Intel News Archives

Another Intel (open-source) software update coinciding with the company's Vision 2022 conference is a new oneAPI Level Zero Loader release.

In addition to all the product announcements made for Intel Vision 2022 in Texas, today marks patch Tuesday with a new round of security disclosures from Intel. This month there are 16 new advisories for addressing 41 vulnerabilities affecting their software and hardware. 76% of these vulnerabilities were found by Intel engineers.

Last year Intel open-sourced the ControlFlag project for using machine learning to uncover bugs within code. With today's ControlFlag 1.2 release, C++ is now a fully supported language for this AI-driven project for uncovering bugs within arbitrary code-bases.

Intel's open-source Linux graphics driver engineers sent in another smorgasbord of "i915" kernel graphics driver changes for the upcoming Linux 5.19 merge window.

Ahead of Intel's Vision event next week, open-source Intel engineers have released ISPC 1.18 as the newest update to their SPMD Program Compiler.

For those with Intel laptop models that are quick to run hot and happen to find your laptop battery quickly being drained even when it should be in a deep sleep state, a solution is in the works for the Linux kernel that ultimately stems from S0ix failing due to the PCH overheating.

We are nearing the cut-off for new feature code to land in the DRM-Next display/graphics drivers for Linux 5.19 while this morning Intel engineers sent in a final drm-intel-gt-next feature update ahead of this next kernel.

A new open-source tool made public by Intel engineers last month aims to help migrate codebases from using OpenACC to OpenMP. In turn the OpenMP-based offloading is preferred for Intel's XPU offloading strategy.

When it comes to Intel's "i915" DRM kernel driver much of the work lately by the company's open-source engineers have been focused on DG2/Alchemist for Arc Graphics products. There has been some occasional DRM kernel driver patches mentioning their HPC work and Ponte Vecchio "PVC" preparations while sent out today was the first set of patches actually introducing Ponte Vecchio to this kernel driver.

Intel's latest high profile hire is recruiting Brendan Gregg from Netflix.

Intel open-source engineers sent in their initial batch of "drm-intel-gt-next" updates to DRM-Next today destined for the Linux 5.19 merge window.

While Intel launched the Arc A-Series Mobile Graphics at the end of Q1, so far at least in major US markets no laptops with these graphics are currently available. As such it's hard to assess the current Linux driver support level and with no clear communication from Intel on the matter. Intel has been working on their upstream DG2/Alchemist support for a while but it looks like with the Linux 5.19 kernel this summer is what will likely be their base version requirement for the DG2/Alchemist-based Intel GPUs.

Last year open-source developers called on Intel to open-source their "PSE" firmware. The Programmable Services Engine (PSE) introduced with Elkhart Lake is an Arm Cortex-M7 companion core responsible for various tasks and is programmed by a binary-only firmware module. While it started out as a proprietary, binary blob, the PSE firmware has now been open-sourced!

Intel in cooperation with the Alliance for Open Media has done on a terrific job on the development of SVT-AV1 for open-source, high performance CPU-based AV1 video encoding. This morning marks the release of SVT-AV1 1.0.

Along with the Raptor Lake P Linux kernel graphics driver support that should work its way to mainline for the v5.19 cycle, merged to Mesa 22.2 today is the Raptor Lake P bits for the Intel OpenGL / Vulkan drivers.

A Canonical kernel engineer is now proposing an Intel P-State performance fix for latest-generation Intel Alder Lake processors be back-ported to the Linux 5.15 LTS series. In turn this should then be picked up by Ubuntu 22.04's kernel build moving forward and others on this latest long-term support series for Linux.

Two Intel TSX (Transactional Synchronization Extensions) fixes were submitted today ahead of Linux 5.18-rc3 and are also marked for back-porting to existing Linux stable kernels. One of the fixes is for addressing a case where systems could still be left vulnerable to the TSX Asynchronous Abort (TAA) vulnerability and the other is where TSX may not get turned off.

While Intel Alder Lake has been out for roughly a half-year now and has been working out well on Linux particularly with v5.16+ kernels, the "intel_idle" driver for CPU idle time management hasn't supported these latest Intel desktop/mobile processors but now there is that support on the way for possible power-savings benefits.

With the Linux 5.19 kernel there is going to be the initial graphics driver support for Raptor Lake S with the initial batch of PCI IDs being added. Published today in patch form and still potentially making it to mainline in v5.19 is Raptor Lake P support.

The folks at open-source firmware consulting firm 3mdeb have published a new blog post outlining the current state of open-source firmware on Intel Tiger Lake platforms.

While every few days it seems like we are writing about new DG2/Alchemist graphics code being prepared for the Linux kernel or related components like Mesa -- and it's been something going on for many months now -- knowing the actual working state of Intel Arc Graphics on Linux hasn't been exactly clear given no formal announcements/communication out of Intel yet as to Linux support expectations / version requirements and not yet having any hardware access. While much of the graphics support has been squared away for Intel Arc DG2/Alchemist as covered in prior articles, it turns out the compute support is still settling but there is now a patch series pending for actually exposing it.

Opened up at the end of March is the work-in-progress Intel oneAPI back-end for Blender's Cycles renderer. This Intel GPU back-end focused for supporting the company's forthcoming Intel Arc graphics cards is targeting the open-source oneAPI Base Toolkit and making use of SYCL. There still is more code work needed, but it's good to see this coming together to complement Blender's NVIDIA CUDA and AMD HIP support.

Being a week out past the end of the Linux 5.18 merge window, today Intel sent out their first batch of "i915" DRM graphics driver updates to DRM-Next for queuing ahead of what will be the Linux 5.19 kernel this summer. There is a lot of code churn still happening around enabling Intel's discrete graphics hardware and other open-source driver happenings.

Intel via their Intel Labs organization announced last year ControlFlag for finding bugs in code using AI. Intel's ControlFlag is open-source and leverages machine learning for uncovering bugs within arbitrary code-bases. At first ControlFlag was focused on uncovering bugs within C/C++ code but with its new v1.1 release is beginning to uncover PHP bugs too.

It looks like the initial Linux kernel enablement code around Trust Domain Extensions (TDX) will be mainlined for the Linux 5.19 cycle this summer.

Ahead of next week's expected feature freeze / code branching for Mesa 22.1, Intel today committed Arctic Sound M "ATS-M" support for their open-source OpenGL and Vulkan drivers.

Following Intel's Arc A-Series mobile graphics introduction from earlier in the week, Intel open-source engineers have released their Media Driver/SDK 22.3.1 version that includes more DG2/Alchemist feature enablement.

Last week Intel engineers released Sound Open Firmware 2.1, the newest feature update to their open-source audio DSP firmware stack that has also begun seeing some AMD support and other platforms too like NXP i.MX8.

Back in January Intel engineers released SVT-AV1 0.9 with significant speed-ups to this open-source AV1 encoder while now as we roll into Q2, SVT-AV1 v1.0 is being readied for launch.

Earlier this year with the Intel Media Driver 22 there was enablement of "ATS-M" with references to "Arctic Sound Mainstream" . Now the Linux kernel patches have arrived with the changes needed on their end for this DG2-based discrete GPU that now sums up ATS-M as a display-less GPU for servers.

After being years in development, the Intel PECI subsystem is landing for the Linux 5.18 kernel.

Intel today announced the Core i9 12900KS as "the world's fastest desktop processor" with a 5.5GHz maximum turbo frequency.

Indirect Branch Tracking (IBT) that is part of Intel's Control-Flow Enforcement Technology (CET) found with Tiger Lake CPUs and newer is landing for the Linux 5.18 kernel.

The Intel Graphics Compiler (IGC) that is open-source and used by the driver stacks on both Windows and Linux is up to version 1.0.10713 and with this milestone is functional ray-tracing support in preparation for upcoming Intel Arc graphics processors with hardware ray-tracing support.

Intel announced yesterday that they in cooperation with Microsoft have contributed the Scalable I/O Virtualization (SIOV) specification to the Open Compute Project for being an open standard moving forward.

As expected, the thermal subsystem updates for the in-development Linux 5.18 kernel is bringing the new Hardware Feedback Interface (HFI) for benefiting their hybrid architecture processors as introduced recently with Alder Lake.

Intel has added a little OpenCL C compiler binary to Mesa 22.1 today in the latest development code-base.

A small but important change was just merged into GCC 12 ahead of its upcoming release in a month or so and also the same patch back-ported now for the GCC 11 stable series.

Intel announced today their initial investment of over €33 billion into the EU as part of their IDM 2.0 strategy.

While there have already been a number of vulnerabilities exhibited for Intel's Software Guard Extensions (SGX) from Prime+Probe to Plundervolt, Spectre-like attacks, SGAxe, and others, it looks like they expect more still to come in the future. Intel engineers are working on the ability for SGX to gracefully handle live CPU microcode updates without a reboot, which these days is increasingly driven for security mitigations and system administrators wanting to apply said updates right away while foregoing downtime.

The open-source Intel HDA audio driver for Linux already supports Alder Lake S, P, M, and N series of processors while now there is support being added for "AlderLake-PS" as a seemingly yet to be announced variant.

A set of 13 patches were posted overnight for improving the Intel Linux kernel graphics driver's handling of the power-savings feature Display Refresh Rate Switching (DRRS) for laptops.

Indirect Branch Tracking (IBT) as part of Intel's Control-flow Enforcement Technology (CET) is set to be supported as part of the upcoming Linux 5.18 kernel. Last night the IBT patch series has queued into TIP's x86/core ahead of the Linux 5.18 merge window.

Beyond all their timely Linux kernel contributions surrounding their processors and graphics hardware, Intel continues well with ensuring network adapters, Bluetooth, and other ASICs are generally well supported on Linux ahead of launch. With Linux 5.18 there is now support for "Madison peak" as another yet-to-be-announced Bluetooth chip.

Intel's big open-source Linux graphics driver engineering team has submitted their last feature pull of new material for inclusion into the upcoming Linux 5.18 kernel. Intel engineers remain very busy on the discrete GPU enablement both for the DG2/Alchemist Arc graphics cards as well as the forthcoming compute accelerators.

While much of Intel's Xeon Scalable "Sapphire Rapids" enablement has been squared away for a while now within the Linux kernel and related components, there are a few holdouts only now coming about in patch form and working their way to the mainline kernel with Sapphire Rapids production ramping up in the coming months.

Intel In-Field Scan is a hardware feature we have not heard the company talk about publicly until yesterday when they posted a new open-source Linux driver for this hardware failure testing feature being introduced with Sapphire Rapids processors.

While Intel's DG2/Alchemist Arc graphics card support with the open-source Linux driver stack appears to be getting into shape with the latest upstream code ahead of the graphics cards expected to ship next quarter, the Xe HP compute accelerator support remains very much a work-in-progress for the open-source Intel Linux kernel driver.

Last week a new version of Intel's IWD open-source wireless daemon was published with a few improvements and new features for this increasingly used alternative to WPA_Supplicant on Linux systems.

Intel's Linux enablement work around Trust Domain Extensions (TDX) continues for better securing virtual machines on future Intel hardware platforms.