Back at SC19 Intel released a beta of their oneAPI Base Toolkit for software developers to work on performance-optimized, cross-device software. Complementing that initial software beta is now the oneAPI Level 0 Specification.

Reported on earlier this month is the decision by Linux kernel developers to disable HPET for Intel Coffee Lake systems. The High Precision Event Timer was being disabled since on some Coffee Lake systems at least this timer skews when entering the PC10 power state and that makes the time-stamp counter unstable.

For several release cycles already the Linux kernel has supported Intel's 5-level paging for increasing the virtual and physical address space available to systems while for Linux 5.5 the five-level support is being enabled by default.

Intel's crew maintaining the Scalable Video Technology open-source video encoders on Monday issued a new pre-release of SVT-AV1 in an effort to further speed-up AV1 video encoding on CPUs.

Ending out the week is an exciting development in the Intel open-source graphics driver space... Shared Virtual Memory (SVM) support! This is another step towards their upcoming discrete Xe GPUs and ultimately their exciting oneAPI conquest.

The Khronos Group has officially confirmed Intel's new "Iris" Gallium3D driver as being a conformant OpenGL 4.6 implementation.

Wednesday marked the v1.0.2878 update to Intel's "IGC" Graphics Compiler that is used by their graphics hardware compute stack.

The "Data Streaming Accelerator" (DSA) is a new block on future Intel CPUs that hasn't been talked about much publicly... Until now. Intel's open-source crew has begun detailing DSA for future Intel CPUs that will offer high-performance data movement and transformation operations. The Linux driver enablement has begun.

Last week ago we provided a number of benchmarks looking at the performance impact from Intel's Jump Conditional Code (JCC) Erratum that required a CPU microcode update to mitigate but that comes with a performance hit. At least Intel has pending GNU Assembler patches to help offset that performance hit. In time for last week's articles I didn't have a chance to perform Skylake Xeon Scalable (1st Gen) benchmarks but now here are some metrics alongside Cascade Lake.

The Intel "Gen11" Iris Plus Graphics on Ice Lake are a big upgrade over earlier Intel graphics generations but the gains are even more enticing if making use of their new Gallium3D OpenGL Linux driver.

While the patches overnight about "substantial" improvement in power usage for Intel graphics on Linux were exciting on first look, it's less so now as it turns out last week's graphics driver security fixes is what regressed the Intel graphics power-savings.

Longtime open-source Intel Linux graphics driver developer Chris Wilson has sent out a set of 19 patches for what he calls fast soft-RC6 support and is a "substantial" improvement over the current driver code for Intel graphics power-savings.

With yesterday's much anticipated Intel oneAPI beta being built around open-source standards like SYCL, the "cross-device" support can at least in theory extend beyond just Intel platforms. Codeplay is already showing that's possible with a to-be-open-source layer that will allow oneAPI and SYCL / Data Parallel C++ to run atop NVIDIA GPUs via CUDA.

A patch series was merged today for the in-development Mesa 20.0 to further lower the CPU overhead of Intel's open-source Vulkan driver.

Making waves today is that Intel will be removing very old BIOS and driver downloads from their site on or after 22 November. Though these software downloads for the products in question are around ~20 years old so the real-world impact should be small plus with Linux drivers being in the mainline kernel, all you'd really be losing out on are BIOS updates that themselves haven't seen updates in years.

SUSE developer Giovanni Gherdovich has sent out the latest patches on supporting frequency invariance within the kernel's scheduler code and ultimately making use of it for select Intel CPUs to yield not only better raw performance but also power efficiency.

In addition to announcing the much anticipated oneAPI beta, Raja Koduri spent his time at Intel's event today also talking about "Ponte Vecchio" as their forthcoming general purpose GPU.

The upcoming Linux 5.5 kernel cycle should bring an improvement for power management on Intel's latest-generation Ice Lake processors.

Released at the end of October was Intel's IWD 1.0 wireless daemon while hitting the web this week was version 1.1.

The Intel developers working on their open-source compute run-time this morning released a new version as they continue making improvements to their Gen11 Ice Lake support as well as further bringing up the Gen12/Xe Tiger Lake support.

Another Intel change being sent off for Linux 5.4 and to be back-ported to current stable series is disabling of HPET for Coffee Lake systems.

Of the 77 security advisories Intel is making public and the three big ones of the performance-sensitive JCC Erratum, the new ZombieLoad TAA (TSX Asynchronous Abort), and iTLB Multihit No eXcuses, there are also two fixes to their kernel graphics driver around security issues separate from the CPU woes.

The Linux kernel has just received its mitigation work for the newly-announced TSX Asynchronous Abort (TAA) variant of ZombieLoad plus revealing mitigations for another Intel CPU issue... So today in addition to the JCC Erratum and ZombieLoad TAA the latest is iITLB Multihit (NX) - No eXcuses.

In addition to the JCC erratum being made public today and that performance-shifting Intel microcode update affecting Skylake through Cascade Lake, researchers also announced a new ZombieLoad side-channel attack variant dubbed "TSX Asynchronous Abort" or TAA for short.

A change to look forward to with Mesa 20.0 due out next quarter is Vulkan timeline semaphore support (VK_KHR_timeline_semaphore) for Intel's "ANV" open-source driver.

Complementing the earlier Intel Ice Lake "Gen11" graphics comparison and the Windows vs. Linux Ice Lake graphics driver numbers, here are some additional Vulkan data points in different Linux and Steam Play games.

With the Linux 5.3 kernel release this summer Intel enabled Speed Select Technology under Linux for this feature found on new Cascade Lake processors. The SST Linux tool has now seen some updated patches ahead of the forthcoming Linux 5.5 cycle.

Intel's Mika Westerberg who continues overseeing the Linux kernel's Thunderbolt code has prepped more changes ahead of the upcoming Linux 5.5 cycle.

Intel's open-source crew has submitted the last of their feature updates to their "i915" Direct Rendering Manager graphics driver for staging in DRM-Next ahead of the upcoming Linux 5.5 kernel cycle.

With Mesa 19.3 having been branched yesterday, hitting Git master today as an early change for Mesa 20.0 is an overhaul to the Intel "ANV" open-source Vulkan driver's buffer object (BO) allocation code.