While Intel was building up anticipation for their Xe Graphics dedicated hardware last night in San Francisco with their inaugural "Odyssey" event, quietly hitting the Intel servers is an architecture overview for their Icelake "Gen 11" graphics.

Intel's Iris Gallium3D driver may now see slightly better performance in some scenarios thanks to fast color clears support having landed.

The performance out of Intel's SVT video encoders for offering great CPU-based video encoding performance for the likes of HEVC / AV1 / VP9 continues maturing quite nicely. Since discovering Intel's open-source work at the start of February and benchmarking it several times since, its performance has continued to improve particularly for the SVT-AV1 encoder.

With the core functionality for Intel Icelake CPUs appearing to be in place, Intel's open-source developers have been working on the other areas of hardware enablement for these next-generation processors.

Announced on Monday was that the US Department of Energy in cooperation with Argonne National Laboratory will see the "Aurora" supercomputer as the first US Exascale SC coming online in 2021 and featuring Intel's highly anticipated Xe Graphics.

It's busy as ever for the open-source Intel Linux graphics driver developers bringing up support for upcoming hardware like the recently published driver patches for Comet Lake, continuing to tweak the maturing Icelake "Gen 11" graphics, and also plotting the necessary re-engineering of the driver needed to bring-up Intel's in-development "Xe" discrete graphics. And Intel developers this evening sent out their initial enablement work for Elkhart Lake.

While we are looking forward most to Icelake with the new "Gen 11" graphics, Intel has been working on Comet Lake for introduction this year as a Coffeelake derived successor to Whiskey Lake for desktops and mobile devices. The patches needed for Comet Lake graphics driver support on Linux are now pending.

The latest work within Mesa 19.1 is for the Intel "ANV" Vulkan driver and that is dumping more shader information within the VK_EXT_debug_report extension. The output of that is then used by the Mesa developers' VKpipeline-DB utility for offline analysis.

The x86 platform driver updates were sent in Friday for the Linux 5.1 kernel.

Following the Gallum Nine "TTN" support landing to allow a TGSI-to-NIR code path to be used rather than requiring Gallium3D drivers support the conventional TGSI intermediate representation, Intel's new "Iris" driver now is working with Gallium D3D9 after the final bit of code was merged.

A month ago we were first to report on Intel posting Linux graphics driver patches for "device local memory" as they prepare for the bring-up of their "Xe Graphics" discrete GPU hardware due out at some point in 2020. To no surprise, there are more patches out today as the Intel open-source developers begin pushing out more code restructuring work for bringing up graphics support past Icelake "Gen 11" graphics.

Intel has been developing "i10nm_edac" as the new Error Detection And Correction (EDAC) driver for supporting their next-generation 10nm-based server CPUs.

The open-source Intel "ANV" Vulkan Linux driver has picked up support for some of the newer extensions.

Intel has announced they are contributing the Thunderbolt 3 specification to the USB Promoter Group and making it royalty-free for other hardware vendors to implement support for it. Plus it was also announced the USB4 specifcation is based on the Thunderbolt protocol.

It was just one week ago that developers from the Intel Open-Source Technology Center contributed their new Vulkan Overlay later to Mesa 19.1 for providing various performance metrics/statistics of use to application/driver developers. This Vulkan overlay continues being improved upon as well as making it more applicable to gamers/enthusiasts.

Well that sure didn't take long... Less than 24 hours after the merge request to mainline the Intel "Iris" Gallium3D driver was sent out, it's now been merged into the mainline code-base! The Intel Gallium3D driver is now in Mesa Git for easy testing of their next-generation OpenGL Linux driver.

As some more exciting open-source Intel Linux graphics news this week besides their new merge request to mainline the Iris Gallium3D driver, over in the Vulkan space they have merged today their overlay layer that provides a heads-up display of sorts for their Linux "ANV" driver.

For just over the past year Intel open-source driver developers have been developing a new Gallium3D-based OpenGL driver for Linux systems as the eventual replacement to their long-standing "i965 classic" Mesa driver. The Intel developers are now confident enough in the state of this new driver dubbed Iris that they are looking to merge the driver into mainline Mesa proper.

Intel's open-source ANV Vulkan driver now supports the VK_EXT_depth_clip_enable that was designed in part to help the DXVK project for mapping Direct3D atop of the Vulkan API.

Intel developers have begun posting their Linux kernel patches for enabling multi-die/package topology support to the Linux kernel as part of their Cascade Lake AP upbringing.

At the start of the month Intel open-sourced SVT-AV1 aiming for high-performance AV1 video encoding on CPUs. That complemented their existing SVT-HEVC encoder for H.265 content and already SVT-AV1 has been seeing nice performance improvements. Intel now has released SVT-VP9 as a speedy open-source VP9 video encoder.

The previously mentioned work on improving ETC2 support for older generations of Intel graphics has now been mainlined for Mesa 19.1.

It was just a few weeks ago that Intel open-sourced the SVT-AV1 project as a CPU-based AV1 video encoder. In the short time since publishing it, there's already been some significant performance improvements.

It's sure been a busy week in the Intel open-source graphics driver space... The latest improvement is a patch series providing better context restoration in the case of GPU hangs.

The Intel DRM/KMS kernel driver will soon see PSR2 panel self refresh capabilities enabled by default for allowing more power-savings on Intel-powered ultrabooks/notebooks.

A big patch series was sent out today amounting to 42 patches and over four thousand lines of code for introducing the concept of memory regions to the Intel Linux graphics driver. The memory regions support is preparing for device local memory with future Intel graphics products.

Back during the Intel Architecture Day event in December, Intel confirmed that finally with Icelake "Gen 11" graphics there is Adaptive-Sync support after talking about it for several years. While they didn't explicitly mention Linux support, they've been largely spot on for years with supporting new display features on Linux and this should be the case as well with Adaptive-Sync and their next-generation graphics.

After going through several rounds of patch review in recent months, a patch series providing for tracking AVX-512 usage of tasks and exporting it to user-space is poised to be part of the upcoming Linux 5.1 kernel.

One bit of Intel consumer hardware support not currently handled by the Linux kernel was for their Cherry Trail Whiskey Cove PMIC LEDs -- that's for the LEDs connected to their power-management IC on various laptops.

Intel's Open-Source Technology Center has published a whitepaper looking at the Android application performance impact on Intel-powered Chromebooks when the Android Bionic Library is optimized for AVX2.