Intel Begins Working On "Xe2" Linux Graphics Driver Support For Lunar Lake

Intel open-source driver engineers have begun starting work on preparing the Linux graphics driver stack to ultimately handle Lunar Lake integrated graphics that is the generation following Arrow Lake.

With Intel Meteor Lake Linux graphics driver support largely squared away at this point and Arrow Lake seemingly have similar graphics capabilities to MTL, the next target being worked on by Intel's Linux graphics driver developers is Lunar Lake.

Intel engineers have begun drafting the Lunar Lake platform support for the Intel Mesa driver side and the kernel side will follow -- presumably with the forthcoming Xe kernel driver succeeding i915.

The patches do confirm that Lunar Lake will feature "Xe2" graphics capabilities, an upgrade from the current Xe graphics. Merged already to Mesa 23.2 was some basic code for handling the Xe2 device initialization code path. The basic platform enum was also added as another baby step.

Expect much more Lunar Lake / Xe2 graphics driver patches to surface over the weeks and months ahead, but for now just pointing out that this open-source graphics driver work has started. It's great as always seeing Intel's open-source, upstream-focused driver work starting out well in advance of future generation products so that by the time these 16th Gen Core processors ship, the Linux support will hopefully be in good shape out-of-the-box. Lunar Lake processors aren't expected to launch until at least 2025.