Intel News Archives

Formerly known as Intel GPU Tools, the scope of "IGT" has been expanding now for providing tools and functionality testing not only around the Intel DRM/KMS driver but also the other mainline Linux display drivers.

On Windows there is no shortage of GUI configuration utilities for tweaking Intel CPUs around overclocking and under-volting, but less so on Linux with no official utility/library. But there is now an unofficial GUI project for manipulating Intel CPU voltages from the Linux desktop.

Intel has been developing a new Media Driver for the Video Acceleration API (VA-API) geared for Icelake "Gen 11" graphics hardware and future generations. For Icelake video encode there is new functionality that needs to be exposed in the kernel to user-space for use by the Intel media-driver and it looks like that user-space interface will be christened by the upcoming Linux 5.1 kernel.

For those running Ivybridge/Haswell era Intel graphics and older, better support for ETC2 texture compression is on the way.

A patch series queued into Linux's driver core infrastructure ahead of the 5.1 kernel cycle is set to enhance the boot performance particularly for larger NUMA servers/systems. This latest round of kernel work was another contribution to the core kernel code thanks to Intel.

Yet another open-source project out of Intel is SVT-AV1, which is a new AV1 video encoder implementation for Windows and Linux Systems.

Intel's open-source Linux graphics driver team has sent out another feature batch of changes for queuing in DRM-Next ahead of the upcoming Linux 5.1 kernel cycle.

As some other exciting Linux graphics news today alongside NVIDIA rolling out G-SYNC Compatible support for Linux, the Intel Mesa OpenGL driver could soon finally achieve OpenGL 4.6 compliance with the mainline code.

With the upcoming Linux 5.1 cycle we'll likely see Intel "Fastboot" enabled by default at least for Skylake hardware and newer, but Cherry Trail and Valleyview might also get this special treatment.

Among the recent projects by Intel's open-source graphics driver crew for Linux has been supporting FP16 visuals for handling wide color gamut with a focus on Android support in particular. A big set of Mesa patches for this effort have now been posted.

As is standard practice for the DRM-Next development workflow, the Intel open-source graphics driver developers have already been staging their new feature work ahead of the Linux 5.1 kernel cycle, as have other parties involved in DRM/KMS drivers and elsewhere in the kernel. Today another big feature update was submitted to DRM-Next of new material that will come with Linux 5.1 this spring.

As a follow-up to the story from earlier this month about Intel wanting to add SYCL programming support to LLVM/Clang, the company's initial open-source compiler is now public.

The Intel WiFi Linux driver "IWLWIFI" will see support for various new WiFi adapters with the upcoming Linux 5.1 kernel cycle.

Going back seven years has been the Intel Linux graphics driver's "Fastboot" support for allowing a more polished initial boot experience by allowing unnecessary mode sets to be avoided by the hardware. There have been multiple attempts over the years to enable this cleaner boot experience by default, but each time it ended up being rejected or later reverted due to running into issues with problematic hardware. This year looks like we might finally see it enabled by default for Skylake HD/Iris Graphics and newer.

Aside from some out-of-tree experiments last year by one of Valve's developers on a RADV Vulkan HUD of similar nature to the popular Gallium HUD option, it turns out an Intel developer has recently been working on a Vulkan overlay layer to provide "Gallium HUD" inspired information.

Ahead of the Mesa 19.0 feature freeze coming up at month's end for this next quarterly feature release, Intel's open-source developers today merged support for the VK_EXT_transform_feedback extension that is important for Linux gamers with DXVK for mapping Direct3D 11 atop Vulkan and similar graphics API translation libraries.

The new "Timer Events Oriented" (TEO) governor in development over recent months by Intel developer Rafael Wysocki is poised to land with the Linux 5.1 kernel cycle.

The Intel "ANV" open-source Vulkan driver for Linux systems has picked up two more extensions ahead of the Mesa 19.0 feature freeze that is coming up before month's end.

Intel's Linux graphics driver stack has never offered its own vendor-specific driver control panel GUI like is common among all major graphics vendors on Windows, but instead they've opted for the command-line experience and making use of common interfaces with what's offered by the different desktop environments for resolution handling, multi-monitor setup, etc. But moving forward they may end up bringing a new graphics driver control panel to Linux.

While the Linux 5.0 kernel won't even debut as stable until around the end of February, as is standard practice, it's open season for new feature improvements of the changes developers want to end up queuing into the "-next" branches ahead of the Linux 5.1 cycle. The Intel open-source driver developers on Monday sent in their initial batch of graphics driver changes for this next kernel cycle.

One of the lesser known compiler backends/targets by the LLVM compiler is Nios II, which is for the 32-bit embedded FPGA processor designs.

SYCL, the single-source programming model developed by the Khronos Group and based upon standard C++, might soon be supported by the LLVM Clang compiler thanks to Intel.

With Mesa 19.0 entering its feature freeze in three weeks, the race is on for finishing up OpenGL/Vulkan driver changes to make it in this next quarterly installment of these 3D open-source Linux graphics drivers.

Intel's CES 2019 press conference is now wrapping up with some interesting announcements and other new information to relay, some of which was also covered at last month's Intel Architecture Day event in California but under NDA until now.

Besides the Intel engine-reset graphics driver work, some other interesting activity to report on this weekend in the Intel open-source Linux graphics driver space is the FP16 visual and frame-buffer configuration support that recently debuted.

In early 2017 was when there was initial work underway for the Intel Linux graphics driver on a new engine reset capability for Broadwell "Gen 8" hardware and newer. This capability allows for per-engine resets rather than resorting to a full GPU reset in the case of hangs. The code at the time didn't end up being merged to the Linux kernel but there is now a revised implementation.

Linux power management expert Rafael Wysocki, who is also the maintainer of the ACPI/PM subsystems, has been working on the "TEO" the past few months as the Timer Events Oriented governor for CPUIdle framework.

The IOMMU changes were sent in today for the Linux 4.21 kernel merge window. There are some AMD IOMMU improvements, new Qualcomm SMMUv2 IOMMU hardware support, NUMA-aware allocations in the IOMMU DMA code for some very slight performance benefits, and most notably is likely the scalable mode support within the Intel VT-d driver.

Local Display Direct Flip is a feature being worked on by the Intel developers working on the GVT-g graphics virtualization technology for Linux for more efficient display handling.

With less than one week until the new year, here is a look back at the most popular Intel Linux/open-source news of 2018, among all of our other end-of-year articles.

The in-development Iris Gallium3D driver that is being developed as Intel's next-gen, open-source OpenGL Linux graphics driver started out with supporting Skylake graphics and newer. But now with the latest Iris driver code, the hardware support has been extended to cover Broadwell graphics.

The Intel DRM "Fastboot" option is what allows skipping a mode-set upon the device initalization during the Linux boot process to allow for a slick and smooth Linux desktop boot experience free of any excess flickers. While Intel Fastboot has been an option for years, it isn't yet the default behavior for this graphics driver.

Patches for the board support for the Chameleon96 Intel FPGA board have been published and could soon be found in the mainline Linux kernel.

Intel's growing graphics team recently hosted a "Ask You Anything" on Reddit as they solicit more feedback and ideas from the community about their discrete graphics plans. From that, interest in their Linux graphics driver/software stack came in second for popularity.

Besides seeing Icelake demos at the Intel Architecture Day that were running on Ubuntu, with closely tracking the Linux kernel's development most of the new features presented for Sunny Cove and Gen11 graphics have already been merged or at least available in patch form for some months within the Linux ecosystem. Here's a look at the features talked about yesterday and their state on Linux.

Intel's Architecture Day on Tuesday was delightfully filled with an overwhelming amount of valuable hardware information, but Intel's software efforts were also briefly touched on too. In fact, Raja Koduri reinforced how software is a big part of Intel technology and goes in-hand with their security, interconnect, memory, architecture, and process pillars and that's where their new oneAPI initiative will fit in. But what learning afterwards was most exciting on the software front.

Intel's 2018 Architecture Day was primarily focused on the company's hardware architecture road-map, but one of the software (pre)announcements was their oneAPI software stack.

At Intel's architecture day, the company finally detailed their "Gen 11" graphics that we've been seeing open-source Linux graphics driver patches for many months (Intel OTC posted their initial open-source display driver code in early January and has continued the enablement work since) albeit elusive in substantive user details and hardware until Icelake. But today at least we can share more about the significant improvements with Gen11 graphics.

With aiming to improve the deep learning development experience, Intel's Open-Source Technology Center has announced the Deep Learning Reference Stack.

Intel's Mesa OpenGL driver has been supporting KHR_debug as required by OpenGL 4.3+, but without making full use of the extension. Now though to help with the shader debugging process, it will be exposing more information via this OpenGL debugging extension.

While Coffeelake processors have been available for a year now, Intel initially didn't intend to support their open-source Graphics Virtualization Technology (GVT) with these chips but now are in the process of bringing up such support.

While we are all super anxious to learn more about the Intel discrete graphics card offerings planned for their initial debut in 2020, in representing the beauty of open-source, there was an open-source Linux display driver update on Thursday for their "original" discrete card: the Intel740.

With the time for new Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) driver feature material to enter DRM-Next for the Linux 4.21 kernel cycle quickly coming to a close, the Intel Open-Source Technology Center crew has sent in a final feature pull of material for this next kernel development cycle.

Yesterday saw the release of Vulkan 1.1.95 that introduced the new VK_KHR_shader_float18_int8 extension for supporting 16-bit floating-point types and 8-bit integer types within shader code for arithmetic operations, compared to earlier extensions limiting these data types to load/store operations. NVIDIA released a same-day driver update for the new 1.1.95 extensions while now Intel's "ANV" open-source Vulkan code is the second Linux driver seeing this support (or first if just looking at the open-source drivers).

It should come as virtually no surprise to any regular Phoronix reader given the significant investment Intel makes to Linux via their Open-Source Technology Center with working on Mesa for their Vulkan/OpenGL drivers and related components, but their discrete GPU undertaking will support Linux gaming alongside Windows.

Last month ODROID announced an Intel-powered single board computer after their experimenting with a Ryzen SBC hadn't panned out for this company known for their high-performance ARM SBCs. The ODROID-H2 has begun shipping as this $111 USD Intel x86_64 quad-core board while for your viewing pleasure today are some initial performance benchmarks of this board.

At the end of last year Intel announced the Stratix 10 FPGA with HBM2 memory for HPC workloads. With the Linux 4.21 kernel cycle, the support for this hardware will be further improved upon for FPGA programming with the mainline kernel.

Fresh out of the US holiday weekend, the Intel Iris Gallium3D driver that is forming as the company's future OpenGL Linux driver with better performance potential and modern design, saw a number of new code commits.

Following their first DRM-Next feature pull request submitted at the start of November, Intel's Open-Source Technology Center developers have mailed out their second batch of feature changes ahead of the Linux 4.21 kernel cycle.

While the Intel Open-Source Technology Center invests heavily into the GNU/Linux toolchain in ensuring their future processors will have their full feature set and performance potential exploited, when it comes to the GNU C Library "glibc" in particular it can be quite a while before Linux distributions pull in a new release that contains various Intel performance optimizations. As a result, Intel Linux veteran toolchain developer H.J. Lu has laid out a new proposal.