Intel Enables Xe2 Lunar Lake & Battlemage Graphics By Default With Linux 6.12

It's happening! The upcoming Linux 6.12 kernel cycle will be enabling the Xe2 graphics in Lunar Lake and Battlemage out-of-the-box / by-default. The Xe2 support within the open-source "Xe" kernel graphics driver appears to be stable enough now for enabling the support by default for Lunar Lake and Battlemage hardware with the next kernel version. The patches have been submitted.

Back in July I wrote about the likelihood of Lunar Lake and Battlemage seeing official graphics support for Linux 6.12 and this has indeed aligned. That's good news for seeing the Battlemage support ready to be enabled by default ahead of those graphics cards launching and should allow for a much smoother Linux experience than during the early DG2/Alchemist days. For Lunar Lake it's to be a bit more of a nuisance for early customers of the next-gen Intel Core Ultra laptops.

Lunar Lake is set for its big reveal on 3 September. But the Linux 6.12 merge window isn't happening until mid-September and the stable v6.12 kernel will be out in November. So for those planning to buy a Lunar Lake laptop beginning next month, you'll either need to be riding a Linux 6.12 Git kernel or be trying out the experimental support on Linux 6.11 after using the "force_probe" module parameter workaround. With not trying out Lunar Lake yet myself, I don't know how the force_probe level of support is on Linux 6.11 but I will be buying a Core Ultra Series 2 laptop once available for Linux testing.

Yesterday's drm-xe-next pull request makes the change for promoting the Lunar Lake (LNL) and Battlemage (BMG) support. It notes:

"Aside from the additional fixes compared to last week, 2 important patches to remove the force_probe requirement for LNL and BMG. Those are the first platforms to be officially supported by the xe driver: one integrated and one discrete. For BMG there are still some necessary changes going through the drm-intel-next pull request later this week."

Those patches drop the force_probe requirement and thus making the Lunar Lake and Battlemage graphics work out-of-the-box beginning with Linux 6.12.

That pull request also enables priority memory read support on Xe2, performance tuning changes for Xe2, Battlemage GFuC firmware stabilizing, and other fixes/improvements.

Stay tuned for my Linux testing of Intel Lunar Lake as soon as an interesting Core Ultra Series 2 laptop goes on sale.