Phoronix takes a look at the Intel Broadwell Linux GPL driver

While Intel's Broadwell processors won't be launching until 2014 as the successor to Haswell, this weekend the initial open-source Linux GPU kernel driver was published ahead of the Linux 3.13 kernel merge window. The changes are massive and it's looking like the Broadwell graphics improvements will be astonishing and provide significant improvements over Haswell and earlier generations of Intel graphics.

Ben Widawsky of Intel's Open-Source Technology Center was cleared on early Sunday morning to publish the initial kernel driver support for Broadwell. Intel in their traditional manner has managed to publish their open-source graphics driver support for Linux months prior to the hardware debut so that it can be merged into the upstream kernel and begin appearing in the next round of Linux distribution releases. For Broadwell Linux enablement Intel is pushing the preliminary hardware support into Linux 3.13 and hopes to stabilize it and push additional features for Linux 3.14. With the Broadwell support in Linux 3.13, it should be at feature-parity to Haswell. With that said, Fedora 21 and Ubuntu 14.04 LTS -- and other H1'2014 Linux distributions -- should be in good shape for supporting the next-generation Intel hardware. How this timing will work out for Linux end-users with "out of the box" support will be contingent upon what month Intel begins shipping Broadwell CPUs; hopefully it will be in Q2 to avoid some of the missteps made during the early 2011 launch of Sandy Bridge.

  Intel Open-Sources Broadwell Linux GPU Driver; Broadwell Graphics Look Amazing