Intel News Archives

For those still using Intel "Ivy Bridge" class processors with integrated graphics, Mesa 17.1 will take the hardware from OpenGL 3.3 to OpenGL 4.2.

While Intel's Beignet is a terrific project especially when it comes to being a leading open-source OpenCL implementation that works with OpenCL 2.0 on GPUs (something that can't be said for Radeon with its open-source OpenCL stack consistently lacking and Nouveau not really being usable either), the sad part of it is that Beignet is consistently slow in supporting new versions of LLVM.

Intel's open-source Linux graphics driver developers have begun publishing patches for initial hardware enablement of Cannonlake's "Gen 10" graphics and the Cannonpoint PCH.

An initiative taking place within the Intel open-source Linux driver camp is trying to effectively move libdrm_intel -- the Intel-specific code for the DRM library -- into the i965 Mesa driver itself.

Intel has queued changes for their GVT-g graphics driver stack for Linux 4.12, allowing some improvements around their newly-mainlined graphics virtualization tech support for running VMs with accelerated graphics capabilities.

With the upcoming Linux 4.11 kernel release there is better support for Intel Turbo Boost Max 3.0 after originally it didn't look like this feature would be available for Linux. Under Linux 4.11, my Core i7 6800K + MSI X99A WORKSTATION box is now working with "ITMT" enabled, so here are some quick benchmarks.

Intel has published a series of patches today adding FPGA device drivers to their Linux kernel for their selection of FPGA hardware.

Last week I wrote about Intel's Rafael Wysocki working on P-State improvements for Linux 4.12 and today he has published yet more clean-up and optimization patches for this Intel CPU frequency scaling driver alternative to ACPI CPUfreq.

For months there have been Intel developers working on 5-level paging to increase Linux's virtual/physical address space limitations and with Linux 4.12 it looks like that will be supported.

With Broadwell "Gen 8" graphics and newer, there is better engine reset support in case of problems or hangs. The Intel DRM driver is still being wired up to take advantage of this better support under Linux.

Tuning the P-State CPU frequency scaling driver for the Linux kernel feels like a never-ending process. While it's been around for years and continues to be refined, for some Intel CPUs on some workloads, the CPUFreq scaling driver leads to be better performance and even Intel's own Clear Linux distribution is using CPUFreq by default. With Linux 4.12, more intel_pstate revisions are taking place.

Intel's open-source "ANV" Vulkan Linux driver is prepping support for the experimental VK_KHX_multiview extension.

Intel had already sent in a batch of feature updates to DRM-Next targeting the Linux 4.12 kernel and yesterday an additional feature pull was submitted of work to premiere in this next kernel series.

Igalia's Samuel Iglesias Gonsálvez has updated his 28 patches for ARB_gpu_shader_fp64 support for Intel Ivy Bridge hardware that in turn allows these older Intel graphics to have OpenGL 4.0 support.

Support for pipeline statistics queries are now enabled within Mesa Git for the Intel ANV Vulkan driver.

Intel developers have done their "2016-Q4" quarterly update to XenGT for mediated graphics passthrough on Linux hosts for Intel graphics hardware. This is their last release on the old architecture now that the code began landing upstream in Linux 4.10.

Intel developers have published their latest version of patches that implement a Single Loop Power Controller (SLPC) as a replacement to host-based power management features.

Pipeline statistics queries is the latest Vulkan capability being added to the Intel "ANV" Mesa Vulkan driver.

The Clear Containers initiative within Intel's Clear Linux project from their Open-Source Technology Center is out today with a big update.

Intel GPU Tools 1.18 has been released as the newest version of this open-source package for assisting developers in debugging and analyzing the Intel Linux graphics driver stack.

A bug-fix release was pushed out this morning for Intel's Beignet open-source GPU-based OpenCL implementation.

Intel's Mesa driver is exposing additional performance counters now for helping game/application debuggers better profile the performance of their software on Intel HD/Iris Graphics hardware.

Intel is off to the races in preparing their new feature material work they plan to have introduced for the Linux 4.12 kernel, even though Linux 4.11-rc1 was just introduced on Monday and thus still nearly two months until the 4.12 merge window.

Earlier today I posted some Linux game CPU scaling benchmarks using a Core i7 6800K Broadwell-E For showing how current Linux games make use of (or not) multiple CPU cores, which originated from discussions by Linux gamers following the AMD Ryzen CPU launch with how many cores are really needed. While going through the process of running those Linux game CPU scaling benchmarks, I also ran some other workloads for those curious.

Intel's Daniel Vetter has updated their drm-intel-testing tree with early code to begin testing that should end up being queued for the Linux 4.12 kernel.

Intel's "SWR" software rasterizer living within Mesa now has support for OpenGL geometry shaders.

Intel's set to enable atomic mode-setting by default with code slated to land for the Linux 4.12 kernel.

Besides recent Intel graphics hardware making use of firmware binary blobs now for the GuC/HuC functionality, Intel audio hardware continues in making use of firmware binary-only blobs for audio support.

Intel's ANV Vulkan driver in Mesa Git has picked up support for two more extensions of this week's big Vulkan update.

Now that Vulkan's external memory patches are now public with today's Vulkan 1.0.42 big update, the Intel ANV open-source Vulkan driver is getting ready to roll out their support for their new extensions.

Better support for Intel Turbo Boost Max 3.0 are among the changes to find with the platform-drivers-x86 updates for the Linux 4.11 kernel.

Intel's "ANV" Vulkan Linux driver has landed the support for enabling MSAA compression.

There was some work years ago for supporting Intel's own INTEL_performance_query OpenGL extension it was dropped in January for a rework and now is back in Mesa 17.1-devel.

For those stuck with older Intel Sandy Bridge hardware, the integrated graphics with Mesa Git should be capable of supporting WebGL 2.0.

Intel Linux developers have partially reverted Mesa work done years ago to drop the default OpenGL behavior with the older i915 driver from exposing OpenGL 2.0+ support to now only having OpenGL 1.4 out-of-the-box.

If you are using Intel Broadwell graphics with Mesa's ANV Vulkan driver, the performance should be better for Dota 2 and potentially other workloads.

It looks like Feral Interactive might be getting closer to releasing their first Linux game port using Vulkan.

In yesterday's Core i3 2100 "Sandy Bridge" vs. Core i3 7100 "Kabylake" comparison I included all of the power consumption and performance-per-Watt results. If you are looking for additional power numbers from other Kabylake CPUs, here is some additional data.

The patch landed in Intel's drm-intel-next-queued branch this week for enabling atomic support by default on the hardware platforms where it's fully supported.

Intel's open-source developers maintaining GVT-g for Linux graphics virtualization support for their hardware are working on migrating their development workflow from this code that's been out-of-tree since its inception to now being mainline.

Intel's open-source Mesa DRI driver has passed The Khronos Group's process for certifying it as a conformant OpenGL 4.5 implementation. This now rounds out the Intel open-source Linux stack with OpenGL 4.5, OpenGL ES 3.2, and Vulkan 1.0 certification.

In our Intel Kabylake benchmarks we have shown how Intel's P-State CPU frequency scaling driver used by most Linux distributions can lead to much lower performance with their latest-generation processors compared to the ACPI CPUFreq scaling driver. Fortunately, action is taking place for improving the P-State performance with Kabylake.

Yesterday I published Linux benchmarks of the Celeron G3930, Intel's lowest-end Celeron CPU at the moment in the Kabylake family. This CPU goes for about $40 USD and you get a dual-core 2.9GHz processor with HD Graphics 610 (GT1). I had published a few OpenGL benchmarks in that review while for this article are some OpenCL compute numbers.

Back in December was talk of dropping the (unofficial) Intel "ILO" Gallium3D driver while now it's looking like that may move forward.

Intel's forthcoming Geminilake hardware has a native HDMI 2.0 controller and as such the open-source Intel Linux driver developers are working on proper HDMI 2.0 support within their kernel driver.

Mesa's "ANV" Intel Vulkan driver can now be built for Android.

For those curious how Intel's flagship Core i7 7700K "Kabylake" processor is performing under Linux, my sample arrived yesterday and I've begun putting the CPU through its paces.

Daniel Vetter, the i915 DRM kernel maintainer from Intel's Open-Source Technology Center, has announced their final set of feature changes to be queued in DRM-Next for the Linux 4.11 kernel.

Note to self: don't drop CPUs on the ground. But even with a bent Core i5 "Kabylake" processor, it still managed to work.

There's some early feature development work that's landed in Mesa Git this Friday as the initial feature development towards Mesa 17.1.