Intel's growing graphics team recently hosted a "Ask You Anything" on Reddit as they solicit more feedback and ideas from the community about their discrete graphics plans. From that, interest in their Linux graphics driver/software stack came in second for popularity.

Besides seeing Icelake demos at the Intel Architecture Day that were running on Ubuntu, with closely tracking the Linux kernel's development most of the new features presented for Sunny Cove and Gen11 graphics have already been merged or at least available in patch form for some months within the Linux ecosystem. Here's a look at the features talked about yesterday and their state on Linux.

Intel's Architecture Day on Tuesday was delightfully filled with an overwhelming amount of valuable hardware information, but Intel's software efforts were also briefly touched on too. In fact, Raja Koduri reinforced how software is a big part of Intel technology and goes in-hand with their security, interconnect, memory, architecture, and process pillars and that's where their new oneAPI initiative will fit in. But what learning afterwards was most exciting on the software front.

Intel's 2018 Architecture Day was primarily focused on the company's hardware architecture road-map, but one of the software (pre)announcements was their oneAPI software stack.

At Intel's architecture day, the company finally detailed their "Gen 11" graphics that we've been seeing open-source Linux graphics driver patches for many months (Intel OTC posted their initial open-source display driver code in early January and has continued the enablement work since) albeit elusive in substantive user details and hardware until Icelake. But today at least we can share more about the significant improvements with Gen11 graphics.

Intel's promising IWD open-source wireless daemon continues picking up additional functionality in its trek towards potentially replacing wpa_supplicant. Out this week is IWD 0.13.

With aiming to improve the deep learning development experience, Intel's Open-Source Technology Center has announced the Deep Learning Reference Stack.

Intel's Mesa OpenGL driver has been supporting KHR_debug as required by OpenGL 4.3+, but without making full use of the extension. Now though to help with the shader debugging process, it will be exposing more information via this OpenGL debugging extension.

While Coffeelake processors have been available for a year now, Intel initially didn't intend to support their open-source Graphics Virtualization Technology (GVT) with these chips but now are in the process of bringing up such support.

While we are all super anxious to learn more about the Intel discrete graphics card offerings planned for their initial debut in 2020, in representing the beauty of open-source, there was an open-source Linux display driver update on Thursday for their "original" discrete card: the Intel740.

With the time for new Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) driver feature material to enter DRM-Next for the Linux 4.21 kernel cycle quickly coming to a close, the Intel Open-Source Technology Center crew has sent in a final feature pull of material for this next kernel development cycle.

Yesterday saw the release of Vulkan 1.1.95 that introduced the new VK_KHR_shader_float18_int8 extension for supporting 16-bit floating-point types and 8-bit integer types within shader code for arithmetic operations, compared to earlier extensions limiting these data types to load/store operations. NVIDIA released a same-day driver update for the new 1.1.95 extensions while now Intel's "ANV" open-source Vulkan code is the second Linux driver seeing this support (or first if just looking at the open-source drivers).

It should come as virtually no surprise to any regular Phoronix reader given the significant investment Intel makes to Linux via their Open-Source Technology Center with working on Mesa for their Vulkan/OpenGL drivers and related components, but their discrete GPU undertaking will support Linux gaming alongside Windows.

Last month ODROID announced an Intel-powered single board computer after their experimenting with a Ryzen SBC hadn't panned out for this company known for their high-performance ARM SBCs. The ODROID-H2 has begun shipping as this $111 USD Intel x86_64 quad-core board while for your viewing pleasure today are some initial performance benchmarks of this board.

At the end of last year Intel announced the Stratix 10 FPGA with HBM2 memory for HPC workloads. With the Linux 4.21 kernel cycle, the support for this hardware will be further improved upon for FPGA programming with the mainline kernel.

Fresh out of the US holiday weekend, the Intel Iris Gallium3D driver that is forming as the company's future OpenGL Linux driver with better performance potential and modern design, saw a number of new code commits.

Following their first DRM-Next feature pull request submitted at the start of November, Intel's Open-Source Technology Center developers have mailed out their second batch of feature changes ahead of the Linux 4.21 kernel cycle.

While the Intel Open-Source Technology Center invests heavily into the GNU/Linux toolchain in ensuring their future processors will have their full feature set and performance potential exploited, when it comes to the GNU C Library "glibc" in particular it can be quite a while before Linux distributions pull in a new release that contains various Intel performance optimizations. As a result, Intel Linux veteran toolchain developer H.J. Lu has laid out a new proposal.

Intel developers have submitted their GCC compiler enablement patch for the Cascade Lake 14nm CPUs due out starting in early 2019.

Intel has published their initial whitepaper on BF16/BFloat16, a new floating point format to be supported by future Intel processors.

This morning Intel officially announced the Core i9 9980XE as the refreshed Skylake-X part succeeding the Core i9 7980XE.

While we haven't had much to talk about the Intel "Iris" Gallium3D driver in development as the future Mesa OpenGL driver for the company's graphics hardware, it has continued progressing nicely since its formal unveiling back in September.

There has been a flurry of activity recently for the GCC 9 compiler due to feature development ending soon. The latest work hitting their mainline tree this morning is support for the Intel PTWRITE instruction.

A new patch-set proposed by one of the open-source Intel Linux graphics driver developers would allow power-savings under load of roughly up to 3%.

Intel has reaffirmed shipping their next-gen Xeon "Cascade Lake" processors in the first half of 2019 while revealing today some initial performance details.

The merge window isn't even over yet for the current Linux kernel cycle that will end in late December or early January, but Intel's stellar open-source crew responsible for their kernel graphics driver have already sent out their first set of changes to DRM-Next for what will start 2019 with either the Linux 4.21 cycle or 5.1 depending upon how the 4.20~5.0 versioning is decided.

Intel's Open-Source Technology Center (OTC) is now the latest organization making use of the Contributor Covenant for aiming to do more to promote a welcoming and inclusive environment.

Modern Intel SoCs support S0ix low-power states during idle periods, which are sub-states of ACPI S0 that increase power-savings while supporting an instant-on experience for providing lower latency than ACPI S3.

Intel's IWD iNet Wireless Daemon that is hoping to one day supplant WPA Supplicant on Linux systems is out this weekend with version 0.10.

While ODROID is most known for their various ARM single board computers (SBCs), some of which offer impressive specs, they have dabbled in x86 SBCs and on Friday announced the Intel-powered ODROID-H2.