Intel Posts Linux Graphics Driver Patches For Whiskey Lake, Amber Lake

Written by Michael Larabel in Intel on 14 June 2018 at 08:36 PM EDT. 10 Comments
INTEL
Intel open-source developers today posted the set of patches for adding support for upcoming Whiskey Lake and Amber Lake processors for the Linux kernel's Direct Rendering Manager driver.

The patches out today add Whiskey Lake and Amber Lake graphics support to the i915 kernel DRM driver. There isn't yet patches for libdrm and Mesa, but given how simple these additions are, those patches should be out soon.

In fact, with Whiskey Lake and Amber Lake being another extension to the Kaby/Coffee Lake family, it mostly comes down to new PCI ID additions for these patches, even with the kernel code.

The Whiskey Lake patch adds in the new GT1/GT2/GT3 PCI IDs (0x3EA0 through 0x3EA9) PCI IDs for the graphics adapters. With Whiskey Lake having the same gen graphics core as Coffeelake, apparently just the PCI ID additions are enough to make the graphics driver happy. Whiskey Lake is the latest micro-architecture coming after Coffeelake and being released in the coming months due to delays in the Cannonlake hardware.

The Amber Lake patch is similarly quite basic and basically adding in the new PCI IDs. Those PCI IDs include 0x591C and 0x87C0. Amber Lake is for the new very low-power processors succeeding the Kabylake Y processors. Amber Lake will find its way into tablets/2-in-1s/convertibles in the months ahead and are a minor step up over Kabylake Y.

These patches are quite simple given they are just PCI ID additions, so we'll see if they try to stage them still for merging into the Linux 4.18 kernel cycle or get held off until Linux 4.19. Hopefully they will work their way into Linux 4.18 considering that is likely the kernel to be used by Ubuntu 18.10 and Fedora 29 while these new Intel Amber/Whiskey Lake systems are just months or less from their debut.
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