Intel Begins Linux Hardware Enablement Work For Meteor Lake

The first patchwork is building up for Intel's "Meteor Lake" on Linux.

Meteor Lake is Intel's first 7nm microarchitecture not expected until late 2022 or 2023 that will pair "Ocean Cove" with "Gracemont" cores as the successor to Alder Lake. Intel engineers continue doing a lot of bring-up work for Alder Lake in recent months and that work coming together nicely for the Linux kernel and related components like the GNU and LLVM compiler toolchains. With the Alder Lake work beginning to settle down and wanting to ensure great Linux out-of-the-box support in time for launch, attention is turning soon enough to Meteor Lake.

The first sign of Meteor Lake is set to come with Linux 5.10. So far there haven't been any patches reaching the mainline Linux kernel acknowledging Meteor Lake but this week queued into net-next for Linux 5.10 is the first.

The Intel e1000e Linux driver is being extended to support the Meteor Lake client platform. Yes, the e1000e is a Gigabit Ethernet driver and looks like two years down the pipe with Meteor Lake there will still be Intel rocking 1Gb Ethernet as part of their platform while thankfully more modern motherboards are at least opting to offer 2.5 Gb options.

The Meteor Lake network support is it so far that I have noticed but as always continue monitoring all of the trees and mailing lists extensively so stay tuned for further Linux bring-up around this future Intel 7nm offering.