Linux 5.10 Continues Bringing Up Support For Intel's Rocket Lake

Building off Linux 5.9 that featured initial support for Gen12 graphics on next year's Rocket Lake desktop platform along with other early enablement for Rocket Lake like RAPL support and other PCI ID additions, that work has continued for the Linux 5.10 cycle.

The libata pull adds Rocket Lake PCH-H RAID PCI IDs as one of the additions.

There is also the platform-drivers-x86 work for Linux 5.10 where Rocket Lake support is added to the intel_pmc_core driver.

While the DRM code in Linux 5.9 brought initial support for Rocket Lake building off the existing Gen12 code, the DRM code for Linux 5.10 also has necessary code changes for properly driving displays with the hardware.

It also looks like some other Rocket Lake PCI ID additions are on the way.

With Rocket Lake on the CPU side primarily appearing to be Willow Cove backported to the 14nm process and with Gen12 Xe graphics, for the most part the Rocket Lake Linux enablement is fairly straight-forward and in most areas amounting to just new PCI IDs in building off the existing Tiger Lake code paths and Gen12/Xe on the graphics side with few other driver-level alterations.

Intel has said they would be announcing Rocket Lake by the end of Q1'2021 so seeing things tidied up for Linux 5.10 is good news but even any lingering additions that hit Linux 5.11 should suffice as that will likely be the kernel powering Ubuntu 21.04 come next April.

Unrelated to Rocket Lake but while on the topic of the Linux 5.10 pull requests mentioned above, it's worth noting the x86 platform drivers pull above is also notable for fixing some HP laptops performing less than optimally when on AC power. The rest of the changes are largely mundane besides a few Tiger Lake fixes.