Intel News Archives

More Linux kernel code around Intel's Trust Domain Extensions (TDX) has landed with the in-development Linux 6.7 kernel.

Intel Arc Graphics on Linux can handle running the Diablo IV game via Valve's Steam Play but only when it hides the fact that it's Intel graphics in use via a game-specific driver workaround.

All of the power management related updates have been merged for the in-development Linux 6.7 kernel.

Earlier this year Intel published x86-simd-sort as a very speedy sorting library that initially leveraged AVX-512 instructions for 10x to 17x faster sorts. Numpy was one of the first major projects to adopt x86-simd-sort and OpenJDK more recently adopted it. Since the initial release we've seen more features and performance optimizations added. Today marks the release of x86-simd-sort 4.0 and it's delivering even greater performance while also adding an AVX2 code path to help those without AVX-512.

A shiny feature landed on Friday for the Intel open-source OpenGL and Vulkan drivers within Mesa 24.0: Tile-Based Immediate Mode Rendering (TBIMR).

Intel's FFmpeg Cartwheel is where the company continues to stage their latest FFmpeg multimedia library patches prior to upstreaming. FFmpeg Cartwheel ends up containing all the latest and greatest code for leveraging VA-API and Quick Sync Video (QSV) from Intel integrated graphics through their latest DG2/Alchemist class discrete graphics.

Building off the recent release of OSPRay 3.0 with initial GPU acceleration support, OSPRay Studio has now been updated against this new version. As a reminder, OSPRay Studio is Intel's open-source interactive visualization and ray-tracing application.

While Meteor Lake isn't shipping until December, Intel's open-source Linux engineers for months have already been working on 15th Gen Arrow Lake (as well as Lunar Lake, among their other processor lines) for getting the driver support in order. The latest early hardware enablement to talk about is the initial Arrow Lake S support coming to their video acceleration drivers.

Following an FCV optimization for the latest Intel graphics hardware, ASTC LDR emulation, some still-pending Vulkan sparse support for ANV atop the existing i915 driver, and other recent Intel open-source "ANV" Vulkan driver optimizations, another optimization was just merged into Mesa 23.3.

An Intel engineer on Friday posted a set of Linux kernel patches that are working to refine the Microarchitectural Data Sampling (MDS) mitigation handling for the Linux kernel to better protect some kernel data and also some very subtle performance benefits.

With the pending changes set to be merged for the upcoming Linux 6.7 kernel, all known issues/limitations around the i915 kernel driver support for upcoming integrated graphics with Intel Meteor Lake laptop processors.

Following other Intel oneAPI components like Embree and OpenVKL introducing GPU acceleration via SYCL, today Intel released the open-source OSPRay 3.0 that rolls out initial GPU support for this portable ray-tracing engine.

In addition to Intel putting the finishing touches on Meteor Lake graphics support for the upcoming Linux 6.7 cycle, Intel's Habana Labs AI accelerator driver also has some notable changes for this next kernel version.

Intel continues to do a splendid job at ensuring the open-source GCC and LLVM/Clang upstream compilers have support for their new processor cores well in advance of products shipping. Beyond already having Sierra Forest, Granite Rapids, Lunar Lake and Arrow Lake support already in upstream GCC, today one of the Intel compiler engineers sent out patches for enabling the Clear Water Forest and Panther Lake cores.

The USB I2C / SPI / GPIO drivers for Intel's La Jolla Cove Adapter (LCJA) are set to be mainlined with the upcoming Linux 6.7 kernel merge window opening at the end of the month.

Next week in DRM-Next will hopefully see the patch promoting Intel Meteor Lake graphics to stable in time for the upcoming Linux 6.7 merge window. Ahead of that an i915 drm-intel-next pull request on Friday sent out more Meteor Lake patches while concurrently working on more driver enablement code for Lunar Lake.

Similar to the Radeon RADV driver recently implementing software-based decoding for Adaptive Scalable Texture Compression (ASTC), the Intel "ANV" Vulkan driver within Mesa has also now wired up ASTC LDR emulation.

It was a busy day for the GCC 14 (GNU Compiler Collection) development with Intel landing three separate noteworthy contributions just today for this next major open-source compiler release.

While one month ago a Linux kernel patch was floated for advertising Meteor Lake graphics support by default to effectively mark it as stable and remove it from behind the "i915.force_probe" block, that has yet to be queued for the mainline kernel. Today another set of patches were submitted of new Intel kernel graphics driver changes slated for Linux 6.7 with this patch still missing -- but it might squeeze in next week to still make it for the v6.7 cycle.

Released back in May was Intel's open-source Open Image Denoise 2.0 that brought GPU support via SYCL for this denoising library intended for use with ray-tracing applications. Following that big release as part of the broader effort to make Intel's oneAPI suite more supportive on GPUs/accelerators, OIDn 2.1 released on Wednesday with fixes and performance improvements to the GPU support.

Intel has enabled a fast clear optimization "FCV" for their Gen12.5 graphics and newer under Linux with the open-source "ANV" Vulkan driver. This can help games like F1 22 with improving performance as much as 45%.

Intel submitted a new i915 DRM Linux kernel driver patch for adding four additional device PCI IDs for DG2/Alchemist graphics processors.

Intel has formally announced the Arc Graphics A580 as their latest graphics processor to fit between the low-end A380 and higher-end A750/A770 graphics cards.

In addition to Intel's compiler engineers pushing a lot of code into GCC -- and other open-source compiler components -- around AVX10, over the weekend code began hitting the GCC 14 Git codebase for the Advanced Performance Extensions (APX) functionality.

In addition to x86-simd-sort 3.0 being released for speedy AVX-512 sorting, Friday also brought the release of oneDNN 3.3 as the deep neural network library that is part of oneAPI and focused on helping developers build out deep learning applications.

Earlier this year Intel posted x86-simd-sort as a blazing fast sorting library that makes use of AVX-512. When the popular Numpy began using it they found up to 10~17x faster sorts for 16-bit to 64-bit data types. Today Intel software engineers released x86-simd-sort 3.0 and it also comes minutes after OpenJDK merged a modified version of this speeding sorting code into that reference JDK codebase.

Intel Linux graphics driver engineers are doing a bit of house keeping to the i915 DRM driver and removing some pre-production hardware bits as well as the incomplete Ponte Vecchio support.

In addition to Vulkan sparse support that works with the existing i915 kernel driver, another exciting open-source Intel Vulkan driver development this week is landing a transfer queue implementation for DG2/Alchemist GPUs. This in turn can help with hybrid graphics systems and other situations.

Motivated by a 25% performance degradation seen on an Intel Xeon Scalable dual socket server due to Indirect Branch Restricted Speculation (IBRS), Red Hat's Waiman Long has been working on a patch series to update the IBRS handling in different conditions for affected Intel processors on Linux.

The biggest hindrance for using Intel Arc Graphics for Linux gaming has been the lack of Vulkan sparse support as needed for running many newer Windows DirectX 12 games atop Valve's Steam Play with Proton using VKD3D-Proton. Intel recently did implement Vulkan sparse support for ANV in Mesa 23.3 but it only works with their yet-to-be-upstreamed and still-experimental Xe kernel driver. But now Intel Linux graphics driver engineers have managed to pull off a solution for getting the sparse resources supported while using the existing i915 kernel DRM driver.

Similar to Embree 4.0 adding Intel graphics acceleration earlier this year via SYCL, Intel's OpenVKL library that is also part of their oneAPI rendering toolkit has now added SYCL graphics acceleration with OpenVKL 2.0.

Intel's Linux graphics driver engineers have begun submitting their feature changes to DRM-Next of new i915 kernel driver feature material they are preparing for the Linux 6.7 cycle this winter.

With the Intel Arrow Lake NPU being very similar to Meteor Lake for this neural processing unit, the patches enabling that NPU for next-gen Intel Core CPUs was submitted as a "fix" for the ongoing Linux 6.6 cycle.

Intel engineers have merged to Mesa 23.3 the initial open-source "ANV" Vulkan driver support for sparse resources! This is the important feature needed for running a number of newer Direct3D 12 games with Steam Play (Proton) via VKD3D-Proton with Intel graphics hardware.

Earlier this month I noted that Intel's open-source Linux graphics driver engineers had begun working on the OpenGL and Vulkan Mesa driver support for Xe 2 graphics as to be found with Lunar Lake "LNL" processors. Since then the initial hardware enablement work has only continued heating up.

Intel's open-source software engineers are known for many great performance optimizations to the Linux kernel. Over the years Intel has contributed countless performance optimizations to the kernel and related Linux components that have made significant improvements not only for Intel hardware but x86_64 as a whole and at times CPU architecture independent improvements. One of their newest performance optimizing patch series is around Per-CPU Pageset (PCP) high auto-tuning.

Announced last year at the Intel Vision conference was the Habana Labs Gaudi2 and Greco AI hardware. Since then we've seen a lot of Linux kernel driver work happen for enabling the Gaudi2 second-generation training and inference AI processor while there hasn't been anything real in the way for Greco, which was the successor to the Goya AI processor. Now references to Habana Labs Greco are being removed from the driver.

Since announcing the Advanced Performance Extensions (APX) and AVX10 back in July, Intel's open-source compiler engineers have been busy preparing the GCC and LLVM/Clang compiler toolchains for these major CPU extensions to be found with future Intel processors.

With the Linux 6.7 kernel this winter there is a new feature coming to Intel's QuickAssist Technology (QAT) device driver that will allow more efficient use with QAT Gen4 hardware such as the latest-generation Intel Xeon Scalable "Sapphire Rapids" processors.

While Intel divested its storage business and Intel Optane was sadly discontinued, one of the interesting open-source software projects from its storage efforts has been DAOS, the Distributed Asynchronous Object Storage engine. Version 2.4 of the DAOS software-defined object store designed for high-speed storage was released this past week.

With Meteor Lake comes the introduction of the Versatile Processing Unit (VPU) that is now marketed by Intel as the Neural Processing Unit (NPU). Recent versions of the Linux kernel have the "IVPU" accelerator driver to support Meteor Lake's VPU/NPU while now a patch is pending to extend that support for next-generation Arrow Lake processors.

Intel engineers have published their Compoute Runtime 23.30.26918.9 that provides their open-source Level Zero and OpenCL support for use on Windows and Linux platforms with Intel integrated/discrete graphics hardware.

Intel announced this morning on the second day of their Innovation 2023 conference that they are collaborating with software vendors such as Red Hat, Canonical, and SUSE for providing Intel-optimized Linux distributions.

Last year Intel announced Project Amber as an effort to verify the trustworthiness of clouds. Project Amber was talked up as "an innovative service-based security implementation" for the remote verification of the trustworthiness of compute assets. Project Amber is now rolling out as the Intel Trust Authority.

Intel is kicking off their Innovation 2023 conference in San Jose with many exciting announcements. Freed from embargo this morning is news around their upcoming mobile and server processors, lots of AI talk, Intel's continued software advancements to complement their hardware, and more.

Stemming from Intel engineers finding significant overhead in some Linux scheduler functions when running PostgreSQL within a Docker instance, a new scheduler patch is on the way for Linux 6.7 that will help out at least Ice Lake and Sapphire Rapids with some migration-heavy workloads. With the change being in the common scheduler code, it's also likely to help out other hardware platforms too.

Since 2021 the Itanium IA-64 code was orphaned in the Linux kernel and over the course of this year there's been talk of retiring the Itanium code from the kernel, a.k.a. strip it out. It looks like 2023 will end with the Itanium IA-64 code indeed being removed from the Linux kernel.

Intel's OpenVINO 2023.1 was just published to GitHub as the newest version of this open-source toolkit for optimizing and deploying AI workloads across their CPUs, GPUs, and now also having official support for the new VPU being found with Meteor Lake SoCs.

Tucked away within a merge to Mesa entitled, "intel/genxml: Support importing, which cuts the overall xml file size almost in half" Intel Linux graphics driver engineers are slowly beginning to start work on the "Xe2" graphics support to be found with Lunar Lake processors.

One of the nifty new features with Intel Xeon Scalable "Sapphire Rapids" processors not talked about much is the In-Field Scan (IFS) functionality for allowing various tests to be carried out prior to deploy the new processors or over time in the data center for trying to spot any silicon-level issues. IFS aims to uncover any processor issues not caught by ECC, parity checks, RAS, or other safeguards when new CPUs reach the data center or as they age over time.