Intel recently began sending out Xe3P kernel graphics driver patches for Nova Lake that will begin landing in the upcoming Linux 6.19 kernel cycle. Now on the user-space side, merged today for Mesa 26.0 were the first enablement patches for Xe3P Nova Lake for their open-source OpenGL and Vulkan drivers on Linux.
The patches merged today add initial Nova Lake S, Nova Lake U, Nova Lake H, Nova Lake HX, and Nova Lake UL entires to the Mesa common code used by their Iris Gallium3D and ANV Vulkan drivers.
There isn’t too much to get excited about with the patch mostly being about adding the new Nova Lake graphics PCI device IDs and other “NVL-U”https://www..com/”NVL_U” entries for denoting Nova Lake. For the most part they are just following the existing Xe3 (non-Xe3P) graphics driver code paths added to the Intel Mesa code for Panther Lake and Wildcat Lake.
For now this support is marked as experimental / blocked by needing the “force probe” environment override for enabling the support. This is in-step with the Intel Xe kernel graphics driver also treating Nova Lake Xe3P kernel graphics as experimental. If traditions hold, it will be a few kernel cycles before it’s declared gold and ready to ship and enabled by default — for context, only with Linux 6.17 the Xe3 Panther Lake graphics were enabled by default. Once the Linux kernel graphics driver enables the support, the Mesa driver code will also drop the force probe requirement.
One interesting bit from the newly-merged Intel Nova Lake Mesa code is that the Nova Lake S / HX / UL models are lacking ray-tracing support. Nova Lake U and Nova Lake H will have ray-tracing capabilities but not the other models, surprisingly. This comes as a bit of a surprise that even for what will likely be 2027 year products will still lack hardware ray-tracing for some models.
Aside from that not much else to mention from today’s merge to Mesa Git for laying the Nova Lake Xe3P graphics foundation for the Iris Gallium3D and ANV Vulkan drivers.
