Linux DRM Maintainer On Skylake: "Try Harder"

With Sunday's DRM graphics subsystem pull request for the Linux 4.4 kernel was an interesting extra comment by DRM maintainer David Airlie at Red Hat.

He ended the pull request with, "I also had the accidental misfortune to have access to a Skylake on my desk for a few days, and I've had to encourage Intel to try harder, which seems to be happening now."

The Intel Skylake Linux support can be hit or miss depending upon who you ask. Dave doesn't seem to be too happy with Skylake right now nor do some within our forums. Since Linux 4.3 when Skylake was no longer considered "preliminary hardware support", it's been working out mostly in my performance-oriented situations, albeit tests I did this weekend show Skylake graphics are much faster on Windows than Linux. Outside of graphics, Skylake audio support didn't even land until last week's Linux 4.3.0 debut. It hasn't been nearly as nice as say the Haswell launch, but it's at a much better state than the Sandy Bridge launch when more code was in flux and preliminary support just in Git form at the time of its debut.

Anyhow, as Linux 4.4 stabilizes I'll be running more benchmarks with the Core i5 6500 and Core i5 6600K currently in my possession. I'm also wanting to pick up a Skylake ultrabook to upgrade for my main production system once coming across an interesting device.