Mesa 24.1 Enables Intel Xe Kernel Driver Support By Default

While the new Intel Xe kernel graphics driver was upstreamed in Linux 6.8 as this modern DRM driver that is opt-in for current generation hardware and aims to be the default for Lunar Lake / Xe2, currently with Mesa you must build the Intel ANV Vulkan and Iris Gallium3D driver code with the "intel-xe-kmd" option to enable compatibility for this alternative kernel driver to i915. With Mesa 24.1 coming next quarter, that Intel Xe kernel driver support will be enabled out-of-the-box.

While the Intel Xe driver was undergoing upstream review for the Linux kernel and during its early stages of introduction, the Mesa graphics driver support for interfacing with the Xe kernel driver was gated behind the "intel-xe-kmd" Mesa build option. Without this build option when compiling Mesa, using the Intel Xe driver via the i915/xe "force_probe" options would leave you without OpenGL or Vulkan support. But thankfully Intel is now ready to remove this option and in turn meaning the Intel Xe kernel driver support for Mesa out-of-the-box.

This doesn't change the fact that the Intel Xe driver is opt-in for supported Intel graphics hardware (Tiger Lake and newer) but just means that if/when you do switch over to the Xe kernel driver, Mesa 24.1+ will jive just fine without having to worry about rebuilding Mesa or taking any extra steps.

This merge to Mesa 24.1 on Tuesday completed the Xe KMD driver support and enables it out-of-the-box. The last step in ungating the support was seeing the stable Linux 6.8 release with no last minute user-space API changes being necessitated or other issues coming up during the Linux 6.8-rc phase.