Intel Starts Work On Enabling "Xe2" Graphics Within Their Open-Source Mesa Drivers

Tucked away within a merge to Mesa entitled, "intel/genxml: Support importing, which cuts the overall xml file size almost in half" Intel Linux graphics driver engineers are slowly beginning to start work on the "Xe2" graphics support to be found with Lunar Lake processors.

The Intel Mesa driver code leverages a set of XML files for generating C pack files for various instructions and other structs for each generation of Intel graphics. The now-merged code introduces the notion of allowing importing prior-gen XML files to cut-down on the overall XML file size. But in turn the interesting tid-bit is that this is being done to start the enablement work around Xe2 graphics.

So with that, the start of the Xe2 support is underway though nothing significant with this merge. It's not a surprise though given that going back to August there's been some Xe2 / Lunar Lake graphics work for Intel's kernel graphics driver. Since then Intel Linux engineers have continued on Lunar Lake display/graphics support. Following in their initial kernel graphics driver work is now beginning to work on this Xe2 support for Mesa in enabling OpenGL and Vulkan support on Linux.

There's also been new merge requests this week with some draft compiler changes for Xe2 as well as other shader compiler patches for Xe2 / Lunar Lake. In any event, it's good seeing Intel continuing to be early and active in enabling their next-gen open-source graphics support for the Linux desktop.