New Intel Broadwell Backends Land In Mesa

Some open-source Intel Linux developers have been busy this weekend to ensure the Broadwell open-source driver enablement work will be ready for when the hardware ships in a few months time so it won't be like the poor open-source Kaveri driver.

Intel has been publicly pushing open-source Broadwell Linux graphics support for a few months. On the kernel side it looks like Linux 3.14 will be in good shape for all core functionality of this next-generation Intel processor that succeeds Haswell. On the Mesa side, it will be whatever the latest code is when the hardware ships. The support in their Mesa DRI driver is okay right now it appears, but other features and improvements are being made on a daily basis -- just as Haswell and Ivy Bridge improvements are still routinely landing in Mesa.

Arriving this Sunday to better off Intel Broadwell Linux graphics support is a new fragment shader back-end, a new vec4 back-end, a new disassembler for Broadwell's new instruction encoding, support for generating Broadwell shader assembly, and other Broadwell work. Just a few days ago via another Mesa commit we found out Broadwell has ETC texture compression support.

From a hardware perspective I am incredibly excited to see the Intel Broadwell processors debut in the months ahead. What do you think about Intel's next-generation hardware? Let us know on Facebook and Twitter.