Intel Continued Upstreaming A Lot Of Great Linux/Open-Source Code This Quarter

Along with AMD's upcoming hardware enablement and other Q1 code contributions, Intel's open-source engineers remained very busy this quarter as well. Intel continues upstreaming a lot of new code not only for upcoming hardware but also a lot of exciting Linux kernel features in general, various optimizations and improvements to countless open-source user-space software projects, and their other great open-source efforts in general.

For reliving the past three months or in case you missed out on any of the daily content on Phoronix, below is a look at the Intel highlights for 2024-Q1 from the open-source/Linux angle. This is just a look at the most popular Intel news on Phoronix for the quarter, not counting the various Intel hardware reviews and other featured benchmark articles.

Intel Continues Prepping The Linux Kernel For X86S
Nearly one year ago Intel published the X86S specification (formerly stylized as "X86-S") for simplifying the Intel architecture by removing support for 16-bit and 32-bit operating systems. X86S is a big step forward with dropping legacy mode, 5-level paging improvements, and other modernization improvements for x86_64. With the Linux 6.9 kernel more x86S bits are in place for this ongoing effort.

Targeted Intel oneAPI DPC++ Compiler Optimization Rules Out 2k+ SPEC CPU Submissions
SPEC has effectively invalidated more than two thousand SPEC CPU 2017 benchmark submissions after it was discovered the Intel oneAPI DPC++ compiler was effectively "cheating" per their standards with a targeted optimization.

Awesome Changes Coming With Linux 6.9: Lots From Intel/AMD, FUSE Passthrough & More Rust
Depending upon how Linus Torvalds is feeling today, Linux 6.8 could debut today as stable and in turn mark the opening of the Linux 6.9 merge window... Otherwise it will be punted off by one week. In any event, there's a lot of interesting work queuing for Linux 6.9 as shared in today's preview.

Linux 6.7 Released With Bcachefs, Intel Meteor Lake In Good Shape & Nouveau GSP Support
As anticipated Linus Torvalds went ahead and just released the Linux 6.7 kernel as the first new version of 2024.

It's Becoming Possible To Use The Webcam On Newer Intel Laptops With Open-Source Linux
While Intel typically does a great job with their open-source Linux hardware support with enabling all features under Linux and doing so in a timely manner -- often well in advance of the client and server hardware availability -- an exception in recent years has been around the web cam support for many newer Intel laptops. Since Alder Lake an increasing number of Intel-powered laptops have been relying on a raw MIPI camera sensor connected to the IPU6 IP. Intel has been tightly controlling the intellectual property around IPU6 so in turn their Linux support has consisted of an out-of-tree kernel driver and a proprietary user-space component. But thanks to Linaro and Red Hat, an open-source alternative has been forming.

Intel's FRED Looks Like It Could Be Ready For Linux 6.9
For the better part of two years we've seen Intel open-source software engineers working on preparing the Linux kernel for FRED, the Flexible Return and Event Delivery for defining new transitions for changing privilege levels. Intel's been working hard on the FRED kernel plumbing for better performance, lower response times, and improved robustness and it's looking like FRED could be set to land come Linux 6.9.

Linux 6.8 Is Very Exciting With Intel Xe Driver, Raspberry Pi 5 Graphics & New Hardware
Linux 6.8 could debut as stable as soon as tomorrow if all goes well... Linus Torvalds last week was unsure whether an extra release candidate would be needed after the quiet 6.8-rc7 release. This week's seen a continued flow of fixes land, so we'll see what Linus decides on Sunday but in any event there are already a number of early 6.9 pull requests.

Intel's Open-Source Vulkan Driver Wired Up To Support AMD's Radeon Memory Visualizer
While AMD's GPUOpen team developed the Radeon Memory Visualizer for their own Radeon graphics processors, thanks to the software working out well and being open-source and the profiling/dump format being public, the Intel open-source Vulkan Linux driver has added support for it. With the Intel ANV Mesa driver you can now generate Radeon Memory Visualizer (RMV) compatible dumps that can then be loaded into the GPUOpen software for analyzing the video memory behavior of Intel's integrated and discrete graphics.

Open-Source Intel & AMD Drivers Make Quick Progress On Vulkan Roadmap 2024 Extensions
Following this morning's embargo lift on the Vulkan Roadmap 2024 specification, Mesa merge requests were opened by Intel and RADV stakeholders in beginning to implement the new extensions for these Mesa Vulkan drivers and promoting existing extensions to their newly-minted state.

Intel Makes Open-Source Its Python NPU Acceleration Library
Intel has made open-source its NPU Acceleration Library (intel-npu-acceleration-library) as a user-space library for Windows and Linux systems for interfacing with the Neural Processing Unit (NPU) found initially on their new Meteor Lake laptops.

"The Finals" Can Run With Intel Graphics On Linux When Hiding The Fact It's An Intel GPU
Embark Studios' The Finals free-to-play first person shooter has proven quite popular since its release in early December. The Finals is a game powered by Unreal Engine 5 that has been running on Linux thanks to Valve's Steam Play (Proton + VKD3D-Proton). With the latest Mesa driver activity, Intel Arc Graphics on Linux with their open-source driver can now handle this popular game.

Intel Thread Director Virtualization Patches Boost Some Workloads By ~14%
Intel's hybrid core handling for modern Intel Core CPUs with a mix of P and E cores has largely been in good shape under Linux for a while. Intel Thread Director support has come along with various Linux kernel improvements to better handle task placement between the P and E cores. One area seeing new work now though is for virtual machines (VMs) running on Intel hybrid systems with a new Linux kernel patch series working on Thread Director Virtualization.

KVM Virtualization With Linux 6.9 Brings More Optimizations For Intel & AMD
The Kernel-based Virtual Machine changes for Linux 6.9 continue to enhance the capabilities of the open-source Linux virtualization software stack.

Linux 6.8 Brings More Sound Hardware Support For Intel & AMD, Including The Steam Deck
Waiting for pulling into the mainline kernel once Linus Torvalds is back online following Portland's winter storms is the sound subsystem updates for Linux 6.8, which include a lot of new sound hardware support.

Intel Releases x86-simd-sort 5.0 With 4~5x Faster C++ Object Sorting Using AVX-512
It's been nearly one year to the day since outlining intel's AVX-512 powered sorting library to offer blazing fast sort speeds. Over the past year has brought the 1.0 release, new algorithms in v2.0, AVX2 support and more AVX-512 optimizations in v4.0, and now today Intel is out with x86-simd-sort 5.0 with yet more performance improvements.

Intel Survey Finds Maintainer Burnout & Documentation Top Open-Source Challenges
At the end of last year Intel hosted a survey of open-source developers to collect their feeback on various open-source software issues. Intel’s 2023 Open Source Community Survey is all wrapped up, the data tallied up, and the results emailed out today to participants.

Intel Making It Easier To Reproduce Linux GPU Hangs On Real Hardware
Intel engineers working on their open-source Mesa OpenGL/Vulkan driver code currently replay captured error state / GPU hangs using a simulator, but a new patch proposal allows for replaying GPU hangs on the actual hardware. In turn this will hopefully help Intel driver developers better address some real-world issues.

Linux 6.7 Set For Release With Bcachefs File-System, Intel Meteor Lake Graphics In Good Shape
The Linux 6.7 kernel is expected to be released as stable later today following the one week delay due to the end-of-year holidays. Here's a reminder about some of the best features in Linux 6.7.

Intel & AMD Enjoy SoundWire Updates With Linux 6.9
Linux sound subsystem maintainer Takashi Iwai with SUSE has submitted all of the core sound updates and driver changes for the ongoing Linux 6.9 kernel merge window.

Linux 6.8 To Introduce New Intel Xe & PowerVR Graphics Drivers, Prepare For New AMD & Intel CPUs
Linux 6.7 should be released later today as the first stable kernel of 2024. In turn the Linux 6.8 merge window will then open tomorrow and run for the next two weeks. For those curious about the features expected for Linux 6.8, here's an early look at some of the changes expected to land for that next kernel cycle.