Intel today merged a new patch into the Mesa 23.0 driver to make it easier to run Intel OpenGL and Vulkan drivers on non-x86 / x86_64 architecture devices. The purpose of the driver improvement is to allow Intel Arc Solo to run on architecture devices such as AArch64, POWER and RISC-V.
Intel has spent the last few months working on improving Linux drivers on non-x86 architectures. Previous development efforts have focused on kernel drivers, while today’s combined patch provides OpenGL and Vulkan open-source driver support for non-x86 / x86_64 architectures.
While most open-source Linux graphics drivers work well on different CPU architectures, due to the nature of open source and the Linux community, they have traditionally not needed to care about non-x86 support in the case of Intel’s graphics driver stack.
In the days when integrated graphics support was offered, they were obviously tied to their x86 / x86_64 CPUs. But now that they’re getting into the discrete GPU game with Arc Graphics and their Ponte Vecchio / Max series, it’s a completely different paradigm.
With the possibility of installing standalone Intel GPUs on ARM64 servers, RISC-V desktops, and libre POWER9 desktops, their graphics drivers need to address the x86’isms that have been built up in their code base over the years.
