So just a silly little thing to be aware of if you plan on being an early Coffee Lake customer. And if you are grep'ing dmesg looking for the i915 hints of what's going wrong, the actual line mentioning it's to do with alpha hardware support doesn't have any references. Previously this was the ' i915.preliminary_hw_support=1' switch for enabling early hardware support, but seems to have quietly been renamed to just 'alpha'. Well, after then searching the contents of dmesg after finding the time today, I realize the i915.alpha_support option is actually for alpha/preliminary hardware support. Initially off the top of my head I figured it was some new tunable having something to do with alpha compositing or the like given all the new display work happening within the Intel space. When grep'ing dmesg for i915 (Intel's DRM driver name), there were just some audio references and a line about alpha support.

Of course, LLVMpipe was at play to lead to a sluggish experience.Īt first I didn't realize what was going on since the Coffee Lake PCI IDs are present in all of the components of the Intel Linux graphics driver stack, I was using Ubuntu 17.10 with its stock Linux 4.13 that is quite new, and these Coffee Lake graphics that are essentially rebranded Gen 9 GT2 graphics hardware from Kabylake were not working.

This was connected to a 4K display and the mode-setting to it didn't happen with being stuck on the efifb driver. When first powering on the i5-8400 and i7-8700K configurations, I was surprised to see the Intel DRM driver not working. While there wasn't any real changes architecturally to the graphics hardware, right now the Linux support isn't quite out-of-the-box.

With these Intel 'Gen 8' processors, the integrated 'HD Graphics' from Kabylake have been rebranded to 'UHD Graphics'. This morning I delivered the initial Linux processor benchmarks of the Core i7 8700K and Core i5 8400 for the just-launched 'Coffee Lake' desktop processors.

Uhd graphics 630