Mesa 22.2 receives last-minute support from Intel for their Arc Graphics
The Mesa Project’s enablement of various Intel DG2 and Alchemist PCI IDs had already focused heavily on the company’s integrated GPUs in laptops. Arctic Sound M server GPU support was also added to Mesa recently by Intel. The merge request has remained open for the last ten months, following the numerous requirements that Intel DG2 and Arc Alchemist open-source support for the necessary drivers. The Open Graphics Library (OpenGL) allows cross-platform APIs to render both 2D and 3D graphics, interacting with the GPU to accelerate the hardware rendering. Intel’s “ANV” Vulkan driver allows modern games on the Windows OS that run under Valve’s Steam Play to be appropriately rendered with the company’s graphics processors. Michael Larabel of Phoronix notes that ReBAR support is still causing some challenges for the open source developers to introduce into Linux 5.20. As mentioned in this post, Mesa 22.2 and Linux 5.20 are expected to be the minimum requirement for Intel’s Arc Graphics desktop GPUs and the Arctic Sound M server graphics cards. The two will also be a crucial component for AMD’s RDNA 3 architecture seen in the company’s upcoming GPUs. Mesa 22.2 will initially release next month, while Linux 5.20 will launch as early as October. Larabel further notes that the Linux 5.19 kernel will be utilized in Ubuntu 22.10 this fall due to the late additions to the code. News Sources: Phoronix, Gitlab, Freedesktop