Intel Raptor Lake S Graphics Ready For Linux 5.17, Alder Lake P Now Considered Stable

Intel's stellar open-source graphics driver team sent in their latest batch of feature updates to DRM-Next for staging ahead of next month's Linux 5.17 cycle kicking off. Notable with this pull among other changes is initial support for next-generation Raptor Lake S graphics while Alder Lake P graphics are considered stable / promoted from being behind the experimental flag.

Intel 13th Gen "Raptor Lake" is the successor of Alder Lake and expected in 2022. Details are still light on Raptor Lake while the Intel open-source driver engineers have already been working on enabling the integrated graphics as well as other areas of the RPL platform.

Linux is getting ready for Intel's next Lake.

Last month Intel posted their initial Raptor Lake Linux graphics driver code and was rather small... In fact, from the driver perspective effectively identical to Alder Lake. The Intel kernel graphics driver is treating Raptor Lake S graphics the same as Alder Lake S with the exception of enabling the GuC micro-controller submission handling by default. Just a few dozen lines of code changed, namely adding the new PCI IDs for identification. That initial Raptor Lake S graphics support will be found in Linux 5.17.

Meanwhile Intel is promoting Alder Lake P to stable. Alder Lake P graphics with Linux 5.17+ will no longer require the "force_probe" module parameter to enable accelerated support with ADL-P now being determined to have stable Linux driver support. That's similar to what happened with Alder Lake S where force_probe is required until running Linux 5.16 where that support was declared stable.

This pull request also has the Intel driver changes around privacy screen support for the eDP support with newer notebooks. There is also 10-bit gamma pipe color support for Display13 hardware, code clean-ups, more DG2 / Alchemist workarounds, fixes for building the driver on non-x86 platforms, and other general graphics driver fixes.

See this drm-intel-next pull for the full list of these latest Intel graphics driver patches now ready for Linux 5.17. This follows earlier pull requests for the Intel driver in Linux 5.17 that added variable rate refresh (VRR) for Ice Lake among other enhancements.