Intel Begins Adding Alder Lake Graphics Support To Their Linux Driver

Intel has begun adding support for Alderlake-S to their open-source Linux kernel graphics driver.

An initial set of 18 patches amounting to just around 300 lines of new kernel code was sent out today for beginning the hardware enablement work on Alderlake-S from the graphics side.

Yes, it's only a few hundred lines of new driver code due to Alder Lake leveraging the existing Gen12/Tigerlake support. The Alder Lake driver patches similarly re-use some of the same workarounds and changes as set for the 14nm Rocket Lake processors with Gen12 graphics coming out in Q1.

The Alder Lake graphics changes so far are primarily on the display side with supporting 5 combo PHY outputs and can handle one embedded DisplayPort, two HDMi, and two DisplayPort output possibilities.

Alder Lake S PCI IDs added for the Gen12 graphics include 0x4680, 0x4681, 0x4682, 0x4683, 0x490, 0x4691, 0x4692, 0x4693, 0x4698, and 0x4699. Granted, some of those PCI IDs may be reserved for engineering samples or possible but currently unplanned editions and not necessarily for different SKUs.

The code is now under review and should be mainlined for the Linux 5.11 cycle around the beginning of the year. This in turn should make it into the likes of Ubuntu 21.04 next spring.

Alder Lake is not expected until the second half of 2021 and will use a hybrid architecture of Golden Cove and Gracemont cores with the LGA-1700 socket. To date much of the Alder Lake talk has been on the CPU side with the hybrid design but now we know for sure Alder Lake is just having Gen12/Xe Graphics.