Bringing Up Intel HD 520 on My Hobby OS
Posted: Wed Sep 30, 2026 4:11 am
Not sure how many people here are interested in iGPU driver development, but after a long battle, I finally got Intel HD 520 up and running on real hardware.
The display pipeline now works end-to-end, including the switch from the firmware-provided GOP resolution to the panel's native resolution. I also got a hardware cursor displayed through a dedicated Cursor Plane (the cursor icon was shamelessly borrowed from Ubuntu).
AI tools were a huge help along the way, acting as an always-available debugging partner with source code, and register dumps.
Seeing the first cursor appear on screen was surprisingly exciting after all the debugging.
And honestly, the iGPU experience is just buttery smooth. Definitely worth all the effort.
Source code: https://github.com/jjwang/HanOS
The display pipeline now works end-to-end, including the switch from the firmware-provided GOP resolution to the panel's native resolution. I also got a hardware cursor displayed through a dedicated Cursor Plane (the cursor icon was shamelessly borrowed from Ubuntu).
AI tools were a huge help along the way, acting as an always-available debugging partner with source code, and register dumps.
Seeing the first cursor appear on screen was surprisingly exciting after all the debugging.
And honestly, the iGPU experience is just buttery smooth. Definitely worth all the effort.
Source code: https://github.com/jjwang/HanOS