Intel News Archives

Just weeks after their first round of DRM updates for Linux 4.8 were submitted, the Intel crew has their second -- of a possible three -- feature updates readied for the Linux 4.8 kernel via DRM-Next.

With the imminent Mesa 12.0 release there is now OpenGL 4.3 compliance for Intel Broadwell graphics hardware and newer, rather than OpenGL 3.3 as was the upper limit in the Intel Mesa driver to this point. Now having OpenGL 4.x support with this open-source Intel driver, I decided to see how various OpenGL 4.x games are running with the Intel driver when using a Skylake CPU sporting HD Graphics 530.

With the recent report that Intel's Vulkan Linux driver should now work with Dota 2, I was curious to test out the game -- and Talos Principle -- with the latest Mesa Git code that houses this open-source "Anvil" Vulkan driver.

It could really be any day now that the Intel i965 Mesa DRI driver exposes OpenGL 4.5 support!

It appears that Intel's Vulkan open-source Linux driver is finally in good enough shape for being able to handle Valve's Dota 2 game.

Just found a nugget of news from an Intel representative in case you have been eyeing an Intel Broadwell-E processor: there are no driver plans for Linux for the new Turbo Boost Max 3.0 functionality.

Timothy Arceri of Collabora published his second version of patches on Friday for implementing ARB_enhanced_layouts packing support for Mesa's Intel i965 driver.

Intel's first batch of i915 DRM kernel graphics driver changes for targeting the future Linux 4.8 kernel cycle has now been queued into DRM-Next.

As was expected for launching at Computex, the Broadwell-E processors are now out in the wild. The Broadwell-E launch also includes Intel's first ten-core desktop processor, but it will cost you a pretty penny.

A few days ago code landed in VA-API for VP9 hardware encoding support and was wired into the Intel Video Acceleration driver. Now more details are known.

One of the last pull requests to cover for the Linux 4.7 merge window is Darren Hart's platform-drivers-x86 updates.

The Intel China team maintaining Beignet, the open-source OpenCL driver implementation for modern Intel graphics on Linux, has landed the code for supporting this implementation on Android.

Intel has been rapidly advancing their OpenGL 4.x support and OpenGL 4.5 is even in sight now.

It was just last week that Intel crossed OpenGL 4.2 in Mesa and earlier today the needed Intel OpenGL 4.3 patches landed while tonight there are patches pending for the OpenGL 4.4 changes for Intel's open-source Linux graphics driver.

A few days ago when delivering benchmarks of the new CPUFreq "Schedutil" governor in Linux 4.7 the P-State comparison results on this Git kernel looked particularly terrible. I've since done some P-State tests on the same system using the Linux 4.5 and 4.6 kernels that further point towards a regression having taken place.

For Broadwell hardware and newer, this week marked the milestone of the Intel Mesa driver exposing OpenGL 4.2 support. However, they are only one extension away from OpenGL 4.3 compliance for the newer Intel graphics hardware and a new version of that patch-set was just posted.

Following all of the Intel 3D graphics tests this week for DRM-Next code for Linux 4.7, Mesa 11.3-devel, and more, there's been a few readers requesting a fresh xf86-video-intel vs. xf86-video-modesetting comparison.

There is finally a public TODO list for Intel's Vulkan Linux driver living within Mesa.

While "Light Ridge" was the first copper Thunderbolt controller and released back in 2010, only now in 2016 is the first-generation controller seeing mainline Linux support.

OpenGL tests I published yesterday show that Intel Broadwell graphics are much faster with Mesa 11.3 -- and that's on top of the newly-minted OpenGL 4.2 support -- but the same can't be said for Haswell.

With today marking the milestone of Intel's Mesa driver jumping ahead to OpenGL 4.2 compliance after just yesterday hitting OpenGL 4.0, I decided to try out the Mesa Git code of the i965 driver on an Ubuntu 16.04 system.

It was just yesterday that Intel's Mesa driver crossed the OpenGL 4.0 threshold while today it's jumped ahead to OpenGL 4.2.

Intel's Mesa driver is now at OpenGL 4.0 compliance with the landing of ARB_gpu_shader_fp64.

While the Intel i965 Mesa driver is currently at OpenGL 3.3 while waiting for the FP64 support to land for hitting OpenGL 4.2, various other OpenGL 4.3/4.4/4.5 extensions continue to move along for this open-source graphics driver.

Intel's Tiago Vignatti has written a blog post about sharing CPU and GPU buffers on Linux using a new API introduced by DMA_BUF with the Linux 4.6 kernel.

If you are fortunate enough to get your hands on one of Intel's Xeon Phi co-processors based on their Many Integrated Core (MIC) architecture, it can run fairly well under Linux.

When working on the story this week about Intel Is Preparing A Major Restructuring Of Their Graphics Driver, I found out another bit of information worth relaying: a longtime contributor to the Intel Linux graphics driver stack has left the company to focus on a new venture.

The latest patches from Igalia have been published for finishing up the ARB_gpu_shader_fp64 implementation within Intel's Mesa driver, which would bring it into supporting OpenGL 4.2 (thanks to the other extensions already being completed) for the latest generations of Intel hardware.

Intel's Daniel Vetter has put out a concise overview of their DRM graphics driver changes queued up for the Linux 4.7 kernel.

Patches have emerged for being able to take advantage of Intel's low-power/high-performance H.264 encoder on Linux via VA-API.

While Intel already landed a big round of code into DRM-Next as Linux 4.7 material, the train has not stopped and more fresh code is now in testing via the intel-drm-testing branch for integration into a future kernel release.

Following the recent Iris Graphics of Xubuntu 16.04 vs. Clear Linux vs. Fedora 23 I had some extra time so I decided to fire up Beignet on Ubuntu 16.04 for this Haswell ultrabook.

Broxton was to be Intel's 2016 Atom SoC platform for phones and tablets. Broxton was to be using 14nm Goldmont CPU cores and Skylake graphics, but now it's no more.

While the Intel Mesa driver remains at OpenGL 3.3 due to missing FP64 support, that code continues to be worked on by Igalia and Intel's OTC developers. Patches for a related extension, ARB_vertex_attrib_64bit, have also now been published that will clear Intel's Mesa driver requirements for OpenGL 4.1.

Intel is finally offering up a kernel driver it's seeking to mainline for providing support for Secure Guard Extensions (SGX).

Intel quietly announced last week the publishing of the complete source code around the firmware / real-time operating system for the Arduino 101 and Genuino 101 boards.

My NICs appear to enjoy sleeping in with the mornings being particularly brutal on the network hardware.

Daniel Vetter of Intel OTC sent in another round of feature updates for DRM-Next to in turn premiere with Linux 4.7.

One of the new set of patches published this week for the Intel DRM kernel graphics driver is for engine reset and recovery support for Broadwell "Gen8" graphics hardware and newer under Linux.

Daniel Vetter of Intel OTC has sent out an announcement about another round of i915 DRM kernel driver code that's ready for testing by developers and the community.

Intel developers are planning to merge their branched version of Mesa with their Vulkan graphics driver into mainline Mesa in just a matter of days.

Here are some of my earliest Linux 4.6 kernel benchmarks out there from a few different subsystems with the tests happening from a Xeon E5 Haswell system with AMD Radeon graphics.

While the Linux 4.6 kernel is enabling FBC and PSR by default in the Intel graphics driver, it's only for select generations of Intel hardware for these power-saving Frame-Buffer Compression and Panel Self Refresh features. With Intel Skylake, FBC support remains a work in progress.

Intel MPX memory protection aims to safeguard against buffer overflows in programs assuming you have a supported processor and software stack. Over at Intel's Open-Source Technology Center they published a guide this week on making use of Intel MPX under Linux.

New firmware blobs have been updated in linux-firmware Git this morning for Skylake affecting both audio and graphics.

Support for Memory Protection Keys (PKeys/MPK) that will be found on future Intel CPUs is being proposed for inclusion into Linux 4.6.

As covered already in a few articles and in our forums, Mesa 11.2 isn't yet found by default on Ubuntu 16.04 but the developers have a feature freeze exception for still landing this feature update to the Mesa 3D user-space drivers and currently have it staged via a Personal Package Archive.

Intel OTC's PowerTOP utility has been around for nearly a decade for making it easy to carry out power optimization tweaks on Intel Linux systems. However, is this program still useful or are modern Linux distributions and upstream code now better optimized by default for delivering an ideal power-savings experience? As it's been a while since the last time I tried PowerTOP, I fired it up today on an Intel Haswell ultrabook running a development snapshot of Ubuntu 16.04.

To many users, Intel's codename of Bay Trail for the recent Atom SoCs would be more accurate if it was named Bay Fail.

Intel's Daniel Vetter on Friday sent in another batch of DRM-Next changes for the upcoming Linux 4.6 kernel cycle. This pull does contain some interesting open-source graphics changes for this Intel DRM driver.