Intel Rocket Lake Platform Support Added To Mesa 20.2

Written by Michael Larabel in Intel on 9 May 2020 at 09:06 AM EDT. 5 Comments
INTEL
Last week Intel open-source developers sent out their initial kernel driver patches for Rocket Lake graphics support and now the Rocket Lake platform support has been merged for Mesa 20.2 on the OpenGL/Vulkan driver side.

The kernel patches last week affirmed that next-generation Rocket Lake graphics processors indeed will sport Gen12 graphics, as a big upgrade over the Gen9 graphics that have been around for the past several years on the desktop side since Skylake. While Rocket Lake will still be a 14nm chip, having Gen12 alone makes it exciting for those utilizing Intel graphics. Gen12 is the same as Tiger Lake and initial Xe Graphics hardware.

On the kernel side, that Rocket Lake graphics support is likely to be merged this summer for Linux 5.8.

Landing overnight into Mesa 20.2-devel was the MR adding Rocket Lake platform support for the Iris OpenGL driver and ANV Vulkan driver via the common Intel device code.

That Rocket Lake "RKL" adds GT1 PCI IDs of 0x4c8a, 0x4c8b, 0x4c90, and 0x4c9a. There is also a RKL GT 0.5 part with a PCI ID of 0x4c8c. No IDs for any Rocket Lake GT2 parts are yet to be added to Mesa.

With the graphics driver enablement heavy lifting being done in kernel space and Mesa already having Gen12 support from the Tiger Lake enablement, this Rocket Lake platform support addition is rather trivial. At this stage at least on the Mesa side Rocket Lake is re-using all of the existing Gen12 graphics code paths.

Mesa 20.2 will be the Q3'2020 feature release and should be out in August. This roughly correlates to Linux 5.8 with it seeing its merge window likely opening in early June and should debut as stable in August as well. If this Rocket Lake support is squared away for Linux 5.8 + Mesa 20.2, it should ensure nice out-of-the-box Rocket Lake support for the autumn 2020 Linux distributions like Ubuntu 20.10 and Fedora Workstation 33.

Rocket Lake as the successor to Comet Lake is rumored to be releasing in Q4, in which case the open-source Linux driver support should be ready in time for ensuring pleasant launch-day support.
Related News
About The Author
Michael Larabel

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

Popular News This Week