Intel News Archives

In addition to Intel acquiring Linutronix as the company known for their work on the real-time (RT) kernel patches and other contributions and then back in June acquiring Codeplay Software, Intel has today made another notable software talent acquisition... Intel announced this afternoon that the team behind ArrayFire has joined the company to further their ambitious software endeavors.

Intel has detailed more of the Arc Graphics A-Series hardware specifications for upcoming models, including the A700 series.

Blender 3.3 is set to be released today and one of the exciting enhancements with this open-source, cross-platform 3D modeling software update is initial support for Intel oneAPI/SYCL GPU acceleration. Intel Arc Graphics discrete GPUs can now enjoy this accelerated Cycles back-end, permitting your driver stack is new enough on Windows or Linux and are using their new dGPUs and not existing integrated graphics. But this is just the start of their oneAPI GPU-accelerated push for Blender.

While Intel Arc Graphics is already running on the open-source Linux driver stack, Intel engineers continue improving upon and refining that DG2/Alchemist graphics card support. Overnight some fresh workarounds were merged into Mesa 22.3-devel as the latest Linux driver improvements for Intel's forthcoming discrete graphics cards.

Back in July I called attention to the issue how Linux 5.19 was set to break Alder Lake P graphics support unless moving to new graphics micro-controller "GuC" firmware in tandem. That user-space breakage is frowned upon and following that article the upstream DRM kernel maintainers outlined explicit requirements around firmware not breaking driver support. Intel engineers ended up submitting a quick fix for Linux 5.19 to still support the existing firmware while now a more adequate solution has been devised.

A new patch floated by a Google Chrome OS / Linux kernel engineer would enable support for the Intel-led Indirect Branch Tracking (IBT) by default as part of the standard kernel configuration for this security feature.

Intel's open-source "ANV" Vulkan driver for Linux systems has added support for the newly-ratified Vulkan mesh shader extension.

The recently proposed Intel open-source Vulkan driver split where the Gen7/Gen8 graphics support would be shifted off to a separate "new" legacy driver has happened to allow the Intel ANV Vulkan driver to move forward with its Skylake "Gen9" graphics and later focus.

The latest Linux hardware enablement work to report on for Intel's Meteor Lake client platform is Thunderbolt support being queued ahead of the Linux 6.1 merge window.

With Intel's Meteor Lake moving to a tiled/chiplet approach, we have already seen some interesting changes on the Linux driver side and confirmation of the introduction of a "Versatile Processing Unit" coming with Meteor Lake (MTL) for inference acceleration. Another interesting confirmation from new Linux driver patches is their media encode/decode moving to a "standalone media" Graphics Technology (GT) block.

Back in May Intel announced SYCLomatic as an open-source tool for converting CUDA code to C++ SYCL for execution within their oneAPI stack on Intel GPUs and more. Out today is SYCLomatic 20220829 as their first tagged version of this code porting helper.

Following last week's initial batch of Intel i915 GT updates for DRM-Next ahead of Linux 6.1, today a new pull request was issued of drm-intel-next material that is primed for Linux 6.1.

Along with all the other ongoing Linux work for Arc Graphics, another feature patch series from Intel worth mentioning is they have been buttoning up work on DisplayPort Multi-Stream Transport Display Stream Compression (MST DSC) functionality.

In the year since Intel announced 12th Gen Core "Alder Lake" processors there have been a number of patches tuning the Linux kernel's scheduler and other code to better deal with the mix of the performance and efficient cores. While that looked to be all buttoned up for a number of months now with Alder Lake CPUs performing well on Linux, another patch series further adjusting the Linux sched/fair code was published to help with these Intel hybrid processor designs.

While Intel GPUs support VESA Adaptive-Sync, for Arc Graphics Intel announced Smooth Sync as what amounts to a dithering filter to make screen tearing less of an issue when not running with vsync enabled or lacking an Adaptive-Sync display.

Intel open-source engineers have readied their first batch of "drm-intel-gt-next" changes for DRM-Next of material they are preparing for introduction with the Linux 6.1 kernel cycle later this year.

The current Intel open-source "ANV" Vulkan driver within Mesa supports graphics hardware going back to the "Gen7" graphics found with Ivy Bridge / Haswell. However, Intel open-source Linux graphics driver engineers are preparing to separate the old Ivy Bridge / Haswell (Gen7) and Broadwell (Gen8) graphics into a separate Mesa driver so they can better focus on improving their modern Vulkan driver that would then be limited to Skylake Gen9 graphics and newer.

Intel's open-source Linux bring-up for Meteor Lake continues. The latest open-source patches on the Meteor Lake front are for the Intel Graphics Compiler (IGC) changes for these 14th Gen CPU graphics.

Made public back in June by Intel was the MMIO Stale Data vulnerabilities. The disclosure noted affected Intel products range from Haswell up through Rocket Lake on the client side or Xeon Scalable Ice Lake servers. However, pre-Haswell Intel CPUs might be impacted too while the Linux kernel to this point was incorrectly stating older CPUs are "not affected" by MMIO Stale Data.

While Intel is normally fast at contributing improvements for new hardware to the open-source GCC and LLVM/Clang compilers, just today and ahead of the approaching Raptor Lake launch has a proper scheduler model finally been added for existing Alder Lake P processors.

Greg Kroah-Hartman as the Linux kernel's stable maintainer and effectively Linus Torvalds' second-in-command has suggested avoiding Intel Alder Lake laptops. While much of the Alder Lake laptop support for Linux is in good shape, the exception is around web cameras. These newer laptops with Intel's latest web-camera tech are not currently supported by the mainline kernel and require proprietary software for use. Some platforms like Ubuntu and ChromeOS are picking up these blobs for now while a proper open-source, upstream solution is likely months -- or likely about one year -- away.

Less than one month away is the release of Blender 3.3 and it looks like Intel's initial oneAPI GPU acceleration is ready and in decent shape for Windows and Linux.

Not only is the AMD EPYC performance looking real good for Linux 6.0, but many of the scheduler changes and common kernel improvements also carry over well for Intel's Xeon Platinum 8380 "Ice Lake" server processors too. For your viewing pleasure this weekend are some initial benchmarks looking at Linux 5.19 stable compared to Linux 6.0 Git as we approach the end of the merge window.

While much of the Intel Arc Graphics "Alchemist" (DG2) support appears squared away for Linux 6.0 besides the support still being hidden behind the flag requiring i915.force_probe= to actually enable the experimental support, there still are various DG2 discrete GPU features being tackled by the open-source Intel kernel graphics drivers. One of those "extras" still working its way to the kernel is HWMON subsystem integration to be able to expose power / voltage / energy reporting.

While last week saw the main set of thermal and power management updates for Linux 6.0, a few more items were sent in this week for the v6.0 merge window.

As part of today's "Patch Tuesday", Intel has made a new round of security vulnerabilities public -- including a new processor advisory that affects their latest Xeon Scalable and Core wares resulting in new CPU microcode being required.

Intel used SIGGRAPH to announce their forthcoming Arc Pro A-series professional GPUs. The initial products include the Arc A30M mobile GPU, the Arc Pro A40 single-slot GPU, and the Arc Pro A50 dual-slot GPU.

Intel used SIGGRAPH today to announce OpenPGL as what they say is the industry's first open-source library for path guiding so renderer developers can integrate "start of the art" path-guiding methods.

Going back to late 2020 there has been bits of Intel Vulkan ray-tracing preparations landing within their Mesa "ANV" open-source Vulkan driver in anticipation of Xe HPG with hardware ray-tracing capabilities.

Back in 2020 with Linux 5.11 Intel SGX support was finally merged after undergoing 40+ revisions over the span of years. Fortunately, not taking as long is now Intel SGX2 support that is set to be mainlined with the new Linux 6.0 kernel.

Intel has posted a new open-source Linux VPU driver today... Not Video Processing Unit, but it's for a Versatile Processing Unit coming with 14th Gen Core processors.

With Intel DG2/Alchemist getting settled, the DRM-Next cutoff for v5.20 kernel material having passed, and Raptor Lake enablement also appearing to be in good shape given the little change over Alder Lake, Intel open-source engineers have begun working more on Meteor Lake driver support that will succeed Raptor Lake next year.

Intel today confirmed they are moving their 6th to 10th Gen Intel Processor Graphics (basically all the "Gen9" graphics hardware going back to the Skylake days) to their legacy support model. This primarily impacts Windows but longer-term may have some implications for Linux users.

Mesa 22.2 is about to be branched and enter its feature freeze while fortunately expanded Intel Arc Graphics DG2/Alchemist support has made it in time! Remaining DG2/Alchemist PCI IDs are now enabled for Mesa 22.2 and intended to function with Linux 5.20+ for Intel's forthcoming desktop graphics cards.

In addition to new kernel code and updated firmware fixing a power management issue for Xeon Scalable "Sapphire Rapids" where C1 and C1E power states were mutually exclusive, another important Sapphire Rapids power management improvement is on the way with the upcoming Linux 5.20 kernel cycle.

Back in 2020 Intel announced OSPRay Studio as an interactive, ray-traced visualizer that was added to their oneAPI software suite and powered by their OSPRay engine. Released on Monday was the latest update to this open-source program.

Earlier this year I wrote about the Intel Idle driver support being prepared for Xeon "Sapphire Rapids" CPUs but a limitation with these forthcoming Xeon Scalable processors was that C1 and C1E c-states handling are now mutually exclusive. Unlike earlier Xeon processors, C1 and C1E states couldn't be enabled at the same time. Fortunately, via new Intel firmware they have managed to overcome this limitation.

Intel and MediaTek have just announced a strategic partnership where some future chips for MediaTek will be manufactured by Intel Foundry Services (IFS).

While much of Intel's Arc Graphics DG2/Alchemist enablement appears to be in decent shape for Linux 5.20 with the small BAR support expected to land, the compute support being exposed to user-space in 5.19, etc, one of the few remaining pieces is the GSC support. The Intel GSC is their new Graphics System Controller found with their discrete GPU and used for security-related operations.

Sent in on Friday night were this week's batch of Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) driver fixes for Linux 5.19-rc8 due out on Sunday. While usually the late-stage changes tend to be not too eventful, this pull does carry some extra interest since it does fix the Intel GuC firmware breakage I wrote about last week that ended up breaking Alder Lake P graphics on Linux 5.19 unless also upgrading the firmware version.

Intel's Linux graphics driver developers continue to be very busy polishing the DG2/Alchemist graphics card support for forthcoming Intel Arc Graphics hardware... Merged today to the open-source Intel Mesa Vulkan driver was a ray-tracing focused fix that yields "like a 100x (not joking) improvement." Even more of a kicker? The change is one line of code for the massive improvement.

Added to Intel's documentation in late 2020 and initial kernel patches out since early 2021, Intel has been slowly working on Linear Address Masking (LAM) support for the Linux kernel. Out this past week was finally the latest iteration of this work for leveraging untranslated address bits of 64-bit linear addresses to be used for storing arbitrary software metadata.

While Retbleed was grabbing the headlines last week and attention of kernel developers, an Intel engineer sent out a new patch series adding Linux kernel support for "BHI_DIS" as a new hardware-based mitigation that appears to be coming with future Intel CPUs for better fending off Spectre-BHI (Branch History Injection) that was disclosed back in March. But initial indications are this new hardware-based prevention may be even more costly for performance and is not being enabled by default.

Intel this week issued their Compute Runtime 22.28.23726 pre-release for this open-source GPU compute stack on Windows and Linux for OpenCL and oneAPI Level Zero support on their graphics hardware.

While there are many shiny new features coming in this next kernel version, the Linux 5.19 cycle hasn't been particularly smooth for Intel. In addition to now needing to deal with their GuC firmare breakage for Alder Lake P "ASAP", their brand new In-Field Scan (IFS) driver set to premiere in Linux 5.19 has been marked as "broken" after it was determined its exposed interface may need some alterations.

As a public service announcement for those who already have bought an Alder Lake P laptop or thinking of getting one, with kernel upgrades you need to be cautious/aware now of breaking accelerated graphics support due to versioned firmware requirements around the GuC micro-controller. While I am surprised Linus Torvalds allows this or wonder if he even is aware of it given his past statements on Linux kernel updates not breaking user-space, the Intel GuC firmware handling being versioned and not supporting backwards compatibility can throw a wrench into your upgrade experience like with the upcoming Linux 5.19 kernel.

The last set of drm-intel-gt-next changes intended for Linux 5.20 have now been submitted for pulling into DRM-Next. This pull has some notable changes, including initial Meteor Lake graphics bring-up.

Intel's effort to add oneAPI/SYCL support to Blender for GPU acceleration with forthcoming Arc Graphics hardware appears all buttoned up for the upcoming Blender 3.3 release.

Intel today announced the release of open-source "AI Reference Kits" to help in the development of artificial intelligence software around healthcare, manufacturing, and other fields.

Last month Intel began publishing the Linux kernel driver changes needed for Habana Labs' Gaudi2 AI accelerator. That enablement and subsequent kernel review process has went well and that hardware support has now been queued into char-misc ahead of the upcoming Linux 5.20 merge window.