Intel's open-source driver engineers remain very active on bringing up their discrete graphics card support under Linux with restructuring of the kernel driver to handle local/dedicated memory among a variety of other changes needed. Plus there are new features with the latest generation of Intel graphics such as the Protected Xe Path (PXP) for hardware-protected sessions for multi-user / multi-process scenarios. The Intel PXP code for their Linux driver has been in the works since last year and the latest revision now submitted.
Intel News Archives
2,916 Intel open-source and Linux related news articles on Phoronix since 2006.
After Intel originally proposed zero-copy capability for the Linux kernel's AF_XDP high performance packet processing code years ago and implemented for their higher performance network hardware/drivers, with Linux 5.14 the common Intel "IGC" Gigabit Ethernet driver is set to introduce AF_XDP zero-copy support.
Intel's Linux preparations for Alder Lake -- and more broadly the concept of hybrid x86_64 CPUs with a mix of large Core and small Atom cores -- continues with the P-State CPU frequency scaling driver seeing new work to prepare for Intel's hybrid era.
Intel engineers have been publishing open-source/Linux enablement patches around Advanced Matrix Extensions (AMX) for nearly one year now. While Intel Xeon "Sapphire Rapids" with AMX support is expected around the end of this year, one of the key pieces yet to land is the Linux kernel support.
A bit late to the game on the Rocket Lake side but ahead as usual when it comes to Alder Lake S, Intel's engineers maintaining the open-source Compute Runtime for Linux systems have now flipped on the Level Zero support.
As usual when getting my hands on a new processor family, I was curious about the performance difference if booting the Xeon Platinum 8380 "Ice Lake" processors with the Spectre security mitigations disabled at run-time. Ultimately there was very little difference when using the standard "mitigations=off" option for these new Intel server processors.
With recently showing desktops and servers enjoying better performance on Ubuntu 21.04 through high end hardware like Xeon Ice Lake, you might be wondering what this means for mobile Linux performance... Here are some quick weekend benchmarks of the Dell XPS laptop with Core i7 1165G7 "Tiger Lake" on Ubuntu 20.10 versus 21.04.
Intel's open-source team maintaining their graphics compiler (IGC) have issued a big update this week.
With the Linux 5.13 merge window past, Intel's open-source graphics driver developers have submitted their initial queue of new patches to DRM-Next of material they have ready ahead of the Linux 5.14 kernel cycle this summer.
More than a decade ago when the open-source graphics driver stack was being modernized with kernel mode-setting and better handling the stack for OpenGL, composited desktops and the like, TTM (Translation Table Maps) was born for managing GPU video RAM by the kernel Direct Rendering Manager drivers. While Intel initially expressed interest in TTM, they ultimately decided to create GEM as the Graphics Execution Manager for handling their video memory management needs. Now in 2021 with Intel aggressively pursuing discrete graphics, they are working on TTM support.
One of the features already found in new Intel "Tiger Lake" CPUs but not yet supported by the Linux kernel is Key Locker for securing AES keys on the system. Going back months there has been various patch series working toward Key Locker support while the actual patch series getting things ready for usage was just sent out again under a "request for comments" flag.
For two years now Intel open-source engineers have floated patches for reporting per-client engine utilization for showing on an application level how much it's leveraging the Intel graphics render/3D, blitter, and video/multimedia engines. This can be used for some nifty system information reporting like a GPU top or other system monitoring functionality. The latest version of these patches were sent out this week.
Intel today is announcing their 11th Gen Core H-Series "Tiger Lake H" mobile processors that features SKUs clocking up to a 5.0GHz turbo frequency and twenty lanes of PCI Express Gen 4.
Outside of the i915 kernel graphics driver one of the areas Linux 5.13 is seeing more discrete graphics card bring-up work is within their PMT driver for enabling platform monitoring / telemetry support with this inaugural Intel PCIe graphics card.
Intel's open-source graphics driver developers volleyed an initial set of nearly 100 experimental patches working on GuC submission support as they work towards integrating the DRM scheduler into their graphics driver.
Linux 5.13 is introducing the "intel_tcc_cooling" driver for helping to cool newer Intel mobile/desktop CPUs by down-clocking the processor cores when crossing a lower threshold than is set by default.
As an additional security measure for the Linux kernel, Intel engineers are exploring making kernel page tables read-only and to then only allow writing on a per-CPU basis when they need to be modified. This would be handled using the PKS functionality found with future Intel processors.
Intel's open-source "ANV" Vulkan Linux driver has finally merged support for the KHR_fragment_shading_rate extension.
The Rust-written Cloud-Hypervisor project led by open-source Intel engineers as a VMM designed for cloud workloads has broke well past the "1.0" milestone. Following a series of 0.x releases, Cloud-Hypervisor 15 was released this week.
Intel's code for Linux kernel bus lock detection that works in conjunction with newer Intel CPUs has landed in the Linux kernel.
Queued this week into perf/core ahead of the imminent Linux 5.13 merge window is perf subsystem bring-up for Intel's next-gen Alder Lake processors.
Intel's engineers working on their open-source Linux-based Compute Runtime stack just released their latest version.
With Mesa 21.1 now branched for this collection of primarily OpenGL/Vulkan open-source drivers for Linux, feature development is on for Mesa 21.2 that will debut in Q3. One of the first major changes to land for Mesa 21.2 is the beginning of the graphics compiler support for Intel's forthcoming Xe-HP high performance graphics processor.
Back in early 2018 were patches proposed for selectable platform support when building Intel's kernel graphics driver so users/distributions if desired could disable extremely old hardware support and/or cater kernel builds for specific Intel graphics generations. Three years later those patches have been re-proposed.
While these kernel patches aren't expected to land until the Linux 5.14 kernel cycle later in the summer, a set of 19 patches published on Monday morning begin allowing a test system to boot with the DG1 graphics card.
While Intel is often very proactive in adding new CPU families to the open-source GCC and LLVM/Clang compilers where it tends to land a year or more in advance of the processors actually shipping, occasionally there are slipups. Today in fact the "Rocket Lake" support finally was merged into GCC 11 days ahead of that compiler release and after the CPUs were already launched at the end of March.
Over the past two years we have seen a lot of Intel Linux kernel graphics driver work in preparing to support Intel discrete graphics cards. That work is still ongoing even for the DG1 graphics card that has been sampling to customers while Linux 5.13 will take things another step forward this summer.
While Skylake was introduced a half-decade ago already, Intel's open-source engineers aren't done relentlessly optimizing for it and subsequent 14nm processors. Hitting the GCC 11 open-source compiler today was an optimization for benefiting Skylake through the likes of Cascade Lake with some possible performance benefits.
The Intel "Crocus" Gallium3D driver in development for supporting old Intel i965 IGPs through Haswell continues making progress by the upstream, open-source Mesa3D community for hopefully one day replacing Intel's classic "i965" Mesa driver.
This week Intel's open-source developers released version 2.2 of oneDNN, their deep neural network library that is part of their oneAPI offering after previously being developed under the names MKL-DNN and the Deep Neural Network Library (DNNL).
Intel's open-source "ANV" Vulkan driver now supports the Vulkan EXT_conservative_rasterization extension that is most notably used by DXVK for translating Direct3D atop this graphics API and work is also pending too for VKD3D.
Intel's open-source developers have released a new version of IGC, the Intel Graphics Compiler that is used by their open-source Linux compute stack, recently was transitioned for use by their Windows driver too, and might eventually be piped into their Mesa OpenGL/Vulkan drivers.
The past several weeks have seen a few rounds of Intel graphics driver changes sent in to DRM-Next ahead of the Linux 5.13 cycle. This Linux 5.13 Intel graphics driver work has included Alder Lake S enablement and other feature changes. A final batch of "feature" work was sent out this morning for targeting the Intel kernel graphics driver in Linux 5.13.
Along with our Intel Core i5 11600K + Core i9 11900K Linux review from yesterday with 22 pages of benchmarks, even more performance data is now published and continues to flow in via OpenBenchmarking.org for looking at the Intel Rocket Lake performance across hundreds of benchmarks and compared to many other processors we have tested and that of the community.
For longer than the past year Intel engineers have been working on wiring up the Linux kernel support to handle split lock detection and bus lock detection. Back in Linux 5.7 the split lock detection landed for warning or even killing the offending software should a split lock occur due to the significant performance impact and possible denial of service. Now it's looking like the bus lock detection code could be ready for mainline.
The Intel IGC network driver (not to be confused with their other IGC, the Intel Graphics Compiler) that supports their Gigabit/2.5G Ethernet devices has support for the Express Data Path (XDP) with the upcoming Linux 5.13 cycle.
A small but measurable and seemingly widespread performance optimization is currently being buttoned up for Intel's open-source "ANV" Vulkan driver within Mesa to benefit latest-generation Gen12/Xe Graphics.
While Intel is well known and loved for their generally very timely open-source hardware enablement under Linux, occasionally there are exceptions to that long-standing tradition of having the support squared away ahead of product launches. One of the areas where Intel has been slow at enabling their open-source Linux support is around their Gaussian and Neural Accelerator (GNA) but that driver is now coming together for being mainlined hopefully in the near future.
Raised during the recent discussion over looking at removing Mesa's classic drivers from the mainline tree this year is that there still exists an effort trying to create an Intel Gallium3D driver for older pre-Broadwell graphics currently only served by the i965 classic driver. That Crocus effort continues to be worked on but isn't yet mainline.
Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger is hosting a webcast to provide an update on the company's manufacturing and other engineering efforts.
One week ago AMD introduced the EPYC 7003 "Milan" processors while this morning Intel has made public when they will be formally introducing their 3rd Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors.
While Intel upstreamed their forthcoming "Ice Lake" Xeon processor support long ago and has been focused on next-gen Sapphire Rapids enablement now for the better part of the past year, there still are some Ice Lake Xeon tweaks taking place here and there. This week a new bleeding-edge patch is in testing for tweaking the power/performance behavior of Ice Lake Xeon with Intel's idle driver.
Coincidentally on the same day as formally announcing Rocket Lake S, Intel's open-source driver engineers have sent in their next-gen "Rocket Lake S" enablement code to DRM-Next for landing this spring in the Linux 5.13 merge window.
This week marked Intel sending out initial Linux driver enablement patches for Alder Lake P mobile support to complement the existing Alder Lake S desktop support that has been coming together in recent months. In addition to the Linux kernel code for ADL-P, the Intel open-source Media Driver code was also updated for video acceleration on this Intel hybrid chip.
While for months already Intel has been volleying Linux driver patches around Alder Lake S, today they began publishing their graphics driver support patches for Alder Lake P.
Intel sent out their latest open-source Linux driver patches today for their new "XE_LPD" display architecture that will be found with upcoming hardware platforms. XE_LPD features "version 13" display capabilities but not to be confused with "Gen13" graphics as they are beginning to more segregate their different Intel GPU IP blocks.
Back in 2019 we reported on Intel bringing up a new SoC dubbed "Lighting Mountain" to be used as a network processor and for other use-cases. Intel brought up that initial Linux kernel code for Lightning Mountain in 2019 but since then the code has already begun to fall into disrepair while it looks like it was either punted off as part of MaxLinear's acquisition last year of the Intel Home Gateway Platform Division or otherwise as a result of that was cancelled.
Intel engineers have been working on a tool called kcpuid for showing the raw CPU features/capabilities of a processor under Linux. This utility will be part of the kernel source tree and is queued up now in tip's x86/misc branch, thereby making it material for Linux 5.13 barring any issues coming up.
While Intel 11th Gen Rocket Lake desktop processors are launching this month, Intel's open-source Linux driver developers known for their punctual support are already preparing early code around their 14th Gen "Lunar Lake" platform.
University of Illinois researchers have discovered that Intel's CPU ring interconnects are vulnerable to exploit by side-channel attacks. This opens a whole new can of worms with the cross-core interconnect now being vulnerable to exploit but so far Intel doesn't appear to be overly concerned and there are some open questions on whether this interconnect exploit would still work with the latest Intel Xeon processors.
2916 Intel news articles published on Phoronix.