Xe2 Ray-Tracing & More Intel Lunar Lake Enabling Land In Mesa 24.2

Intel's open-source Linux graphics driver engineers continue to be quite busy preparing their Xe kernel driver and Mesa user-space ANV Vulkan / Iris Gallium3D driver for upcoming Lunar Lake processors. Merged today for Mesa 24.2-devel is more Lunar Lake platform enablement work plus early support for ray-tracing with the integrated Xe2 graphics. However, more work is still needed before this Lunar Lake / Xe2 support will be ready for end-users on the Linux desktop.

Merged today were a set of 11 patches wiring up more of the Lunar Lake / Xe2 support for Mesa. Most notably is beginning to build the Xe2 ray-tracing support. There's also a patch to add the initial Lunar Lake device information. But this latest enablement push still stops short of adding the initial Lunar Lake graphics PCI device IDs that are needed for the support -- thus not clear of the finish line yet.

This patch series does add a new "INTEL_FORCE_PROBE" environment variable to allow for force-probing the user-space Intel graphics driver components with a particular PCI ID. This workaround is being done since the merge request notes "it's still too early for LNL PCI IDs to be added." In turn Lunar Lake graphics device IDs of 0x6420, 0x64a0, and 0x64b0 are added but behind this "force probe" gate similar to the i915/xe kernel driver's "force_probe" module option on experimental hardware support where the driver initialization for those IDs will not otherwise happen out-of-the-box.

So this merge now in Mesa 24.2 is another step toward having Lunar Lake graphics support working on Linux. Hopefully in time for the Mesa 24.2 release in August the Lunar Lake Xe2 support will be stabilized with Intel recently confirming Lunar Lake will arrive in Q3. But even then it's still likely to mean launch-day Linux users will need to be on a rolling release distribution or otherwise building your own kernel and Mesa given the close proximity between the likely Mesa 24.2 release date (assuming all the support is ironed out by then) and the Lunar Lake debut.