Linux 7.3 Will Treat Intel Nova Lake S Graphics As Stable

Ahead of the next-generation Intel Nova Lake processors expected to begin rolling out around the start of 2027, the upcoming Linux 7.3 kernel cycle is going to begin treating Nova Lake S processors with their integrated graphics as stable.

Intel software engineers for many months now have been upstreaming the Xe3P graphics support and as part of that the integrated graphics to be found with Nova Lake. There is the experimental Nova Lake integrated graphics support already in the mainline kernel but with existing kernels it requires using the "force_probe=" module parameter with the Intel graphics PCI device ID to manually enable the support. But beginning with Linux 7.3, Nova Lake S graphics will be treated as stable and thus enabled by default.

The patch dropping the "force_probe" requirement for NVL-S simply notes:

"NVL-S is stable enough for us to drop force_probe requirement. Let's do that."

That patch was part of the final drm-xe-next pull request of new material now on the way to DRM-Next for staging ahead of next month's Linux 7.3 merge window. In addition to enabling NVL-S graphics out-of-the-box, there are various new workarounds, GuC updates, RAS improvements, and other fixes.

So look for Linux 7.3 to be the safe minimum base version if wanting to use Nova Lake S integrated graphics on Linux in the months ahead.