Intel Is Already Publishing Open-Source "Kabylake" Graphics Driver Patches

While Skylake processors are still extremely fresh, the Intel Open-Source Technology Center developers have already begun publishing open-source driver patches for supporting the next-generation Kabylake.

Kabylake (or Kaby Lake) is the interim successor to Skylake. While Skylake was initially planned to be succeeded by Cannonlake, a few months back is when Intel confirmed that Kabylake will come in between and that Cannonlake isn't coming until H2'2017. Kabylake is expected in 2016 as an update over Skylake with improved performance, native USB 3.1 and HDCP 2.2, and graphics performance improvements.

With Kabylake not being too much of a difference to Skylake, open-source Linux graphics patches have already been flowing. Since earlier this month have been the first Kabylake Linux graphics driver patches where it's considered a Gen9p5 graphics processor (Skylake is Gen9) and with mostly shared code for Skylake.

Published earlier today was the latest Kabylake patches for the Linux kernel's i915 DRM driver. The initial Kabylake PCI IDs can be seen here.

The initial Kabylake enablement comes in at just about 100 lines of new code. This support will be initially hidden behind the DRM driver's preliminary hardware support flag and the more interesting Kabylake Linux patches should come in due time. We should find out more about Kabylake in 2016.