Intel Updates Its Packaged Arc Graphics Driver For Ubuntu

Last year Intel made available a packaged "Arc Graphics Driver" for Ubuntu 22.04 LTS and later Ubuntu 23.04 to provide a DKMS-backported kernel driver and packaged Mesa driver to make it easier to use Arc Graphics (DG2/Alchemist) during the phase when the upstream kernel support was still stabilizing and not yet found out-of-the-box on Linux distributions at the time. This week marked another rare update for this packaged driver.

The Intel Arc Graphics Driver for Ubuntu Linux is effectively just a snapshot of the i915 kernel driver and Mesa driver components for easy deployment on existing Ubuntu releases -- it isn't any special sauce or proprietary driver bits. This week the Intel Arc Graphics Driver for Ubuntu was updated. There isn't a change-log but it appears to have been updated for adding 14th Gen Intel Core "Raptor Lake Refresh" graphics support. While the focus of this packaged driver has been on Arc Graphics (Alchemist) discrete GPUs, it continues to support 11th Gen Tiger Lake and newer integrated graphics too when it comes to official support. The new package adds in the 14th Gen Raptor Lake Refresh.

No other changes are mentioned but presumably just a newer i915 and Mesa version in use. Only Ubuntu 22.04 LTS and Ubuntu 23.04 are supported since the recently released Ubuntu 23.10 has great upstream support from Linux 6.5 + Mesa 23.2 for the latest Intel discrete and integrated graphics.

Those interested can find this packaged Ubuntu driver via Intel.com. For most users though I really wouldn't recommend it but rather sticking to upstream updates as close to Git as you are feeling -- the Ubuntu Mainline Kernel PPA provides newer stable and development snapshots plus there are various PPAs for Mesa stable and Git snapshots there like the wonderful Oibaf PPA. Those sources are updated much more often than this occasional packaged driver release. In any event, this new packaged driver is available for those who want it.