Intel News Archives

Intel's pixel pipeline optimization work focused on speeding up DG2/Alchemist graphics cards with their open-source graphics driver has managed to land in Mesa 22.0.

Intel announced new leadership changes today as 2022 gets started for what is expected to be an eventful year at the company with Sapphire Rapids, Raptor Lake, and Intel Arc graphics ahead.

In preparation for Xeon Scalable "Sapphire Rapids" processors, Linux 5.16 adds support for Advanced Matrix Extensions. But that AMX bring-up is more invasive than when introducing AVX as with AMX the feature needs to be "requested" for use by user-space, among other changes. As such extra handling also needed to be introduced for the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) that hadn't made it for v5.16 but now it looks like the AMX KVM support may be ready for mainline.

Starting off a new year Intel's open-source compute stack developers have published the Intel Graphics Compiler (IGC) 1.0.9933 release that is used for their OpenCL / oneAPI Level Zero support on Linux and also used by their graphics driver on Windows.

In the mainline Linux kernel for a year now has been the Intel variable rate refresh (VRR) support for Gen12 / Xe Graphics and then with the upcoming Linux 5.17 cycle that's being enabled for Gen11 Ice Lake graphics too. With the Intel i915 DRM kernel driver support for VRR/Adaptive-Sync being mature, the Intel Mesa OpenGL and Vulkan driver components are finally enabling the support by default.

Back in late 2020 Intel's programming manuals detailed the Enhanced Hardware Feedback Interface for the CPU to provide guidance to the kernel's scheduler on optimal task placement of workloads. While marketed as Thread Director with the new 12th Gen Alder Lake processors, that hardware feedback interface support is getting squared away for the Linux kernel to improve the support for these newest processors.

It was another exciting year for Intel on the open-source/Linux front with countless contributions to the Linux kernel, Mesa, and other open-source projects. Intel's oneAPI toolkits continue humming along and they continue maintaining tons of other projects from Clear Linux to SVT-AV1 to IWD and many more. Intel's Linux graphics driver developers have also been extremely busy preparing the open-source support for next year's discrete GPU launches. Here is a look at the most popular Intel articles on Phoronix during the course of 2021.

For those with systems making use of an Intel "Titan Ridge" Thunderbolt 3 controller, a Linux kernel driver improvement working its way to mainline should yield thermal/power benefits.

Intel open-source engineers have prepared "PFRUT" support for Platform Firmware Runtime Updates for allowing (U)EFI capsule updates to be performed on capable systems without rebooting the system in order to eliminate downtime.

Queued into the sound subsystem's "for-next" branch ahead of the Linux 5.17 cycle are some Alder Lake audio updates.

Intel's modern WiFi driver "IWLWIFI" is set to see a number of improvements with the Linux 5.17 kernel development cycle kicking off in January.

It was nearly four years ago already that Intel announced Sound Open Firmware in pushing for open-source sound firmware for their hardware. The Sound Open Firmware effort has been a great success even if it's not a shiny project widely talked about among consumers. Just prior to the holidays Sound Open Firmware 2.0 was quietly released.

Intel on Thursday submitted a final drm-intel-gt-next pull of new material slated for introduction in the upcoming Linux 5.17 cycle.

Intel has now made their oneAPI Toolkits 2022 release publicly available after announcing it earlier this quarter.

Linux 5.17 will have a seemingly important fix for upcoming Intel Alder Lake mobile processors. Without this change/fix, you might not see the advertised one-core turbo frequencies being met for your processor depending upon the system and whether tuning your EPP.

Coming as a surprise to end out the week is confirmation that the lead developer and architect for Intel's Linux Vulkan driver has left the company.

The ENQCMD functionality that is part of Intel's Data Streaming Accelerator with upcoming Xeon Scalable "Sapphire Rapids" processors was disabled earlier this year for being "broken beyond repair". But now ahead of Sapphire Rapids beginning to ramp up in the coming months, Intel open-source engineers believe they have improved the code that the ENQCMD instruction usage could be re-enabled for the Linux kernel.

Intel's CM Compiler for their "C for Metal" programming language has been updated for various new GPU targets, including not only Xe HPC "Ponte Vecchio" but also a Ponte Vecchio XT variant.

Intel Linux engineers have posted a new set of patches enabling the Graphics Security Controller "GSC" support under Linux as a chassis controller for discrete graphics cards.

Intel's stellar open-source graphics driver team sent in their latest batch of feature updates to DRM-Next for staging ahead of next month's Linux 5.17 cycle kicking off. Notable with this pull among other changes is initial support for next-generation Raptor Lake S graphics while Alder Lake P graphics are considered stable / promoted from being behind the experimental flag.

One of the Intel patch series we have been waiting to see mainlined since all the way back in 2018 is around per-client GPU metrics reporting for being able to show various GPU engine activity on a per-process basis. Every once in a while the patches have been revived but have yet to reach mainline. They recently were revved once again, leaving us hope that in 2022 we might finally see this standardized per-client/process GPU statistics reporting land in the mainline kernel.

Coming with future Intel CPUs is Trust Domain Extensions (TDX) to further enhance the security of virtual machines (VMs) and it's sounded a lot like AMD's Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV) in many regards and in fact now for the Linux kernel Intel is looking at leveraging some of that SEV code to allow for more code sharing between these CPU features to improve virtualization security.

Aside from the separate work around experimental Vulkan Video decode support, thanks to Intel recently there have been a number of Vulkan improvements to the FFmpeg code around new accelerated filters.

With Intel's Atom x6000E "Elkhart Lake" SoCs there is a new block called the Programmable Services Engine (PSE) that is an Arm Cortex-M7 companion core that handles various tasks. Unfortunately, with the PSE it means a new binary-only firmware module. With the Programmable Services Engine likely to come with future Intel platforms too, Coreboot developers and open-source enthusiasts are calling on Intel to now open-source this firmware to avoid having this extra binary blob and further complicating future open-source firmware efforts.

Sent to DRM-Next this week for queuing until the Linux 5.17 merge window in January is the latest batch of drm-intel-gt-next updates, which has hang fixes and more preparations for Intel discrete graphics.

Intel's oneDNN Deep Neural Network Library that is part of their oneAPI toolkit is out with version 2.5 and brings RISC-V CPU support among other updates.

One of many exciting features/changes with upcoming Intel Xeon Scalable "Sapphire Rapids" processors is the introduction of Advanced Matrix Extensions (AMX). While initial AMX support is premiering with Linux 5.16 due out in stable form as the start of the new year, it currently doesn't allow for KVM virtualized guests to make use of the new capabilities.

Back in September Intel originally posted Linux patches for "Software Defined Silicon" for being able to activate extra CPU features present in the processor's silicon but not exposed by default unless the cryptographically secure process with this SDSi driver was performed. Intel appears to be moving toward allowing licensable processor features that can be activated after the fact and today a new version of that SDSi Linux driver appeared.

Intel's open-source Linux graphics driver developers continue making their driver preparations for being able to accommodate Vulkan ray-tracing with upcoming Xe HPG graphics having ray-tracing hardware capabilities.

Added to the in-development Linux 5.16 kernel was cluster-aware scheduling designed to enhance system performance where groups of CPU cores may share caches or similar and thus the scheduler could benefit from knowing that information for making more optimal task placement. But as I pointed out early on with Linux 5.16, this cluster scheduling is hurting the Intel Alder Lake performance on the new kernel. Intel is now working to correct this by making the cluster scheduling configurable and disabling this functionality by default for hybrid CPUs such as Alder Lake.

Ahead of Intel ARC graphics cards premiering next year, Intel's open-source Linux graphics driver developers remain very busy preparing for the next-generation graphics capabilities.

At the end of November was a big update to Intel's Graphics Compiler while out today is IGC 1.0.9441 as the first update since to this open-source, cross-platform graphics compiler.

While Intel's Software Guard Extensions (SGX) functionality has been present in CPUs going back to Skylake, it took until last year with Linux 5.11 for SGX support to finally be mainlined and required more than 40 rounds of review/revisions. Finally today Intel posted patches for bringing up SGX2 as the next iteration of Software Guard Extensions and already found in shipping processors.

An early batch of Intel kernel graphics driver feature updates intended for Linux 5.17 was sent out yesterday to DRM-Next for queuing until that next merge window opens around the start of the new year. Notable with this pull is Icelake "Gen11" graphics finally seeing variable rate refresh enabled!

With the graphics driver support for Alder Lake S-series in good shape with Linux 5.16 and the Alder Lake P-series support also coming together for upcoming ADL-based laptops, next up is the Alder Lake N enablement happening for Linux.

Merged this Friday afternoon into the Linux 5.16 development kernel is fixing a performance issue affecting some Intel Alder Lake motherboards.

Intel's open-source engineers today released the Compute-Runtime 21.47.21710 as their latest update to this open-source compute stack for Linux systems enabling their graphics processors to enjoy performant OpenCL and oneAPI Level Zero support.

With Intel Tiger Lake mobile processors introduced last year there has been good open-source support going back to launch, but a few of the more niche features have seen slower than normal handling for getting the features supported by the upstream Linux kernel. The latest patch series being revived now is for Intel Key Locker support.

Intel just released IGC 1.0.9289 as a huge update to their open-source Graphics Compiler used on Linux currently by their OpenCL/oneAPI Level Zero compute stack and also by Windows with their official driver.

Last year with Intel "Tiger Lake" was the introduction of Control-Flow Enforcement Technology (CET) for helping fend off return/jump-oriented attacks and as part of CET is hardware Indirect Branch Tracking (IBT) support. There have been patch series working to implement CET's IBT support but after having gone through 30 rounds of review and not being merged, a new take on it was submitted today.

IWD as the Intel-developed iNet Wireless Daemon that can serve as a replacement to the likes of WPA_Supplicant while integrating nicely with NetworkManager / systemd-networkd / ConnMan is out with a new version.

Back in September we were first to report on Intel developing "Software Defined Silicon" support for being able to activate extra licensed hardware features not otherwise exposed. Intel hasn't talked about the controversial feature in terms of product plans but this weekend they posted a new revision of this Intel "SDSi" Linux driver.

Intel last month open-sourced "ControlFlag" for finding bugs within source code by using AI with training off more than a reported one billion lines of code. Intel has said they have successfully been using it within their software from applications down to firmware. The new milestone today is ControlFlag 1.0 being released.

Intel passed along news today of their development efforts around Universal Scalable Firmware, a new initiative they are pursuing to simplify and scale firmware development for hardware from edge computing devices to the cloud.

Following a lot of improvements the past few years to the Intel Linux kernel graphics "i915" driver it looks like it's ready to enable run-time power management auto-suspend support by default.

When writing this morning about intel "Raptor Lake" Linux enablement to begin, I didn't expect that to bear fruit so quickly in just a matter of hours... As predicted, that Linux bring-up for the Alder Lake successor is beginning now -- and doing so at full-speed with the initial Raptor Lake S (RPL-S) graphics support being posted.

Following today's inaugural patch, over the coming weeks we are expected to see Intel Raptor Lake patches beginning to make it out onto the public kernel mailing list for review.

Red Hat's David Airlie has been working on early support for Vulkan Video API support with Mesa's Radeon "RADV" driver while the past week he spent time working on similar treatment for Intel's open-source "ANV" Vulkan driver and also resurrecting some unfinished VA-API video acceleration code he was working on for the Intel Crocus Gallium3D driver.

OEMs have begun releasing updated BIOS/firmware revisions to address new security vulnerabilities disclosed this week by Intel. Most pressing are potential security vulnerabilities within the BIOS reference code used by various Intel CPUs that could lead to privilege escalation by local users and ranked a "high" impact severity.

Posted last year for introduction in the GCC 11 stable compiler released earlier this year was the initial Alder Lake "alderlake" target. Now that Intel 12th Gen Core "Alder Lake" processors are officially out, Intel engineers have updated their Alder Lake tuning for the GNU Compiler Collection to yield more efficient performance with GCC 12 due out in Q2'2022.