Intel Xe2 Lunar Lake & Battlemage Graphics Might Be Officially Supported With Linux 6.12

While the Linux 6.11 merge window ended just days ago, Intel engineers are already beginning to submit kernel graphics driver changes to the DRM-Next branch of material they want to get in for the Linux 6.12 cycle that will end out 2024. Notable is they are trying to wrap up the Xe2 graphics support for Lunar Lake and Battlemage discrete graphics so that the support can be exposed by default.

With Linux 6.11 there is initial support for Battlemage graphics as the successor to DG2/Alchemist. Linux 6.11 also further works over the Lunar Lake graphics support that has been ongoing. But as of now the Linux 6.11 kernel doesn't expose this Battlemage or Lunar Lake graphics support by default / out-of-the-box, but instead must be enabled via the "force probe" parameter if having early hardware and wanting to enable the accelerated graphics support.

From the latest Linux mailing list commentary, it looks like that exposing by default might happen for Linux 6.12. The Linux 6.12 merge window will open in September after the v6.11 stable release and in turn pulling of the material from DRM-Next. But the stable Linux 6.12 kernel won't be out until the November timeframe. That's unfortunate considering Lunar Lake is launching at the start of September and thus any early adopters will need to jump to an in-development kernel version or roll their dice with Linux 6.11 depending upon how complete that support is. Meanwhile with AMD's just-launched Ryzen AI 300 "Strix Point" alternative to Lunar Lake with AMD RDNA3.5 graphics, there is graphics support working on the current stable kernel for a slightly better experience. But it's still less than ideal for working out-of-the-box on currently-released Linux distributions.

In today's drm-xe-next pull request for beginning to queue the Xe kernel driver patches for Linux 6.12, it was summed up as:

"Early drm-xe-next pull request for 6.12. Main reason for being much earlier than usual is to have the additional SIMD16 EU reported as it's a needed UAPI for Lunar Lake and Battlemage. It's sitting in drm-xe-next for a few weeks and userspace already testing with it.
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Other changes bring general improvements and cleanups to the driver, further support for SR-IOV as well as head Lunar Lake and Battlemage to the finish line of being officially exposed by the driver. Some bits still influx, so not yet there though."

Of the user-space API change for exposing the SIMD16 EU mask, it's explained in the patch as:

"PVC, Xe2 and later platforms have 16-wide EUs. We were implicitly reporting for PVC the number of 16-wide EUs without giving userspace any hint that they were different than for other platforms. Xe2 and later also have 16-wide, but in those cases the reported number would correspond to the 8-wide count.

To avoid confusion and make sure the right number is used by userspace depending on the platform, add a new item to the topology query and drop the one that is not available. The new mask reported for both PVC and Xe2 should now match the numbers reported via hwconfig."

So hopefully for Linux 6.12 there will be good support enabled by default for both Lunar Lake and Battlemage. There's still one month to go to cross that finish line before the cut-off of new Direct Rendering Manager material for the Linux 6.12 merge window. Short of back-porting by Canonical to the Ubuntu 24.10 kernel that is expected to be based on Linux 6.11, this will mean a lacking out-of-the-box user experience on Ubuntu 24.10 for Lunar Lake and Battlemage until Ubuntu 25.04 next spring, similar for other autumn Linux distribution releases.