Intel Sends Out Initial Open-Source Mesa 3D Driver Patches For Ice Lake

Written by Michael Larabel in Intel on 13 February 2018 at 02:44 PM EST. 1 Comment
INTEL
One month ago Intel's Open-Source Technology Center began posting the initial Linux driver enablement for Icelake "Gen 11" graphics, the generation succeeding this year's Cannonlake "Gen 10" hardware. That initial work focused on the DRM kernel driver while now they have posted the first Mesa patches.

Out today are the first 16 patches for preparing Intel Ice Lake support within their i965 OpenGL driver. This comes in at just under four thousand new lines of code / XML headers. There still is about another 50% more code though needed before the Ice Lake Gen 11 support will be in place for this driver.

This patch series also doesn't touch the Intel ANV Vulkan driver for any Ice Lake support yet.


The initial 16 patches can be found on Mesa-dev. In doing some basic digging through the patches, unfortunately, they don't reveal any juicy details about what we can expect from these "Gen 11" Intel graphics in terms of performance or new features; the more interesting patches will likely come later on.

This work obviously depends upon the kernel support being in place and that initial Intel DRM driver support will likely be staged initially in Linux 4.17 but will certainly take a few cycles before it's ready for the first hardware to arrive, likely sometime in 2019.
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