Intel working on new Xe graphics driver for Linux

A nice little bonus before the holidays, Intel have made public work on their brand new Xe driver for the future of Intel graphics on Linux. Found via Collabora developer Jason Ekstrand on Mastodon, who previously started off this work, this is quite exciting.

The idea is to have a fresh set of code that doesn't have to deal with the legacy the current i915 driver does, which supports a lot of older chips. The Xe driver support starts from Tiger Lake, which was the first with Intel Xe, and the code is already at a stage where it can actually be used. Going by what they said it is built to support multiple platforms with initial support in Mesa for Iris and ANV (the OpenGL and Vulkan drivers).

In the Mesa merge request draft, they also mentioned it's good enough already for running GNOME plus some OpenGL and Vulkan games but plenty of issues are expected and it's not optimized yet.

Their plan is to keep working on it, and merge it into Mesa in smaller parts but their main draft for the whole thing will stay up as it goes to allow for easier testing.

Looks like 2023 and beyond for Intel drivers on Linux is going to be quite exciting. Hopefully they will keep putting out new Xe cards too, so that we can have more competition in the GPU space.