Posted on Tuesday, November 05 2013 @ 13:06 CET by Thomas De Maesschalck
FUD Zilla
spotted that Intel has already issued initial kernel driver support for its future Broadwell processor. Over the weekend, 62 patches to the Linux kernel were published for enabling Broadwell support via Intel's Direct Rendering Manager. The libdrm and intel-gpu-tools are anticipated to follow in the coming days.
Intel is pushing the preliminary hardware support into Linux 3.13 and hopes to stabilise it and push additional features for Linux 3.14. The big idea is that Broadwell support in Linux 3.13, should be as good as Haswell. This means that Fedora 21 and Ubuntu 14.04 LTS -- and other H1'2014 Linux distributions should be able to support the next-generation Intel hardware.
Intel is doing better than AMD at getting its chips into the Open Source arena. Stable open-source support only arrived post-launch for major new GPU introductions. Chipzilla has done better than Nvidia too where the open-source support is still largely left up to the reverse-engineering Nouveau community.
