Intel Begins Working On Next-Gen Xe3 Graphics With Linux 6.13

While Intel Xe2 graphics have just debuted with Lunar Lake and we are awaiting Battlemage discrete GPUs with Xe2, Intel's open-source Linux driver engineers have begun work enabling Xe3 graphics! Xe3 driver work is now underway for next-generation Intel graphics.

Xe3 graphics enablement has begun for the Linux kernel within the Intel Xe Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) driver. For now it's starting as an extension of the Xe2 driver code and initially focused on Xe3 LPM.

The Xe3 graphics will first be found in next year's Panther Lake platform. With the initial Xe3 bits are also the first Panther Lake (PTL) graphics platform code including the new graphics device PCI IDs of 0xB080, 0xB081, 0xB082, 0xB090, 0xB091, 0xB092, 0xB0A0, 0xB0A1, and 0xB0A2.

For now this is just the basic Xe3 / Panther Lake enablement that has begun and largely following the Xe2 driver code paths without yet revealing any new features or capabilities of the next-generation Intel graphics.

This initial Xe3 Linux driver support was sent out as part of today's drm-xe-next pull request of code to be queued for the Linux 6.13 cycle. Intel engineer Rodrigo Vivi sent out the pull request and also talked of performance optimizations to come to the Xe kernel driver and there also being new driver maintainers:

"Besides the cross-driver collaboration and enabling of upcoming hardware, one of our key areas will be to improve performance and address reports by users so that the driver keeps getting better.

I’m having the honor to send this first pull request on behalf of the new team of maintainers that we are putting together for the xe driver: Lucas, Thomas, and Oded. I’m going to assist them to get this through and to set up the drm-tip development flow. Then, you should expect future pull requests coming directly from them. Likely, with a rotation of duties that they will define by themselves, but that should be similar to drm-intel and drm-misc."

The Linux 6.13 merge window doesn't get underway for another month so we'll see what more Xe3 enablement and performance optimizations come to the Intel kernel graphics driver in time for this next version.