Intel Begins Shifting 6th To 10th Gen Intel Processor Graphics To Legacy Support

Intel today confirmed they are moving their 6th to 10th Gen Intel Processor Graphics (basically all the "Gen9" graphics hardware going back to the Skylake days) to their legacy support model. This primarily impacts Windows but longer-term may have some implications for Linux users.

Intel today published their Windows 31.0.101.2111 driver on Intel.com where they announced:

Intel will be moving 6th - 10th Gen Intel Processor Graphics and related Intel Atom®, Pentium®, and Celeron® processor graphics to a legacy software support model.

With the legacy driver model for Windows they will now be bundling both their legacy and current drivers into the same single Windows driver package. This is great for end-user usability but now in effect leaving the pre-11th Gen Intel Processors on an older driver.

Intel says "only critical fixes and security vulnerabilities" will be addressed for the legacy supported hardware moving forward. Any updates will be out on a quarterly basis compared to the 11th Gen and newer continuing to see monthly updates as well as day-zero game updates.

Basically they will still be offering support for Skylake through Comet Lake integrated graphics with their single-package Windows driver, but it's no longer going to see many changes besides security fixes and any other critical fixes. Today's announcement isn't too surprising as just days ago I wrote about Intel's Compute-Runtime beginning to disable older Intel generations of support with Windows builds.

For Linux users today's announcement doesn't mean much directly. Intel's older integrated graphics support will continue to exist within the mainline Linux kernel and the OpenGL/Vulkan drivers within Mesa. Nothing is changing there nor would any changes be expected... Thanks to Crocus and the like, much older Intel integrated graphics continues to live on in the open-source Linux world.

Where with time will likely be changes is Intel engineers working on their Linux driver spending less time focusing on bug reports around these older generations of hardware. Similarly, with time it wouldn't be surprising if they reduce their CI coverage for in-house hardware testing of these older generations of integrated graphics or even phase out that lab testing completely.

But thanks to their fully open-source driver stack, at least you don't need to worry about the graphics support outright disappearing or breaking for new Linux kernel releases, etc, and from the open-source community is still the possibility of new feature work moving forward.