Mesa 22.2 Is Ready With Broader Support For Intel Arc Graphics GPUs

Mesa 22.2 is about to be branched and enter its feature freeze while fortunately expanded Intel Arc Graphics DG2/Alchemist support has made it in time! Remaining DG2/Alchemist PCI IDs are now enabled for Mesa 22.2 and intended to function with Linux 5.20+ for Intel's forthcoming desktop graphics cards.

Some of the DG2/Alchemist PCI IDs have already been enabled in Mesa primarily for the notebook GPU designs while today a batch of more PCI IDs for the rest of the DG2/Alchemist desktop graphics line-up as well as the Arctic Sound M server card were added.

This is merging this MR that has been open the past 10 months and tracking the many prerequisites for DG2/Alchemist open-source driver support.

The last remaining hurdles on the kernel side revolve around the small BAR support that is set to be introduced in Linux 5.20.

It was quite a long TODO list before Intel was ready to add the rest of the DG2/Alchemist PCI IDs into Mesa for their Iris OpenGL and ANV Vulkan drivers on Linux.

So given this Mesa merge overnight, it looks like Linux 5.20 and Mesa 22.2 are the minimum baseline for these desktop Arc Graphics "Alchemist" and ATS-M graphics cards. Linux 5.20 and Mesa 22.2 are also important for upcoming AMD Radeon "RDNA3" graphics cards. Mesa 22.2 will be out as stable around the end of August and should see its first release candidate later this week. Linux 5.20 stable should be out around early October. Unfortunately that Linux 5.20 timing means Linux 5.19 instead will likely be the kernel used by the likes of Ubuntu 22.10 this autumn.