Intel News Archives

Intel this week is using Computex 2023 to make some disclosures around next-generation Meteor Lake processors for laptops. The most exciting aspect relayed in advance during our press briefing last week was that all Intel Meteor Lake processor SKUs will feature their new Vision/Versatile Processing Unit.

As a temporary workaround for helping recent versions of Cyberpunk 2077 to run on Linux under Valve's Steam Play with Intel Arc Graphics, Intel's open-source Mesa driver is temporarily no longer identifying as "Intel" graphics via its graphics vendor ID in order to workaround an issue.

One of the new features of Intel Xeon Scalable 4th Gen "Sapphire Rapids" server processors is support for Trust Domain Extensions (TDX) but for this generation is only being activated for CPUs going to select cloud providers. Intel TDX allows better isolating virtual machines from the VMM/hypervisor and other non-TD software on the platform. This limited roll-out of Intel TDX has worked out okay with the Linux support for this security feature still being in flux. Sent out today was the 14th spin of the 113 patches needed for getting KVM TDX support wired up within the Linux kernel.

A few days ago I wrote about a Linux kernel patch being prepared for fixing Intel hybrid CPU SMP/HT topology reporting due to the way the Linux kernel was currently counting the number of Hyper Threading siblings for each core. Fortunately, that fix which is apparently becomes more pressing for upcoming Meteor Lake processors, has now been picked up in time for today's Linux 6.4-rc4 release and is set for back-porting to stable kernel series.

Intel Linux kernel graphics driver developers are looking at making use of Netlink for exposing RAS (reliability, availability, serviceability) and telemetry features of kernel graphics drivers to user-space for their modern GPUs.

For those wondering how the performance of Intel Arc Graphics is relative to the newly-launched AMD Radeon RX 7600 and other recent graphics cards, here are a couple of benchmarks for the Arc Graphics using the new Linux 6.3 stable kernel paired with Mesa 23.2-dev for the latest open-source OpenGL and Vulkan drivers.

Going back to 2020 has been work by Intel's open-source engineers on implementing Key Locker support for Linux. Intel Key Locker allows for encrypting/decrypting data with an AES key without having access to the raw/actual key. AES keys are converted into handles with Intel Key Locker that can then be used for carrying out encryption/decryption on that system until revoked or system state changes. Intel engineers on Wednesday posted their seventh iteration of the patches for supporting Key Locker on Linux.

Among Intel's dozens of terrific open-source components -- including the many components making up their oneAPI software suite -- is Open Image Denoise. Open Image Denoise for years has been a terrific, high-performance denoising library for ray-tracing use The software has long been CPU-based while being highly performant thanks to leveraging modern instruction set extensions. Today though Open Image Denoise 2.0 is released and brings GPU acceleration across Intel, AMD, and NVIDIA graphics processors.

The Intel IPU6 web camera tech found in Alder Lake laptops and newer has unfortunately no upstream Linux driver yet and has resulted in kernel developers avoiding these laptops where web camera support is needed. Intel maintains an out-of-tree IPU6 Linux driver while they have been making progress toward ultimately getting it upstreamed. To ease the situation for Fedora Linux users, an experimental IPU6 software stack has now been added to the RPM Fusion repository.

The bug I wrote about this weekend where Intel is now disabling PCID for Alder Lake and Raptor Lake under Linux until updated CPU microcode is issued for addressing an issue with the INVLPG instruction when Process Context Identifiers are enabled, has now been merged to Linux 6.4.

With Linux going to disable PCID support on Intel Alder Lake and Raptor Lake while waiting for mitigated microcode due to a CPU bug, I was curious if this disabling of Process Context Identiifiers would have any overall performance implications. So I ran some benchmarks this weekend.

Intel quietly released a new whitepaper and specification for their proposal on "X86-S" as a 64-bit only x86 architecture. If their plans workout, in the years ahead we could see a revised 64-bit only x86 architecture.

Intel's open-source Mesa Vulkan Video driver "ANV" has added support for H.265 (HEVC) video decoding.

The Intel Compute-Runtime 23.13.26032.30 update was released today as the newest monthly feature update to this open-source GPU compute stack used on Windows and Linux for OpenCL and oneAPI Level Zero support. With this release comes various improvements and new features like FP64 emulation for Arctic Sound M.

A set of patches to the Intel Uncore Frequency (intel-uncore-freq) Linux driver are expected for the Linux 6.5 cycle that integrate support for the TPMI interface and prepare for upcoming processors with cluster-level power controls.

Well, this is a bit strange... Intel just published Friday afternoon CPU microcode updates for all supported processor families back to Coffee Lake "Gen 8" for undisclosed security updates.

Back in February was a patch series proposed retiring the Intel Itanium (IA-64) architecture support from the Linux kernel. That removal has yet to take place in Linux Git but it's still being talked about and user-space developers are also eager as it would mean being able to clear out Itanium user-space code too.

One of the fascinating elements of Intel's oneAPI software effort is how open they have been not to just supporting GPUs from multiple vendors or AMD CPUs too, but cross-CPU architecture support. Many Intel oneAPI components end up working on 64-bit ARM (AArch64) and even IBM POWER. The latest Intel software package seeing 64-bit ARM Linux support is their Embree ray-tracing kernels.

Since Linux 5.18 there has been Indirect Branch Tracking (IBT) in the mainline kernel that was contributed by Intel as part of their Control-flow Enforcement Technology (CET). For Linux 6.4 Intel engineers tried to get the Shadow Stack support mainlined as the other part of CET, but issues were uncovered at the last minute. Hopefully Shadow Stack support will be merged for the v6.5 cycle but beyond that host support, Intel engineers have also been working on CET virtualization for enabling these security features for use within virtual machines.

Going back to last August were Intel patches to help Intel hybrid CPU handling on Linux by avoiding unnecessary task migrations within SMT domains. Coming this summer those Intel patches are finally set to arrive with the Linux 6.5 kernel cycle.

Intel's open-source "ANV" Vulkan Linux driver within Mesa is now enabling graphics pipeline libraries (GPL) functionality by default but at the same time has demoted their Vulkan mesh shader functionality to being hidden behind an environment variable until some unexplained hangs can be sorted out.

Intel today published 38 new security advisories in their first Patch Tuesday roundabout since February. Among the new disclosures today are CVE-2023-28410 as an i915 Linux kernel graphics driver vulnerability that could lead to local privilege escalation.

While Intel's in-development Xe kernel graphics driver is focused on supporting Tigerlake/Gen12 graphics and newer integrated/discrete graphics with this modern open-source driver with many design improvements over the aging i915 kernel driver, there looks to be one feature that as currently positioned will be missing for DG2/Alchemist: HuC support for helping with media offloading.

With newer generations of Intel client processors having the GuC firmware binaries is now a hard requirement for accelerated graphics support. Like with AMD and NVIDIA GPUs, firmware binaries are a requirement beyond the open-source Linux driver code. This week Intel published their initial GuC firmware binaries for upcoming Meteor Lake processors.

Intel Shaodw Stack support was submitted for Linux 6.4 at the start of the merge window but now with this two-week merge window drawing to a close, it hasn't been pulled yet and Linus Torvalds raised technical issues with the proposed patches that now jeopardize its arrival this cycle.

Intel software engineers have released a new version of their Implicit SPMD Program Compiler (ISPC) as their C language variant with extensions for enhancing single-program, multiple-data programming for both CPUs and GPUs.

Intel's ANV open-source Vulkan driver has increased its instruction heap size to 2Gb in order to address a hang experienced with the game Overwatch while this is also likely to help other software/games moving forward.

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.