Intel Cannonlake Graphics Should Be In Good Shape With Linux 4.17

Written by Michael Larabel in Intel on 22 February 2018 at 05:55 AM EST. 4 Comments
INTEL
Intel's next-generation Cannonlake processors with "Gen 10" graphics will be considered good to go with the next kernel cycle, Linux 4.17. The alpha/preliminary hardware support flag is being removed for these CPUs expected later this year.

Since last year Intel has been publicly posting patches for Cannonlake graphics driver enablement on Linux and the support has been within the kernel for several cycles now. But up until now, it has required setting the i915.alpha_support=1 flag if you've magically had access to Cannonlake hardware. As a sign of the support being mature, with the Linux 4.17 kernel cycle that barrier is being dropped.

With this week's drm-intel-testing branch, the Cannonlake Gen10 graphics support are promoted out of this alpha quality level. What the Intel developers say of this next-gen hardware support is "the driver should mostly work for the hardware we had at our disposal when testing."


Besides the Cannonlake promotion, this Intel DRM testing code also adds in a missing Cannonlake PCI ID (0x5A4C) and other Cannonlake fixes as well as a number of general bug fixes to this Direct Rendering Manager driver. There is also optimizations to IRQ handlers, vblank tracking improvements, and other minor improvements.

The Linux 4.17 kernel cycle should officially get underway in April while the official Linux 4.17.0 kernel will likely be out by late May or early June. This still should give time for Linux 4.17 to become available before we end up seeing any Cannonlake hardware appear in retail channels. It's good to see this happen since with Coffeelake they dropped the ball a bit where the alpha support cover wasn't removed until Linux 4.15, well after the first retail CPUs began shipping for these processors with effectively just re-branded Kabylake graphics.

As we've been writing about the past few weeks, Intel open-source developers have also already begun posting patches for Icelake graphics support.
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