Intel's open-source team working on their media driver for VA-API Linux video acceleration on HD/UHD/Iris Graphics is preparing for its first release of 2020.

Besides all the usual hardware enablement activities with the usual names by Intel's massive open-source team working on the Linux kernel, one of the more peculiar bring-ups recently has been around the "Intel Gateway SoC" with more work abound for Linux 5.7.

Intel's open-source "ANV" Vulkan driver for Linux doesn't see much attention for pre-Broadwell hardware but today it saw a big improvement for Vulkan compute on aging Gen7 Ivybridge/Haswell era hardware.

Intel just sent out their initial pull request of new feature changes/improvements to DRM-Next that in turn is for landing in about one month's time when the Linux 5.7 merge window kicks off. With taking longer than usual to send in their first round of feature updates, this first of several pull requests already amounts to over 400 patches.

Intel open-source developers have contributed support for VA-API acceleration of HEVC REXT "Range Extensions" content with the widely-used FFmpeg library.

At least not another hardware vulnerability, but CVE-2020-2732 appears to stem from unfinished code within the Intel VMX code for the Linux kernel's Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) support.

Intel today formally announced their "Cascade Lake Refresh" Xeon processors with higher clock speeds in some cases but also more aggressive pricing to go up against the AMD EPYC 7002 series.

For four years we have been seeing Intel Secure Guard Extensions (SGX) bring-up for the Linux kernel and that work continues with the Intel SGX Enclaves support now having been sent out for review twenty-seven times as it tries to work its way towards the mainline Linux kernel.

Version 20.07.15711 of the Intel Compute Runtime was released this morning.

We are learning more about the media engine capabilities with the forthcoming Intel "Gen12" (Xe) Tiger Lake graphics.

It has been one month and a few days since Intel first made public the need for graphics driver patching of Gen 7/7.5 graphics for older Ivybridge / Haswell hardware to fix a graphics hardware flaw. That vulnerability also affected the common Intel Gen9 graphics but there the mitigation was uneventful and quickly merged without causing any performance hit. But for Ivybridge/Haswell one month later the graphics driver mitigation for CVE-2019-14615 is still being addressed.

With a new patch series for the Linux kernel, memory access performance by one measurement can improve by 116% on a dual socket Intel server with Optane DC Persistent Memory.

Version 20.06.15619 of the open-source Intel Compute Runtime was released on Friday as powering the company's modern Linux graphics hardware compute stack.

Intel Blackhole Render support was finally merged today for the new Intel "Iris" Gallium3D OpenGL driver default, the older i965 driver for pre-Broadwell hardware, and also the Mesa state tracker for Gallium3D drivers.

While Linux 5.5 is out in the wild now as the latest stable version of the Linux kernel, it turns out some Intel kernel graphics driver patches were overlooked and this can spell trouble for some users.

Intel's open-source group continues working on Cloud-Hypervisor as a Rustlang-written hypervisor for modern Linux VMs and building off the shoulders of Google's CrosVM, Firecracker, and Rust-VMM. Cloud-Hypervisor 0.5 was released on Friday as a big update to this cloud-centered hypervisor.

As another step towards tightening up the Linux kernel security, Intel's Kristen Carlson Accardi has proposed "FGKASLR" as a significant step forward for better enhancing the Kernel Address Space Layout Randomization.

Intel firmware expert Brian Richardson was at FOSDEM 2020 to talk up UEFI Capsule Update functionality and the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) for allowing OEMs/ODMs to easily distribute firmware updates to Linux users for application with the Fwupd firmware updating utility.

Intel's Linux graphics stack has seen a lot of major changes in recent years besides the addition of their "ANV" Vulkan driver. The Intel Linux OpenGL driver saw their new Gallium3D driver, NIR has come about as the new intermediate representation used across their drivers, and other fundamental changes and improvements. The latest underlying work is introducing a pattern-based code generator for their graphics compiler.

Towards the end of last year Intel quietly released an "ignition firmware" for the Management Engine (ME) on their Cascade Lake platform that is also their first ME firmware release to be under a license permitting redistribution.

There is plenty of PCI work that landed for the Linux 5.6 kernel merge window.

Intel on Friday released Deep Neural Network Library (DNNL) version 1.2, formerly known as MKL-DNN. With this release comes both new features and better performance.

Following on from last week's story that it was looking like Linux 5.6 would drop Intel MPX support, that has now taken place.

Earlier this month when Intel disclosed CVE-2019-14615 as a security vulnerability affecting their graphics architecture, older Gen7 graphics saw a huge hit to their performance with the initial patches for addressing this vulnerability on Ivy Bridge and Haswell processors. Fortunately, a new mitigation patch series was sent out this week where they believe the performance costs are now avoided.

Intel last night made public two more data leakage disclosures, which tie back to Zombieload and November's TAA issue.

Habana Labs, the AI start-up being bought out by Intel, is still striving towards upstreaming their Gaudi processor support code for AI training.

Earlier this month I wrote about Intel SST Core-Power patches as part of Intel's Speed Select's functionality for more control over per-core power/frequency behavior based upon the software running on each core. The "core-power" profile support appears ready now for Linux 5.6.

Patches written two months ago for Intel's ANV open-source Vulkan driver have now been merged ahead of the imminent Mesa 20.0 feature freeze and branching.

As more last minute work for the upcoming Mesa 20.0 is initial OpenGL tessellation support for Intel's OpenSWR driver.

After missing their original target of transitioning to Intel Gallium3D by default for Mesa 19.3 as the preferred OpenGL Linux driver on Intel graphics hardware, this milestone has now been reached for Mesa 20.0!