Intel's Mesa Driver Upstreaming For Xe2 Support Appears Mostly Done

Ahead of launch for new discrete/integrated graphics backed by open-source Linux drivers, it can often be difficult to ascertain the level of support pre-launch given the complexity of today's GPUs, we are past the days of long monolithic patch series for new hardware enablement, and also not knowing about what features may be added for the next-generation hardware. But if latest Mesa developer comments hold, it looks like for Intel Xe2 graphics the open-source Vulkan driver at least has "most" of the code now in place.

There is a merge request that was pushed through yesterday to Mesa 24.2-devel to carry out some refactoring of Intel ANV driver source files for the device and image C files. For end-users that code refactoring doesn't mean much or provide material gain in that shifting around some 4k lines of code between files. But the comment on that merge request from one of Intel's ANV developers is important:

"Now that most of the Xe2 upstreaming is done, it sounds like a good time to do those splits."

So if that Intel developer comment is accurate, "most" of the Xe2 graphics upstreaming work to the Intel Mesa driver for the ANV Vulkan code at least is now done. That's good news ahead of Lunar Lake laptops beginning to ship later this quarter with Xe2 graphics and then a few months down the road is also the Xe2-based Battlemage discrete graphics.

That comment is just in regards to the Intel Mesa code at least while for Linux 6.11 a lot more Xe2 code is upstreamed especially on the Battlemage side. As of writing though the Lunar Lake and Battlemage support is still treated as experimental (disabled by default) with the upstream Linux kernel driver in its current form. So from the kernel graphics driver perspective it remains to be seen if there still are some important missing pieces or if the developers are just waiting until closer to the actual product launches to confirm the driver support is in good shape on the production hardware before lifting that experimental flag.

In any event hopefully when launch day rolls out for both Lunar Lake laptops and Battlemage graphics cards, this open-source and upstream Linux graphics support will indeed be in good shape.