Intel Adds Initial Cherryview Support To Their Linux 3D Driver

Written by Michael Larabel in Intel on 29 March 2014 at 08:19 AM EDT. 8 Comments
INTEL
Cherryview Atom SoCs aren't being released for several months but the first bits of hardware enablement have landed within the open-source Mesa 3D Linux graphics driver. Cherryview with the Cherry Trail platform is the next-generation successor to the wonderful Bay Trail hardware.

Cherryview is expected to be released in Q3~Q4 of this year (likely September) and will feature an Airmont processor, which is the 14nm shrink of current-generation Silvermont processors in the mobile space. When it comes to the graphics, while Valley View / Bay Trail had "Ivy Bridge" class graphics, the Cherryview hardware is based around Broadwell.

Broadwell processors have yet to be released to the general public but the graphics capabilities should be extremely exciting. Broadwell graphics are a big upgrade over Haswell and it's great to see Intel going straight to Broadwell "Gen8" graphics with Cherryview over any Haswell class graphics that are more similar to Ivy Bridge.

With Intel's Open-Source Technology Center developers having already done the heavy-lifting to enable open-source Broadwell Linux graphics support for nearly the past two years, adding in the Cherryview support wasn't too much beyond that. On Friday the initial support for Intel's Cherryview was added and came down to just a few dozens lines of code.

From this Cherryview initial enablement we can't gain too much out of it with regard to hardware/performance specifications since the VS/GS/WM thread counts and other data was simply copied over from the Haswell GT1 specifications. Intel acknowledges this is just basic "placeholder" data and that the real details will be added later on -- closer to the hardware launch after Intel's unveiled the Cherry Trail Atom specifications.

There's just four PCI IDs added right now for Cherryview graphics and they are 0x22B0, 0x22B1, 0x22B2, and 0x22B3. The initial Intel Cherryview hardware enablement for the open-source Mesa graphics driver can be found via this Git commit.

This initial Cherryview graphics support will be part of the Mesa 10.2 release within about two months time. So far we haven't seen the Cherryview PCI IDs added to the Intel DRM kernel driver but that might come ahead with the Linux 3.15 kernel -- stay tuned for more Phoronix updates on Intel Cherryview / Cherry Trail Atom Linux support.
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Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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