Intel News Archives

Igalia's Jose Maria Casanova Crespo sent out a set of patches today for fixes that allow for the enabling of the VK_KHR_16bit_storage extension within Intel's ANV Vulkan driver.

Intel's next-generation Cannonlake processors with "Gen 10" graphics will be considered good to go with the next kernel cycle, Linux 4.17. The alpha/preliminary hardware support flag is being removed for these CPUs expected later this year.

For Mesa 18.0 is the initial Intel shader cache support for archiving compiled GLSL shaders on-disk to speed up the load times of subsequent game loads and other benefits. For the Mesa 18.0 release the functionality isn't enabled by default but it will be for Mesa 18.1.

While we're still waiting on an AMD-powered Chromebook as well as for Cannonlake to materialize, it appears Google is prepping support for a Geminilake Chromebook as well.

A few days back I reported on Intel Icelake patches for the i965 Mesa driver in bringing up the OpenGL support now that several kernel patch series have been published for enabling these "Gen 11" graphics within the Direct Rendering Manager driver. This Icelake support has been quick to materialize even with Cannonlake hardware not yet being available.

Now it's clear why Intel hasn't been working on the Beignet code-base in months as they have been quietly working on a new and better OpenCL stack and run-time! On open-source Intel OpenCL you can now have OpenCL 2.1 while OpenCL 2.2 support is on the way.

Open-source Intel driver developer Francisco Jerez has sent out a set of 15 patches implementing a new version of the EXT_shader_framebuffer_fetch OpenGL extension.

Now that the Linux 4.16 merge window ended this past weekend, Intel has submitted their first pull request to DRM-Next of material they want to get in for Linux 4.17.

Intel's Open-Source Technology Center has announced their 2017Q4 graphics stack recipe, which comes down to all of the system components they currently recommend for making a great Intel Linux system.

One month ago Intel's Open-Source Technology Center began posting the initial Linux driver enablement for Icelake "Gen 11" graphics, the generation succeeding this year's Cannonlake "Gen 10" hardware. That initial work focused on the DRM kernel driver while now they have posted the first Mesa patches.

Many of you have expressed interest in Intel's virtual GPU pass-through support "GVT" and with Linux 4.16 the kernel-side bits have come together for local vGPU display support.

It seems like every few years or so comes a patch series proposing to allow the Intel DRM driver to limit its platform support in the name of saving a few bytes from the kernel build. This week the latest "selectable platform support" patches are out there.

Intel today lifted the lid on the Xeon D-2100 series, what used to be known as Skylake-D.

Intel Coffee Lake CPUs began shipping in October and while their UHD Graphics are effectively re-branded Kabylake graphics, it's taken until today to get mainline support for Coffee Lake OpenCL support on Linux with Beignet.

As noted when covering the news yesterday of Khronos launching the OpenGL 4.6 Adopters Program, the NVIDIA proprietary driver and Intel's open-source Linux driver are the first OpenGL drivers considered 4.6 compliant. But on the Intel Linux side, the OpenGL 4.6 work has yet to be all upstreamed into Mesa.

L2 Code and Data Prioritization (L2 CDP) is a feature of Intel's Resource Director Technology (RDT) that will now be supported with the Linux 4.16 kernel.

Earlier this month Intel open-source driver developers posted the initial graphics enablement for Icelake, the "Gen 11" graphics coming after the yet-to-be-launched "Gen 10" Cannonlake processors. The latest patches in this series have now been published for allowing initial Icelake display support.

When using Intel Skylake X / Xeon Scalable chips right now under Linux the ACPI CPUFreq driver is responsible for the CPU frequency scaling decisions. But with the upcoming Linux 4.16 kernel cycle, Intel's P-State driver will add support for Skylake X.

Besides Intel and Radeon OpenGL/Vulkan driver improvements squeezing into Mesa Git ahead of the imminent Mesa 18.0 code branching, the Intel-developed OpenSWR has landed its latest improvements.

An Intel open-source driver developer has posted preliminary patches taking Cgroups v2 to DRM driver management.

For the Kernel Page Table Isolation (KPTI) support currently within the Linux kernel for addressing the Meltdown CPU vulnerability it's currently limited to 64-bit on the x86 side, but for the unfortunate souls still running x86 32-bit operating systems, SUSE is working on such support.

With the Linux 4.17 kernel (not the upcoming 4.16 cycle) there is likely to be added initial HDCP support to Intel's Direct Rendering Manager driver. Ahead of that this High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection support continues getting improved upon.

Beyond the Retpoline support already found in the mainline Linux kernel, developers are working on Retpoline Underflow support that would be used for Intel Skylake and Kabylake CPUs. RETPOLINE_UNDERFLOW protects against falling back to a potentially poisoned indirect branch predictor when a return buffer underflows and this additional protection is needed for Intel Skylake/Kabylake processors. I ran a couple benchmarks.

A few days back I wrote about open-source Intel developers posting their initial GPU driver patches for Icelake "Gen 11" graphics. That first code drop was just the tip of the iceberg unlike code drops for previous generations where they published the whole stack at once. But now the developers have already moved on to publishing more of the code.

The xf86-video-intel DDX driver now has support for the first "Coffee Lake" processors.

In the wake of Meltdown and Spectre, Intel yesterday released new microcode binaries for Linux systems.

While Intel Cannonlake processors aren't out yet with their new "Gen 10" graphics hardware, Intel's Open-Source Technology Center has published their first graphics driver patches for Linux enablement of Icelake "Gen 11" hardware.

Back in November a Google developer proposed HDCP content protection support for the Intel Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) Linux driver that is based upon their code from Chrome OS / Chromium OS. It looks like that High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection support in the i915 DRM driver will come for Linux 4.17.

Kicking off CES 2018, Intel launched their new CPUs featuring integrated Radeon Vega M Graphics.

Support for Memory Protection Keys (a.k.a. PKU / PKEYs) was finished up this year in the Linux kernel, glibc, and related components. This memory protection feature premiered with Intel Xeon Scalable CPUs and is said to be coming to future desktop CPUs, but it doesn't look like that's happening for the Cannonlake or Icelake generations.

With yesterday having looked at the AMD/Radeon popular Linux/open-source achievements of the year, the tables have turned to now look at the Intel Linux/FLOSS activity.

LLVM's Clang compiler support for the Intel Icelake processors that succeed Cannonlake is getting into better shape ahead of the LLVM/Clang 6.0 feature freeze in January.

Intel Open-Source Technology Center developers have sent in their last planned set of feature changes for DRM-Next that in turn is targeting the Linux 4.16 kernel merge window.

While NVIDIA has been working on HDR display support for the X.Org Server environment via a new "DeepColor" extension, Intel developers have begun working on High Dynamic Range support for Wayland/Weston and the associated changes needed to Mesa.

Intel has sent in another round of feature updates of their i915 DRM driver to DRM-Next of new material slated for Linux 4.16.

Intel has announced the first FPGA product that makes use of High Bandwidth Memory 2 (HBM2) for extreme HPC performance.

Intel today has announced their new Pentium Silver and Celeron processor line-up powered by their Gemini Lake microarchitecture.

With just seven lines of new code, Intel's ANV Vulkan driver is a few percent faster in some Linux games.

Last week Intel submitted their first batch of i915 DRM driver changes to DRM-Next that in turn is slated for Linux 4.16. Today they sent in their second round of feature updates.

Back in early November Intel finally landed its shader cache support for allowing GLSL shaders to be cached on-disk similar to the RadeonSI shader caching that has been present since earlier in the year. But this functionality isn't yet enabled by default as it still needs more testing.

While kernel side there's been Memory Protection Keys support since Linux 4.9 and work has already landed in GCC and Clang, the glibc GNU C Library is finally adding support for MPK.

Kata Containers is the latest tech in the container space and is an effort hosted by the OpenStack Foundation in conjunction with many participating organizations. The underlying tech for Kata Containers originated from the Intel / Clear Linux Clear Containers project.

Last week I wrote about a Google engineer working on HDCP content protection support for Intel's Direct Rendering Manager driver on Linux that is also obviously open-source. Understandably, that raised concerns by free software purists not wanting to potentially lock-down their system in any manner to playback protected content on their systems.

While Linux 4.15-rc1 was just released this past weekend, Intel open-source graphics driver developers have already sent in their first pull request to DRM-Next of new feature material targeting Linux 4.16.

While Intel has been supporting VA-API for years, basically since X-Video/XvMC became irrelevant, as its primary video API for video acceleration, they are now rolling out a new media driver.

The last major item for GCC's libstdc++ standard library for C++17 support is supporting the technical specification around parallelism and Intel is hoping to land their implementation of it for both libstdc++ and libc++.

Igalia developers have published their latest version of the big patch-set implementing 16-bit support within Intel's Vulkan driver and supporting the necessary 16-bit storage SPIR-V changes.

Sure to ruffle some feathers, a Google/ChromeOS developer is looking for comments on the company's patches to add HDCP - High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection - to Intel's open-source Linux kernel graphics driver.

Intel UMIP support landed in Linux 4.15 as part of the x86 updates. User-Mode Instruction Prevention is for preventing certain instructions from being executed outside of ring level zero and will be supported by future Intel CPUs. Support for UMIP within the KVM virtualization space though will have to wait until Linux 4.16.

Intel's SA-00086 Detection Tool has Linux support and will confirm whether your system is vulnerable to the recently published Management Engine (ME) security issues.