Intel Racing Toward The Finish Line For Stable Meteor Lake Graphics With Linux 6.7

While one month ago a Linux kernel patch was floated for advertising Meteor Lake graphics support by default to effectively mark it as stable and remove it from behind the "i915.force_probe" block, that has yet to be queued for the mainline kernel. Today another set of patches were submitted of new Intel kernel graphics driver changes slated for Linux 6.7 with this patch still missing -- but it might squeeze in next week to still make it for the v6.7 cycle.

With Intel Meteor Lake laptops expected by the end of the year, Intel open-source graphics driver developers are racing to have the support ready to go -- namely when it comes to the graphics support with the rest of the Meteor Lake Linux enablement appearing to be in good shape (even the NPU/VPU with that new driver). While they've been working on this integrated graphics support for months with the i915 kernel driver, various items keep coming up and this week's drm-intel-gt-next has more Meteor Lake enablement bits.

Intel's Tvrtko Ursulin wrote in today's pull request to DRM-Next:

"I say second and not final because there is a very small chance we might be doing another one next week, to bring Meteorlake out of force probe status, which was quite close this week but apparently not quite there. At the moment it looks like chances are low, with some last minute findings putting a spanner in the works so this will likely end up the final pull request after all.

In terms of content there is not much in this one. Mostly more work on enabling Meteorlake and some minor fixes here and there."

Hopefully declaring the Meteor Lake graphics stable/non-experimental will happen next week so that it can be ready for Linux 6.7. But given the alignment of the Linux 6.7 kernel, it's not expected to be released until early 2024 and has missed out on having MTL graphics ready in time for Q4'2023 Linux distribution releases. So those buying Meteor Lake laptops close to launch will either need to be running a Linux Git kernel or otherwise be relying on the "i915.force_probe" workaround and whatever warts are in the kernel you're running as it concerns the integrated graphics.

Intel simultaneously continues working on their new "Xe" DRM kernel driver for better support and performance with their latest integrated/discrete graphics but while that driver will be initially merged as an experimental option, it's not ready to go in time for the upcoming Linux 6.7 merge window.