Intel Adds Basic Broxton Support To Mesa

Initial support for Intel's Broxton has been added to their Mesa 3D driver.

Broxton is one of Intel's forthcoming Atom SoC updates and will feature Skylake-class graphics capabilities. Open-source developers at Intel have been working on the hardware enablement for Broxton and with Linux 4.1~4.2 it appears the initial code is in place.

The latest step on the Broxton Linux support expedition is adding support for its graphics to Mesa. Ben Widawsky of Intel yesterday added the initial support. The current Broxton HD Graphics PCI IDs are 0x0A84, 0x1A84, and 0x5A84.

This is rather small work since Broxton shares its graphics tech with the already supported Skylake "Gen9" graphics hardware. The thread counts and URB information are all basic data at this point ahead of the new Atoms appearing, in order to avoid setting any performance expectations or specs on the forthcoming SoCs.

This Broxton Mesa support will be found in Mesa 10.7/11.0. To the dismay of free software enthusiasts, Broxton and Skylake are the first recent Intel graphics processors requiring binary firmware blobs for operation.