Intel News Archives

Intel's Turbo Boost Max Technology 3.0 (ITMT) patches for the Linux kernel have been pushed to their eighth revision as it prepares for mainline integration.

Two weeks back Intel submitted their first set of feature changes for Linux 4.10 to DRM-Next so that they can be staged for this next major kernel cycle. Coming in now is a second set of feature additions and other changes/improvements.

During this year's systemd conference there was talk of A New Wireless Daemon Is In Development To Potentially Replace wpa_supplicant. At that time the code wasn't yet public to this new open-source WiFi daemon developed by Intel, but since then the code has now opened up.

Coming out this morning from the Intel Open-Source Technology Center is their initial hardware enablement code for the future "Geminilake" hardware with their Linux graphics driver stack.

What a wonderful birthday surprise, waking up to see that Intel's open-source Beignet project for OpenCL support on Intel graphics hardware has landed a bunch of OpenCL 2.0 enablement work.

If you are still using old Intel Ironlake-era hardware and have been waiting for video playback improvements via VA-API, you might as well stop waiting.

Intel's open-source team has announced the release of Beignet 1.2.1 as the newest version of their OpenCL GPU hardware implementation for Linux.

A trivial priority scheduler is being worked on for Intel's i915 Direct Rendering Manager driver for the Linux kernel.

With our past Intel Vulkan benchmarks the Vulkan driver was slower than the mature OpenGL driver but this is about to change with an important patch-set published today: a big performance boost is in store.

Well known Intel open-source developer Ian Romanick has published a massive set of 59 patches for enabling GL_ARB_gpu_shader_int64 within core Mesa and their i965 DRI driver.

Rafael Wysocki of Intel has been hacking an interesting improvement into the Intel P-State CPU frequency scaling driver for the Linux kernel.

This weekend I pulled out a Core i5 powered HP EliteBook that served as Intel's Software Development Vehicle for Sandy Bridge. I hadn't touched this laptop in a long time but decided to see how the current Linux + Mesa graphics stack on Ubuntu 16.10 compares to the older Linux distributions when Sandy Bridge hardware was more relevant.

Intel has updated its currently out-of-tree Turbo Boost Max Technology 3.0 patches for compatibility against the Linux 4.9-rc1 kernel plus made other improvements to the code.

With having delivered a number of RADV Radeon Vulkan benchmarks recently, time to turn the tables to see how the Intel Vulkan driver stack is comparing to its i965 classic Mesa DRI driver. Dota 2 benchmarks up today under Ubuntu 16.10 while using Mesa 12.10-dev and Linux 4.9.

Intel's "ANV" Mesa Vulkan Linux driver now has basic support for HiZ, an important performance feature.

The Intel Integrated Sensor Hub (ISH) is supported in the Linux 4.9 kernel code for benefiting Cherrytrail mobile/convertible/ultrabook hardware and newer.

With the recent Beignet 1.2 release some Phoronix readers expressed disappointment that this Intel OpenCL implementation for Iris/HD Graphics hadn't supported the recently-released LLVM 3.9. Well, now it does.

Intel Open-Source Technology Center developer Jason Ekstrand presented earlier today at XDC2016 with a presentation entitled "The Anatomy of a Vulkan Driver" where he covers how he and fellow Intel developers brought up the first open-source Vulkan driver and had it ready for launch-day when Khronos formally unveiled the specification earlier this year.

Intel Open-Source Technology Center developer Kevin Rogovin just finished presenting at this year's XDC2016 conference in Helsinki. Rogovin presented on the promising 01.org project FastUIDraw.

For Linux 4.9 we already saw some Intel DRM changes in early August, a second batch of feature changes in late August for DRM-Next, and out this morning is another batch of i915 DRM driver changes being queued for the upcoming Linux 4.9 kernel merge window.

The Intel Mesa OpenGL driver now exposes the ARB_ES3_2_compatibility extension.

Intel's Precise Touch and Stylus (IPTS) technology offers GPU-accelerated multi-touch/stylus handling using OpenCL. While there have been kernel patches for a few months floating around, this support has yet to be merged into the mainline Linux kernel.

Intel China developers quietly announced the release of their open-source Beignet 1.2 OpenCL implementation at the end of August for HD/Iris Graphics hardware. Beignet 1.2 continues supporting OpenCL 1.x while sadly their experimental OpenCL 2.0 branch hasn't been touched now in three months.

The Single Loop Power Controller (SLPC) was an interesting addition to Skylake hardware but even with Skylake processors being out more than one year and the SLPC patches for the Intel DRM Linux driver having been out for a number of months, this GuC-based SLPC support has yet to be merged. The latest version of the patches was just published.

Intel's open-source developers have been working on a GPU-based high-performance 2D renderer that can be nine times faster than Cairo's CPU-based renderer and still multiple times faster than Qt (even with OpenGL), Cairo with OpenGL, or even Google's Skia with OpenGL rendering. The focus of this new project, FastUIDraw, is ultimately for speeding up the rendering of web content and being able to accelerate all of the HTML5 canvas operations.

Intel is making public more details today about their forthcoming 7th Generation Intel Core CPUs, a.k.a. Kaby Lake.

As I wrote about a few days ago, I'm in the process of my first Broadwell-EP Linux build and for it I had purchased the Xeon E5-2609 v4, a CPU that costs just $300 USD and has eight physical cores while a combined TDP of just 85 Watts, but it lacks Turbo Boost and clocks up to just 1.7GHz. But how does it perform?

There was another long-time Intel open-source Linux graphics driver developer that left the company earlier this summer and is now working at Google on the Chrome/Chromium OS graphics stack.

Unfortunately Intel Corp hadn't sent over any Broadwell-EP hardware earlier this year when launching these new Xeon E5-2600 V5 server processors nor when it came to the high-end consumer Broadwell-E processors. However, I ended up buying a Xeon E5-2609 v4 Broadwell-EP this week for a new system and will be running a variety of upcoming tests.

Earlier this month Intel submitted their first batch of i915 DRM driver updates to DRM-Next that in turn is now targeting the Linux 4.9 kernel. A second batch of new feature material was submitted today.

The Aubinator tool has been added to the Mesa tree for helping Intel graphics driver developers debug problems.

Earlier this month Intel released an updated version of their Linux/Windows OpenCL SDK that's binary-only and subject to commercial terms.

While Intel Skylake hardware has been available for one year now, various issues persist for Linux desktop users wishing to make use of Skylake graphics on Intel's open-source Linux driver.

Earlier this year I heard from an Intel PR representative they had no plans for a Turbo Boost Max 3.0 Linux driver and immediately heard after that from a developer it was bollocks from the media department as usual. Today patches have emerged for supporting Turbo Boost Max 3.0 in the Linux kernel.

Last month when I was trying Intel's open-source Vulkan driver with Dota 2 and The Talos Principle the Linux gaming experience didn't go well, it didn't even really work even when experimenting with Mesa Git and toggling items like the Steam Overlay. With my fresh Git testing today, it went a bit better.

Intel's Beignet project for providing open-source OpenCL support for Intel HD/Iris Graphics hardware on Linux now has support for upcoming Kaby Lake processors.

Intel Open-Source Technology Center developers are back to working on SVM support for the Intel i915 DRM driver.

It has been less than one week since the Linux 4.8-rc1 release and already Intel OTC developers have sent in their first batch of updates to DRM-Next for in turn landing with Linux 4.9.

Collabora's Timothy Arceri, one of the firm's open-source graphics driver developers, has written a blog post about recent work they've done to the open-source Intel Mesa driver stack.

While it has been three years since the last stable xf86-video-intel DDX driver release, almost two years since the last development release, and distributions/users beginning to get fed up by this DDX driver release management, Intel remains mum on the manner.

Already sent in less than half-way into the two week merge window for Linux 4.8 were all of the platform-drivers-x86 updates for enhancing Intel laptop support under Linux. This time around there's the new intel-vbtn driver.

With an Intel Broadwell ultrabook I decided to try out the latest Mesa 12.1-dev Git state with the Intel Vulkan driver to see if Dota 2 and Talos Principle are running happy yet on this open-source driver stack.

Intel has issued their quarterly update to XenGT, their open-source solution to mediated graphics passthrough support with full GPU virtualization on their hardware when making use of Xen virtualization.

It looks like Intel's Mesa open-source Linux graphics driver may be done with OpenGL 4.4 and 4.5, assuming you are using Broadwell hardware or newer.

Iago Toral Quiroga of Igalia has published a set of 95 patches that make the i965 Mesa DRI driver in a state for exposing OpenGL 4.0 for Haswell hardware by wiring in the ARB_gpu_shader_fp64 extension.

Intel's open-source Mesa driver is now in compliance with another OpenGL ES 3.2 extension.

Intel developer Kan Liang has published a set of 30 patches amount to more than two thousand lines of new kernel for implementing what he calls the Kernel NET Policy.

Intel's open-source developers working on their Linux DRM graphics driver have been working on adding support for HuC, a new firmware component to be used by Broxton and newer graphics hardware.

The developers at Igalia continue working on the necessary OpenGL functionality to be able to advertise OpenGL 4.x support in Mesa for Ivy Bridge and Haswell "Gen 7" graphics.

After finishing up this weekend's AMDGPU R9 Fury + RX 480 benchmarks of DRM-Next for material that will land with Linux 4.8 along with RX 480 overclocking support, tables turned to run some fresh benchmarks of the Intel DRM-Next code that will premiere in Linux 4.8.