Intel Ready To Declare Meteor Lake Linux Graphics Driver Support Stable

Ahead of Intel expecting to formally reveal more Meteor Lake processor details in the coming weeks, Intel's open-source Linux graphics driver developers are ready to declare the new integrated graphics stable with the upstream Linux kernel -- dropping the existing flag that treated them as experimental and not enabled by default unless passing a special kernel module parameter.

A few weeks ago I wrote about how Intel Meteor Lake graphics on Linux were still experimental and required the "force probe" option to enable, even with the DRM-Next code that has since been merged for Linux 6.6. Thus when early Intel Meteor Lake customers get their hands on new laptops, the graphics support won't be enabled by default unless using the i915.force_probe=[Graphics-PCI-ID] option at boot time to force-enable the support.

But sent out today is a new Intel i915 Linux kernel graphics driver patch that promotes the Meteor Lake graphics to effectively treating it as stable/official and no longer behind this barrier. The new patch sums up the current Meteor Lake graphics experience on Linux:

"Meteorlake has been very usable for a while now, all of uapi changes related to fundamental platform usage have been finalized and all required firmware blobs are available. Recent CI results have also been healthy, so we're ready to drop the force_probe requirement and enable the platform by default."

Thus the one-line patch to remove the "require_force_probe" option.

For now this patch is just sitting on the mailing list for review/comment. It remains to be seen if this simple patch will be submitted as a fix for the Linux 6.6 development cycle or be held off until Linux 6.7... But with the Meteor Lake graphics support on this open-source driver already apparently in good shape, hopefully this patch will indeed make it as a "fix" for Linux 6.6. Perhaps also back-porting to the Linux 6.5 series if lucky for helping to ensure a nice out-of-the-box experience when Meteor Lake laptops begin appearing, especially with the likes of Ubuntu 23.10 using Linux 6.5 by default.

It's nice to see this support getting squared away pre-launch and to hear that the Linux graphics experience appears to be in good shape. The rest of the Intel Meteor Lake processor support appears to be in good standing under Linux at least based on my monitoring of Linux kernel changes. I'll have a better assessment though once I get my hands on Meteor Lake hardware and able to put it through its Linux paces and performance benchmarking.