Intel News Archives

One of the latest performance optimizations being pursued by Intel on the open-source Linux side is providing an AVX-512-optimized container for Golang usage.

Published back in February were the Linux kernel enablement patches for a new "ComboPHY" driver for supporting the company's forthcoming Gateway SoC. That code is now set to be included in the next kernel cycle, Linux 5.8.

Intel is extending their Dynamic Platform and Thermal Framework (DPTF) Linux support with battery participant device support.

TPAUSE is the new instruction supported by Intel's Tremont microarchitecture and beyond. TPAUSE allows for an optimized state that can provide low wake-up latency compared to existing delay mechanisms. With Linux 5.8, the kernel will begin making use of TPAUSE where supported.

For reasons currently unknown, Intel released new CPU microcode on Wednesday for their Sandy Bridge processors.

As a result of increased bug reports where Linux users are reporting Intel graphics hangs but not including the most pertinent details like the Mesa version, the Intel Mesa drivers are now embedding the driver name and Mesa version as part of their error state.

For months now Intel's open-source driver developers have been working on the "Gen12" graphics support needed most notably for Tiger Lake and more recently is also confirmed for Rocket Lake. But Gen12 is also needed for the highly anticipated Xe Graphics with the discrete graphics offerings to come in the months ahead by Intel. Building off the existing Gen12 graphics driver code, Intel today published the first DG1 patches for enabling their first discrete graphics card under Linux.

Compute Express Link is the interconnect standard backed by Intel, AMD, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Dell, and others for building off PCI Express with new CPU-to-device and CPU-to-memory capabilities. Intel's stellar open-source team has been working on plumbing the Linux kernel support for this next generation of devices.

Adding to the early changes accumulating for the GCC 11 development cycle is automatic CPU detection support for newer families of Intel CPUs.

Queued up this weekend as part of the x86/fpu changes slated for the upcoming Linux 5.8 cycle is low-level functionality necessary for supporting other current and future Intel CPU features.

Various open-source patches have gone back to at least 2017 for enabling Intel's Control-Flow Enforcement Technology (CET) for the Linux kernel and related components. This is the Intel feature for helping prevent ROP and COP/JOP style attacks via indirect branch tracking and a shadow stack. Recently there has been a fair amount of CET improvements to the various open-source components.

Intel's open-source graphics driver team on Friday sent in a final set of kernel graphics driver updates targeting the upcoming Linux 5.8 cycle.

Intel's oneAPI crew just released version 2020-03 (though one would have thought it should be 2020-05) of their Data Parallel C++ (DPC++) compiler and with this release are several new features including the NVIDIA CUDA back-end.

Intel on Friday quietly released new Intel CPU microcode files for Linux.

Last week Intel open-source developers sent out their initial kernel driver patches for Rocket Lake graphics support and now the Rocket Lake platform support has been merged for Mesa 20.2 on the OpenGL/Vulkan driver side.

Intel developers are working on a new Linux feature and technology called "Intel Platform Monitoring Technology" as amounting to a hardware telemetry framework that can also be used by other hardware vendors. This appears to be a new feature Intel will be supporting on the hardware side starting with Tiger Lake.

When it comes to Intel's high performance Scalable Video Technology (SVT) video encoders, SVT-AV1 is the most well known for its great speed and usage by Netflix and others. But Intel SVT also consists of VP9 and HEVC/H.265 encoders too and today brought the debut of SVT-VP9 0.2.

Intel's OpenCL Intercept Layer remains focused on debugging and analyzing OpenCL application performance across platforms. It hadn't seen a new release, however, in two years but that changed last month.

A day after announcing the 10th Gen Core "Comet Lake" S-Series CPUs, the Intel open-source engineers have volleyed their first patches for bringing up the graphics on next-gen Rocket Lake.

Intel's server software team continues working on Cloud-Hypervisor as a Rust-written hypervisor for modern Linux VMs. Cloud-Hypervisor has been picking up a lot of features and out today is another pre-1.0 feature release.

Intel's graphics driver team continues amassing more changes for Linux 5.8.

If you are still running any pre-Sandybridge Intel hardware, you should really consider upgrading to modern hardware for the performance and efficiency gains... But should you still be tied to an old i865-based system, there is an improvement coming in 2020 for Linux users.

There's been a lot of interesting work hitting Mesa Git this week ahead of the Mesa 20.1 code branching and feature freeze. Merged this afternoon was a rather simple optimization benefiting Gen11 (Icelake) and newer for their open-source Vulkan driver, it's such a simple change it is almost surprising it took so long to benefit.

The Intel P-State driver has been going through a number of improvements recently including transitioning to the "Schedutil" governor by default on some systems so far in this governor making use of scheduler utilization data. But Intel's graphics team meanwhile has been working on P-State changes to improve the GPU-bound energy efficiency and that is now spun as a new "adaptive" governor.

Following the release a few weeks back of the Intel Media Driver Q1-2020 update for this open-source Linux video encode/decode driver for Intel graphics, their first pre-release of the Q2-2020 driver update is now out for testing.

Going on since 2016 has been the long-running effort getting the Software Guard Extensions (SGX) support into the mainline Linux kernel. Sent out this week was the SGX foundation patches for the twenty-ninth time as it works to get into shape for upstream acceptance.

Adding to the growing list of changes building up for Linux 5.8 this summer is now having Tiger Lake Thunderbolt/USB4 support.

Earlier this week I highlighted the Dell XPS 7390 "Ice Lake" ultrabook seeing a big performance drop on recent versions of the Linux kernel. Intel engineers seem to have sorted it out and now have a solution in place, which affects those running Linux 5.4 or newer.

Earlier this month I reported that Linux developers were reviving work on the Intel FSGSBASE patches as a performance helper going back to Ivy Bridge CPUs but for which past patch series never got over the finish line for mainlining. On Thursday a new version of the FSGSBASE patches were sent out.

Intel's ISPC compiler (Implicit SPMD Program Compiler) for targeting its C-based single-program, multiple data language is out now with a new feature release.

Two years ago Intel announced the open-source Deep Learning Reference Stack with providing an easy-to-use, performance-focused stack for exploiting deep learning capabilities on Intel x86_64 hardware. Today marks version 6.0 of this toolkit.

As I wrote about just over a month ago, Intel open-source developers have begun their bring-up of the Keem Bay SoC. Out today is a new Keem Bay driver to avoid a situation where inadvertent reboots could happen without this driver.

Slim Bootloader is the open-source initiative Intel announced in Q3'2018 for providing a very bare bones BSD-licensed open-source firmware implementation. We're now seeing new Linux patches for improving the integration with the Slim Bootloader.

Landing today in Mesa 20.1-devel were some of the OpenGL/Vulkan-side driver changes needed as part of Intel's road to bringing up discrete Xe GPU support under Linux.

Intel's open-source SVT-AV1 encoder/decoder for AV1 content continues becoming quite featureful while being extremely performant. Out today is SVT-AV1 0.8.2 with more significant work not only on the encoder side but also decoder.

Currently being tested ahead of the Linux 5.8 kernel cycle is a change so the Intel P-State CPU frequency scaling driver will begin defaulting to its passive mode for systems without hardware-managed P-States.

Intel engineers have outed a new version of oneDNN, the library formerly known as DNNL and before that MKL-DNN for providing a deep neural network library geared for high performance deep learning applications. In aiming to live up to its name, oneDNN 1.4 has more performance optimizations.

Less than one week since the release of Linux 5.7-rc1, Intel's large open-source graphics team has already submitted their first pull request to DRM-Next of changes for Linux 5.8.

Besides the long-running FSGSBASE patch series that has the ability to help the performance for CPUs going back years, another engineer on Intel's open-source team has been working on a separate but enticing patch in the name of performance.

Facebook and Intel have been working on being able to enable Xeon Scalable Open Compute Project systems with an open-source FSP.

For years there have been patches floating around for helping the performance of context switching sensitive workloads going back to "Ivy Bridge" CPUs but without ever crossing the finish line to get this "FSGSBASE" support merged. But now in 2020 it's once again being attempted.

One of the areas of Intel's Linux support that has been less than ideal is their handling of the Dynamic Platform and Thermal Framework (DPTF) for today's ultrabook. Intel has provided some support with a focus on Google's Chromium OS but it's less than complete and notably missing is support for the more advanced "adaptive policy", but that soon could change.

The Intel Graphics Compiler (IGC) and now in turn the Intel Compute Runtime have updated their compiler stack against the newly released LLVM Clang 10.0.

Intel's open-source teams have been issuing a slew of new packages in recent days.

Intel's open-source multimedia crew has released their Media Driver Q1'2020 build for Linux users. This Intel Media driver is what provides Video Acceleration API (VA-API) capabilities for Intel GPU-based video encode/decode for Broadwell through next-gen Tiger Lake.

While Intel's open-source Linux hardware support is extremely good even in time for launch day of not only for their server / data center products but also desktop and mobile platforms, occasionally there are exceptions. One of the biggest exceptions over the past decade has been the Bay Trail support sometimes taking years to see fixes or finishing up areas of the support. The latest example of this is some Intel Bay Trail and Cherry Trail tablets finally seeing working/reliable touchscreen support on Linux 5.7.

On top of all the other changes in Linux 5.7 so far, a secondary set of power management updates were sent in today for this next version of the kernel and includes now using the Schedutil governor by default for Intel P-State and Arm big.LITTLE systems.

Intel on Thursday released version 1.3 of their Deep Neural Network Library (DNNL) formerly known as MKL-DNN in offering a open-source performance library for deep learning applications.

Andy Shevchenko submitted on Tuesday the x86 platform driver updates targeting the Linux 5.7 kernel merge window.

Days after AMD announced their full Ryzen 4000 series mobile CPU line-up, Intel has now introduced their 10th Gen Core H-series processors.