Intel News Archives

The Cloud-Hypervisor project that is led by Intel open-source folks for providing a cloud-focused hypervisor written in the Rust programming language is out with a new feature release.

Intel's software team has released a new version of their Compute Runtime that provides OpenCL and oneAPI Level Zero capabilities for their graphics hardware on Linux.

Building off their earlier Intel graphics driver pull request of new material queuing ahead of the Linux 5.10 cycle, another round of updates were submitted on Friday.

Intel has debuted a new version of HAXM, its Hardware-Accelerated Execution Manager that serves as an accelerator for the Android Emulator and QEMU via Intel VT enabled CPUs.

The feature to provide opt-in flushing of the L1 data cache on each context switch looks like it will be coming with the Linux 5.10 cycle for this functionality providing security benefits but at the cost of further performance degradation.

The Intel Graphics Compiler (IGC) that is used by their Linux OpenCL/Level-Zero compute stack as well as now being used by their Windows graphics driver and potentially their Linux OpenGL/Vulkan drivers in the future is out with a new release.

One of the interesting Intel Linux graphics driver patches to be sent out last year were for per-client engine reporting to allow on a per-application/process basis to see how the GPU's render/blitter/video engines were being utilized.

Intel-owned AI startup Habana Labs is working on expanding their "Gaudi" support to now include the NIC network interface found on this AI training accelerator hardware.

The latest Intel oneAPI software release is a new monthly update to their LLVM-based oneAPI Data Parallel C++ (DPC++) compiler.

With Intel Xe LP / Tigerlake adding AV1 accelerated video decode, the Intel open-source developers are working to expose their AV1 hardware acceleration through the Video Acceleration API (VA-API) for usage by the likes of FFmpeg and other multimedia software.

Proposed last year were a set of patches aiming to improve the Intel virtual GPU "vGPU" performance in para-virtualized cases by having optimizations around the shared memory region between the guest and Intel GVTg code. With optimizing the workload PV submission and PPGTT PV updates, the glxgears performance could improve by 30~50% while for large media/3D workloads was more around a 4% average improvement.

Intel's September 2020 security advisories were posted today and include four security advisories around nine vulnerabilities.

With Intel Gen11 graphics and newer supporting Adaptive-Sync / Variable Refresh Rate for minimizing tearing and stuttering, their open-source developers have now added the necessary bits to the generic xf86-video-modesetting X.Org driver for supporting the VRR functionality.

Intel's open-source SVT-AV1 encoder that is now being used as the basis for the AV1 Software Working Group and used by Netflix and other organizations for being one of the most performant CPU-based AV1 encoders is out with a new release.

Patches were posted on Friday for introducing the Intel Security Manager class driver to the Linux kernel.

Intel's iNet Wireless Daemon (IWD) is out with a new feature release with this daemon continuing to see new usage and possibly on Ubuntu moving forward.

In addition to Intel talking a lot today in virtual briefings about the new 11th Gen "Tiger Lake" mobile processors, they were also talking at a higher level extensively on their second-generation "Project Athena" laptop innovation program and their new Intel Evo branding for premium laptops.

Intel's open-source engineers today sent out their latest patches bringing up the Dynamic Load Balancer 2.0 for the next-gen PCIe device that offers load-balanced, prioritized scheduling of core-to-core communication.

Going back to earlier this year has been work on an "adaptive" mode for P-State to improve GPU bound efficiency when the CPU is forced to share a power/thermal budget with other components like onboard graphics. That work is still advancing and an update was provided on it last week.

While the Linux 5.9 kernel cycle is still young and not seeing its formal release until early October or so, Intel's open-source team has already submitted to DRM-Next their first batch of feature changes desired for Linux 5.10.

As part of the virtual SIGGRAPH20, Intel is using the opportunity to talk up their ray-tracing efforts.

Along with this week marking the release of oneAPI Level Zero 1.0, the oneAPI Data Parallel C++ compiler has seen its newest tagged release.

As part of the upcoming oneAPI 1.0 "Gold" release, oneAPI Level Zero 1.0 was released this morning.

With Intel's Lakefield and the future Alder Lake with their hybrid x86 architecture mixing of "little" and "big" cores, operating system optimizations become all the more important and thus will be interesting to see how the battle is between Windows and Linux.

Intel's open-source team responsible for their Compute Runtime on Tuesday released version 20.32.17625 for this HD/UHD/Iris/Xe Graphics compute stack providing OpenCL 2.x/3.0 and oneAPI Level Zero capabilities.

Back in June after Intel first published the Advanced Matrix Extensions (AMX) specification, the open-source/Linux patches were quick to come by their large software team. That work has continued over the summer in ensuring the Linux ecosystem and developers are ready for Intel AMX programming come next year with Sapphire Rapids.

Merged last week to Linux 5.9 were the main set of power management updates while hitting the kernel now are some last minute power-related changes.

Intel has published a whitepaper on their new TDX "Trust Domain Extensions" technology for better securing virtual machines.

At Intel's Architecture Day this week the company was talking about work on their new Windows graphics driver that is being timed for Xe but supporting existing generations of hardware as well. One of the interesting takeaways was seeing the Windows driver is now using the open-source "IGC" back-end.

Recently I wrote about it looking like oneAPI 1.0 was lining up and now there is further confirmation of the first production release of this Intel software collection indeed coming this year.

While Mesa 20.2 isn't even releasing for a few weeks, Mesa 20.3 is already seeing new feature work that will debut next quarter.

For a while now Intel has been quietly been working on "mOS" as the "multi-OS" that is a modified version of the Linux kernel that in turn is running lightweight kernels for high-performance computing purposes.

It is Intel's August 2020 disclosure day with 18 new advisories being issued for covering 52 vulnerabilities.

For Intel NVDIMMs like DC Persistent Memory there is support on the way with Linux 5.9 to support firmware updates to the non-volatile memory device without the need for a system reboot.

Not much is publicly known about Intel's Emmitsburg chipset. Prior to noticing some Linux patches recently referencing Intel Emmitsburg, the only other public mentions of it has been in the context of the Windows HWiNFO program mentioning it in their change-log. With Linux 5.9, Intel has begun adding Emmitsburg support.

It looks like Intel will soon be tagging their oneAPI Level Zero specification as version 1.0.

Sent out over the weekend was a patch series for the Intel Linux kernel graphics driver entitled "Time, where did it go?" This set of 42 patches aims to provide incremental improvements to the driver to offset a performance regression in Linux 5.7 that Intel hasn't been able to track down. This increased complication of the driver to offset the regression is now under the microscope.

With all the recent work on Intel's open-source compute stack around the vector back-end and GPU code generation with their ISPC compiler there was another significant milestone achieved that went unnoticed until spotting the change a few days ago.

Intel's Scalable Video Technology team is known for their open-source video encoder work particularly on AV1 and VP9 formats, but they also continue to maintain a high performance H.265/HEVC encoder as well. Intel SVT-HEVC 1.5 was released on Monday as their first major update of the year.

A few days back we wrote of Intel's ISPC compiler landing GPU code generation support for their UHD/Iris/Xe Graphics from Gen9 Skylake and beyond. Following that code being merged, ISPC 1.14.0 was quickly tagged.

Besides the code itself to Intel's oneAPI being open-source, the company is being surprisingly open about its support even for areas of usage outside of x86_64 CPUs.

Back in May I wrote about Intel working on Platform Monitoring Technology or hardware telemetry capabilities that are coming with Tiger Lake. The Linux support continues to be worked on for this "PMT" functionality although it looks like the work won't be ready in time for the imminent Linux 5.9 kernel merge window.

Intel's open-source ISPC (the Intel SPMD Program Compiler) now has preliminary support for code generation targeting their GPUs.

Building off the recently mainlined Intel work on split lock detection, Intel engineers have now been extending that with bus lock detection support.

For those using the Intel ICE Linux network driver that is used for the likes of the E800 series, it's now going to be easier updating the device firmware from Linux.

Intel has been preparing "Power Limit4" support for their Linux PowerCap driver that is being rolled out for the forthcoming Tiger Lake SoCs.

Following last week's public disclosure that Intel is running six to twelve months behind on their 7nm production, Intel this evening announced a set of leadership changes to move the company forward.

As outlined a few months ago, Intel's future Sapphire Rapids and Alder Lake processors are set to add a SERIALIZE instruction. That SERIALIZE instruction ensures all flags/register/memory modifications are complete as well as draining all buffered writes to memory before the next instruction is executed. Linux is moving forward with preparing to make use of this new CPU instruction in its function for stopping speculative execution and prefetching of modified code.

While Intel's open-source engineers have been working on Tiger Lake enablement for Linux going back roughly a year with many kernel patches spanning the different areas over numerous kernel releases, which aligns with Intel's ongoing cadence of ensuring good Linux hardware support at launch even for consumer hardware, there have been a few stragglers in the Linux bring-up for Tiger Lake.

While Intel on the hardware manufacturing side continues facing stiff challenges, on the open-source software side the company continues making legendary progress. Out in today's Intel Graphics Compiler and in turn Intel Compute Runtime releases as part of their GPGPU toolchain is the recent open-sourcing and integration of their Vector Compute back-end.