Intel held a virtual event last week to basically plead their case that AMD Ryzen laptops are coming up short on battery-powered performance compared to their own offerings. It was all Windows focused, but at least given their emphasis now on battery performance gave me another opportunity to prod over the lackluster state of Intel DPTF support on Linux with it not being pleasant out-of-the-box and one of the few areas encumbered by blobs or lack of public documentation.

Within Intel's vast open-source software ecosystem and much of the attention being on oneAPI as their preferred programming model for developers these days and there being multiple different open-source Intel graphics compiler back-ends, one that is often forgotten about is the Intel C for Metal Compiler that on Friday saw a new release.

This summer Intel disabled frame-buffer compression for Gen12 Tiger Lake graphics. While FBC helps conserve memory bandwidth and can be beneficial to power-savings, under-run issues and related problems resorted Intel to disabling this common feature for Tiger Lake.

Announced during the summer was Intel's Maple Ridge controller in the form of the Intel JHL8540 / JHL8340 chips as their first discrete Thunderbolt / USB4 controllers. Linux support for the Intel Maple Ridge controller is now on the way.

Intel's SGX enclaves support patches for the Linux kernel have been through 40+ rounds of review at this point over the past many months as they try to get this security feature into the mainline Linux kernel. But SGX isn't the only Intel security feature that's been having a long process for mainlining: Control-flow Enforcement Technology (CET) is in a similar boat.

Another round of Intel graphics driver changes were submitted last week to DRM-Next for queuing ahead of next month's Linux 5.11 merge window.

While Intel is normally very punctual with their Linux hardware support and ensure that the full capabilities of the hardware are exposed under Linux, especially when it comes to server and workstation hardware, occasionally oversights are made.

Longtime Linux users still likely cringe when hearing "Poulsbo" as Intel's first-generation Atom processors that featured "GMA 500" graphics that were based on Imagination Technologies PowerVR SGX IP. The Linux driver support was just awful and now as we prepare for 2021 the Intel Linux kernel driver might just drop its 2D acceleration support for Poulsbo and the short-lived Moorestown platform.

Coming as a late addition to the Linux 5.10 kernel is Thunderbolt support for Tiger Lake H.

Intel's open-source Linux graphics driver developers have begun preparing support for a new feature previously not talked about publicly: Intel PXP or the "Protected Xe Path".

Just a day after the CXL 2.0 specification was published, the initial Linux kernel support for this updated Compute Express Link revision was sent out for review.

Intel on Tuesday evening released their 20201110 CPU microcode package as their first collection of updated CPU microcode binaries since June and it's a big update.

As part of Intel's monthly security disclosures the company is today releasing forty new security advisories today.

Intel is contributing a new driver to the Linux kernel for determining whether Thunderbolt / USB4 ports are functional.

Currently when directly assigning I/O devices to virtual machines the guest memory needs to be statically pinned unless using a vIOMMU setup in which case it does not but there are performance implications there as well. Intel engineers though have been working on a virtual IOMMU implementation with DMA buffer tracking to overcome these limitations.

Intel didn't manage to get their Software Guard Extensions (SGX) support merged for the current Linux 5.10 LTS kernel cycle and it's still up in the air if it will be pulled in the near-term for providing the mainline kernel with SGX enclaves support.

For the past several months there have been a number of Intel Linux DRM patch series around "big joiner" support and that is looking like it may soon be finished up for allowing support for driving 8K displays off a single port.

There's still more than one month to go until the Linux 5.11 merge window kicks off but Intel open-source developers have already submitted their initial batch of kernel graphics driver updates to DRM-Next.

Given Intel's very fresh Tiger Lake platform, our latest benchmarking with the Core i7-1165G7 within the Dell XPS 9310 is seeing if running the in-development Linux 5.10 kernel means any performance or power changes for this latest-generation Intel mobile CPU with Xe/Gen12 graphics.

While Linux 5.10-rc2 is coming later today and a week past the merge window, a notable late pull request sent in this morning by Greg Kroah-Hartman is removing the Intel MIC (Many Integrated Core) architecture drivers, a.k.a. Xeon Phi.

Earlier this year the Linux kernel landed split lock detection for being able to detect and optionally kill processes leading to a split lock since it can cause measurable performance issues and even possible unprivileged denial of service.

Intel Compute-Runtime 20.43.18277 is out this morning as the latest version of the company's open-source graphics compute stack for HD/UHD/Iris/Xe Graphics on Linux with OpenCL and oneAPI Level Zero support.

While 11th Gen "Rocket Lake" desktop processors aren't expected to be released until the end of Q1'2021, given the interest building around AMD Ryzen 5000 "Zen 3" processors, Intel revealed a few more details today about their next-generation wares.

Earlier this year was the surprising move of Intel's oneDNN neural network library adding AArch64 support and that was then complemented by adding IBM POWER support to this neural network library that is part of their oneAPI collection. Now with the latest oneDNN 2.0 beta they have furthered the support and performance for non-Intel hardware.

Intel's open-source developers have begun publishing their patches enabling their "ANV" Vulkan Linux driver to support Vulkan ray-tracing! This is in preparation for next year's Xe HPG graphics card that will feature hardware-accelerated ray-tracing.

This past week Intel began adding Alder Lake support to their Linux graphics driver and that also continued on the compute side with the Intel Compute-Runtime receiving initial support for Alder Lake S "ADLS" too.

Going back more than a year there have been Intel "i915" kernel graphics driver patches implementing integer mode scaling support while finally for Linux 5.11 in early 2021 the support will have landed.

For months now Intel's open-source Linux driver stack has been preparing for VRR support with Gen11/Gen12 graphics. We've seen user-space patches by Intel around VRR while now they are finally sending out their key Linux kernel driver patches with the i915 DRM code.

While the Intel Extreme Tuning Utility (XTU) on Windows allows for undervolting laptop processors, currently on Linux there isn't any Intel-endorsed way for undervolting your CPU should you be interested in better thermal/power efficiency and other factors. But a hypothetical Linux kernel driver could be coming for filling such void.

Intel has begun adding support for Alderlake-S to their open-source Linux kernel graphics driver.