Intel Begins Working On Purley's Lewisburg Support For Linux

Intel's Purley platform, which is reported as the biggest server platform advancement in a decade, isn't set to debut until 2017 but the Linux support is already in the works.

Purley will use Xeon CPUs based on Skylake with up to 28 cores. Purley will rely upon the C620 "Lewisburg" chipset. Support for the chipset is now making it out there for the Linux kernel.

I hadn't seen any Lewisburg Linux kernel patches previously nor did searching through the Linux Git repository turn up anything. Yesterday though Alexandra Yates at Intel began posting some Lewisburg patches. So far it's just Intel device IDs for PCH and Intel SATA device IDs for Lewisburg.

Expect to see more Lewisburg enablement work coming out as we move into 2016. Intel is certainly getting all of the Purley platform work in there early to ensure that the code will work its way into the enterprise Linux distributions well ahead of the product launch. Purley should be quite exciting and is reported to be Intel's biggest platform enhancement since Nehalem.