Intel News Archives

While Intel Thunder Bay sparked rumors years ago as potentially being a mix of Intel x86 cores and Movidius VPU cores, although the Linux patches put it as ARM cores paired with the Movidius VPU, Thunder Bay is no more. As I wrote back in March, Intel Linux engineers have acknowledged Thunder Bay is cancelled and there are no end-customers/users so they are going ahead and removing the Linux support.

A new set of patches were posted today to enable cluster scheduling for x86 hybrid CPUs. In turn thos latest attempt at cluster scheduling for modern Core CPUs of Alder Lake and newer is yielding some small performance benefits over the current code.

You may recall last year how several prominent upstream kernel developers recommended avoiding Intel's latest laptops for Linux use that bear their IPU6 MIPI camera over the lack of upstream open-source support. It's taken some months but the initial IPU6 Linux kernel driver patches are out for review and will hopefully make it to the mainline Linux kernel in the months ahead.

Intel's open-source "cartwheel-ffmpeg" project is their repository where they collect all of their FFmpeg patches prior to upstreaming. While the patches have been available in Git form, prior to the weekend Intel released their 2023Q1 queue of patches to this widely-used, open-source multimedia library.

Since 2020 Intel engineers have been working on Linear Address Masking (LAM) as a feature similar to Arm's Top Byte Ignore (TBI) for letting user-space store metadata within some bits of pointers without masking it out before use. This can be of use to virtual machines, profiling / sanitizers / tagging, and other applications. The Intel LAM kernel support has finally been merged with Linux 6.4.

After profiling and raising an issue by Google's Chrome OS engineers, there is a set of "request for comments" patches out today for the Intel Linux graphics driver that can provide 10~15% better performance when operating in the tuned mode.

The Error Detection And Correction (EDAC) device driver updates have been submitted for the Linux 6.4 merge window.

While Intel Shadow Stack support has been around since Tiger Lake CPUs as part of Intel's Control-flow Enforcement Technology (CET), finally for the Linux 6.4 kernel is this security feature being enabled with the mainline Linux kernel.

Intel's open-source "ANV" Vulkan Linux driver has received another small but measurable performance improvement for various games.

It's been just shy of ten years since Intel launched their Haswell processors that were very successful at the time and was followed by Broadwell. While Intel's open-source Linux driver engineers are primarily concentrated on recent and future Intel hardware platforms, occasionally there is an improvement worth mentioning for mature platforms like Haswell and Broadwell. A new patch series this week will help with some minor graphics power-savings for those still running a nearly decade old Intel Linux laptop.

While Linux 6.2 supports Arc Graphics out-of-the-box and Mesa 23.1 has good OpenGL/Vulkan support, for those running Linux distributions on older kernels and Mesa packages there is less than ideal support -- either no support at all or having to resort to force-enabling the DG2/Alchemist support and potentially running on older OpenGL/Vulkan drivers with various problems. To ease the experience for those running Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, Intel has been maintaining a packaged version of their DRM kernel driver as a DKMS module as well as updated Mesa packages.

For more than one year Intel's been working on developing the Xe Linux kernel graphics driver as a modern Direct Rendering Manager driver for Gen12 and newer integrated/discrete graphics. For recent hardware this is to replace the existing i915 kernel driver usage. The Intel open-source developers continue working toward the milestone of being able to submit this driver for mainlining in the upstream Linux kernel.

If you rely on an Intel I219-LM Gigabit Ethernet adapter, you will want to look forward to upgrading your Linux kernel build soon... A fix was committed today after Intel engineers discovered this particular Ethernet chipset had only been running at around 60% of its maximum speed due to a regression introduced back in 2020.

Back in January Intel engineers posted Linux patches for Linear Address Space Separation (LASS) as a feature being introduced with future Intel CPUs. Intel engineers today posted a set of patches extending that LASS support to the realm of KVM virtualization.

Intel's one-year-old merge request for introducing VK_EXT_graphics_pipeline_library support to their open-source "ANV" Vulkan driver has finally been merged for Mesa 23.2.

Intel's open-source OpenGL "Iris" and Vulkan "ANV" Linux drivers are now part of the auto-generated set of drivers set to be built for 64-bit ARM (AArch64) when compiling this code inside Mesa.

If you have been running a Linux 6.3-based kernel or later Linux 6.2 point release and have encountered your HDMI audio breaking when making use of Intel Arc Graphics A750/A770 hardware, a fix is on the way.

As part of Intel's ongoing Linux support preparations for next year's Sierra Forest processors that will feature up to 144 Xeon E cores per socket, the Error Detection And Correction (EDAC) driver support is set to be added for the upcoming Linux 6.4 kernel cycle.

Days after releasing the Intel Media Driver 2023Q1, Intel's software engineers have now released oneVPL 2023Q1 as the updated quarterly release to this video processing library that is part of Intel's open-source oneAPI toolkit.

While we are still waiting for the Intel Xe kernel driver to be upstreamed as the modern alternative to the long-used i915 Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) driver, upstream Mesa Git is nearly ready in supporting the Xe kernel driver and its new/changed interfaces.

Intel Foundry Services (IFS) has racked up a big win today with Arm over enabling chip designers to make use of Intel's upcoming 18A process for low-power Arm SoCs.

A new Intel graphics kernel driver patch posted by Intel on Tuesday confirm that upcoming Meteor Lake processors will feature an ADM/L4 cache.

Going back to 2020 Intel's open-source engineers have been working on Key Locker support for Linux for that hardware feature introduced with Tigerlake CPUs. The Key Locker Linux support has been worked on now for nearly three years and finally after a hiatus a new version was sent out after they worked through a significant performance issue now being addressed with forthcoming firmware.

Intel has released oneAPI Level Zero Loader 1.10 today, which implements the Level Zero v1.6 specification.

The Intel Media Driver 2023Q1 has been published as the newest feature release for Intel's open-source video acceleration driver providing VA-API support across generations of their integrated graphics as well as newer discrete graphics.

Going along with other Lunar Lake enablement work that has already been started for the upstream Linux kernel, the upcoming Linux 6.4 cycle will see HD audio support enabled for this successor to Arrow Lake.

While for many months now Intel's open-source driver engineers have been busy getting Meteor Lake Linux support squared away and there has even been some Lunar Lake activity for the Linux kernel going back to 2021, it looks now like their Arrow Lake enablement will be getting underway.

Following this week's drm-intel-gt-next pull with more Meteor Lake enablement and other new feature code, a final batch of drm-intel-next feature updates were also submitted to DRM-Next for staging ahead of the upcoming Linux 6.4 kernel merge window.

This week Intel formally debuted its oneAPI 2023.1 Tools package that contains the collection of various compilers, libraries, debugging tools, and related open-source offerings like OSPRay Studio and Embree 4.0.

Intel today submitted their final batch of "drm-intel-gt-next" feature changes that they have planned for the upcoming Linux 6.4 kernel cycle.

Ahead of the Mesa 23.1 branching and feature freeze coming up in the next week or two, Intel's open-source graphics driver developers have been landing some last minute performance optimizations to benefit their "ANV" Vulkan driver.

As part of the process for getting Intel's new Xe DRM kernel driver upstreamed as the eventual replacement to the existing i915 driver for Gen12 graphics hardware and newer, Intel engineers on Monday posted the initial Xe DRM scheduler patches that have been separated out to get review on them, figure out what can be common/shared among drivers, and get those bits upstreamed.

Intel compiler engineers have sent out the initial GCC and LLVM/Clang compiler patches for enabling the newly-disclosed AMX-COMPLEX extension with next year's Xeon Scalable "Granite Rapids" processors.

Introduced with Intel Xeon Scalable 4th Gen "Sapphire Rapids" processors was the In-Memory Analytics Accelerator (IAA) for hardware accelerating data compression/decompression combined with primitive analytics functions for helping to accelerate the likes of RocksDB and ClickHouse. Intel IAA with Sapphire Rapids has already been supported for some time on an open-source stack as laid out in the Intel Sapphire Rapids accelerator setup guide while now Intel engineers are preparing Linux for IAA 2.0.

Intel's oneAPI software engineers are closing out the quarter by releasing oneDNN 3.1 as the newest version of this neural network library that is used by the likes of PyTorch, Tensorflow, PaddlePaddle, ONNX, OpenVINO, MATLAB's Deep Learning Toolbox, Apache MXNet, and many other applications.

Intel hosted an investor call this morning around their Data Center and AI business, including a Xeon roadmap update and more. Here are some of those highlights from this morning's call.

Intel has published v0.1 of its GPGMM software, the open-source General-Purpose GPU Memory Management Library. This library is intended to be used by modern software employing the Vulkan or D3D12 APIs for helping application developers deal with low-level video memory management.

The Intel XeSS SDK 1.0 release happened last September while now has been succeeded by XeSS SDK 1.1. Though like the prior release, the XeSS SDK isn't fully open-source with just the bits around game integration being public.

Intel's open-source engineers continue to be quite busy working on their Meteor Lake enablement ahead of those initial mobile processors shipping later this year.

Intel's Linear Address Masking (LAM) functionality to make use of untranslated address bits of 64-bit linear addresses for arbitrary metadata is aiming to be mainlined with the upcoming Linux 6.4 cycle.

Prominent Intel leader Raja Koduri who currently serves as the company's Chief Architect is leaving to focus on a new software start-up.

After being in development for years, Intel's shadow stack support is set to be merged for the upcoming Linux 6.4 cycle. The shadow stack support is part of Intel's Control-flow Enforcement Technology (CET) security functionality.

With the Linux 6.3 kernel the Habana Labs AI driver has moved to the new "accel" accelerator subsystem/framework while for the Linux 6.4 cycle this summer this Intel driver is continuing to speed ahead as it prepares support for the new Gaudi2 AI hardware and making other improvements for this open-source training/inference stack.

Getting back on track for its new release rhythm, Intel today published the Compute-Runtime 23.05.25593.11 version along with the Intel Graphics Compiler 1.0.13230.7.

I hadn't heard any mentions of Intel's Thunder Bay in quite a while besides the occasional Linux kernel patch while now it has been officially confirmed as a cancelled Intel product and the Linux driver code being worked on the past 2+ years is on the chopping block.

Last week following the Linux 6.3-rc1 release Intel engineers already began sending new Intel i915 driver feature code to DRM-Next for queuing until the Linux 6.4 merge window in early May. This week another batch of "drm-intel-gt-next" material was submitted.

The open-source OpenGL and Vulkan support for Intel's next-generation Meteor Lake client processors is taking a step forward with next quarter's Mesa 23.1 release.

Intel's Linux engineers continue working on Linear Address Masking (LAM) for making use of untranslated address bits of 64-bit linear addresses so that it can be used for arbitrary metadata. The hope is that this LAM metadata can lead to more efficient address sanitizers, optimizations for JITs and VMs, and more, but it's been a lengthy journey getting the support upstreamed.

Embree 4.0.1 is out with a few changes to note for this open-source high performance ray-tracing library for CPUs and GPUs.

While less than one week since the Linux 6.3-rc1 release, already the first batch of Intel (i915) kernel graphics driver updates has been sent to DRM-Next for queuing until the Linux 6.4 merge window kicks off in two months.