While Intel has been upstreaming various Panther Lake firmware bits to linux-firmware.git for pairing with their open-source kernel drivers ahead of Core Ultra Series 3 laptops shipping, one piece of the puzzle only published today is the GSC firmware for the Panther Lake graphics.
The GSC firmware is needed for the Intel Graphics System Controller. Intel GuC and DMC firmware was previously published for Panther Lake but flying under the radar until today was the lack of Panther Lake GSC firmware in linux-firmware.git, the de facto repository that Linux distributions pull from for obtaining their firmware/microcode files needed by the expansive Linux driver collection.
This commit merged this morning adds that Intel Panther Lake GSC firmware support.
With that hopefully the Panther Lake graphics support on Linux and overall system support at large is in good shape ahead of Core Ultra Series 3 laptops beginning to ship later this month. I still haven’t heard anything from Intel or partners about any review hardware for Panther Lake Linux testing. The Panther Lake laptops available for pre-order so far have been rather limited but did pre-order a Core Ultra X7 358H laptop if needed to deliver Linux support and performance benchmarking. So hopefully that Linux testing will begin one way or another before the end of January.
Long story short, for Linux users if planning to buy a Core Ultra Series 3 laptop before waiting on the review/benchmarks, be aware the Panther Lake GSC firmware upstreaming just today and not all Linux distributions will so quickly pick-up the new linux-firmware assets and thus you may need to fetch them manually for the Arc Graphics B390 support on Linux in the near-term.
