Ubuntu 19.10 Provides Good Out-Of-The-Box Support For The Dell XPS 7390 Icelake Laptop

For those not following on Twitter, recently I picked up one of the new Dell XPS 7390 laptops for finally being able to deliver Linux benchmarks from Intel Ice Lake! Yes, it's real and running under Linux! For those eyeing the Dell XPS 7390 with this being the first prominent laptop with Ice Lake, here is a brief look at the initial experience with using Ubuntu 19.10.

The Dell XPS 7390 laptop that's being used for testing features the Intel Core i7 1065G7 processor, an Icelake quad-core processor with 1.3GHz base frequency and 3.9GHz peak turbo frequency. This Ice Lake processor features Gen11 Iris Plus Graphics, which we are eagerly testing with the latest Linux graphics drivers.

With the Intel Core i7 1065G7 the laptop was configured with 16GB of LPDDR4-3733 memory, Toshiba 512GB NVMe SSD, and 1920x1200 display.

For those on older Linux distributions you may need to blacklist intel_lpss_pci and jump through a few other hoops, but for those planning to run Ubuntu 19.10 that will be officially released next week, the experience is largely trouble-free. Ubuntu 19.10 features the Linux 5.3 kernel that is largely in great shape for Ice Lake with the main caveat being the Thunderbolt support... Only with Linux 5.4 will there be Ice Lake Thunderbolt support in order, but besides that Linux 5.3 is in good standing for these new laptops.