The Linux 5.12 kernel will allow optional, run-time disabling of Intel graphics driver security mitigations, which so far is just in regards to last year's iGPU Leak vulnerability. This i915.mitigations= module parameter control is being added as part of finally fixing the Haswell GT1 graphics support that was fallout from this mitigaion.

A new compute code path has been merged into Intel's open-source "ANV" Vulkan and "iris" Gallium3D drivers for the forthcoming Xe HP graphics hardware.

While Bob Swan has been the interim and then permanent CEO for less than three years at Intel, following much speculation heating up in recent weeks, Bob Swan is out and returning to Intel is Pat Gelsinger who will now lead as CEO.

At the start of the month Intel sent out their initial graphics driver changes targeting Linux 5.12 while now a secondary set of changes have been sent to DRM-Next.

As part of Intel's lengthy "Keem Bay" upstreaming for Linux as their latest-generation Movidius VPU offering, now that much of the core infrastructure bits are all mainlined, the latest focus has been on their Vision Processing Unit enablement.

Stemming from the renewed attention this week of Haswell GT1 graphics being broken for the past half-year under Linux with the latest versions of the kernel, a revised patch was sent out to restore that graphics support for low-end Haswell Celeron/Pentium processors. As part of that, a new option is being introduced to allow disabling security mitigations of the Intel graphics driver.

With Linux 5.11 the Intel Linux graphics driver is bringing async page-flipping for Gen9/Skylake and newer. However, patches pending for a future release (potentially 5.12) would extend that performance benefiting feature now all the way back to the Ironlake days.

While Intel is generally well regarded for their Linux development practices especially as it pertains to continuous integration and their test labs for vetting code prior to reaching the mainline Linux kernel to minimize the risk of regressions or other unintended side effects, those running older Haswell GT1 low-end graphics have seen the past several kernel versions going back a half-year yield a GPU hang at boot.

Intel has released their High Performance Computing Reference Stack 2.0 as the latest Docker image optimized for HPC/AI workloads.

The Intel-developed IWD Linux wireless daemon is out with its first feature release of 2021.

Now that more developers are returning from their holiday breaks, the first pull request to DRM-Next has been submitted of Intel kernel graphics driver material destined for Linux 5.12.

Keem Bay, Intel's third-generation Movidius VPU (Vision Processing Unit), continues seeing more upstream open-source hardware support within the Linux kernel. Coming to the Linux 5.12 kernel in a couple months will be more support within the crypto subsystem.

Yesterday Intel released an updated open-source Media SDK for leveraging media acceleration on their graphics hardware. Along with that out today is the Intel Media Driver 20.4.5 release as their dedicated Video Acceleration API (VA-API) driver for Linux systems.

At the start of Q4, Intel released Media SDK 20.3 with AV1 accelerated decode, Rocket Lake, DG1/SG1 discrete GPU support, and other improvements. Now to end out the quarter is a new release coming in at version 20.5.1.

Intel engineers continued with their decade plus tradition of providing timely hardware support (sans the discrete graphics bring-up taking a bit longer), Intel continued showing what's possible with Linux performance by means of Clear Linux, and yes more security updates were among their popular interactions in 2020.

Longtime Intel open-source graphics driver developer Chris Wilson sent out a set of 56 patches today working to improve their kernel graphics driver's scheduling performance.

It didn't land for Linux 5.11 but it looks like Linux 5.12 could end up supporting Intel's "HDR Backlight Interface" for helping newer Intel laptops with their backlight controls where they don't comply with VESA specifications but rather catering to Intel's proprietary interface.

Of all the new Linux 5.11 features and all the enablement work Intel has already completed for Xeon "Sapphire Rapids" hardware, one big feature not yet mainlined is the Advanced Matrix Extensions (AMX) support.

Intel's open-source oneAPI Data Parallel C++ compiler saw a Christmas Day update with the 2020-12 monthly update.

A few days ago there was a glibc commit mentioning Intel "LAM" and now the updated Intel documentation sheds more light on this forthcoming processor feature.

Last week the Linux 5.11 power management updates were merged while on Tuesday some additional new material was merged, primarily around Intel's P-State CPU frequency scaling governor when running with the "Schedutil" governor that makes use of the kernel's scheduler utilization data.

Intel engineers have posted the initial Linux kernel patches providing AVX-512 optimized versions of common crypto algorithms. The AVX-512 optimized versions do pan out and promise to offer huge speed-ups but are disabled by default at this stage over the negative CPU frequency/performance impact that running AVX-512 can have on CPU cores / shared threads.

After undergoing review the past several months, Intel's Platform Monitoring Technology (PMT) is merged with the Linux 5.11 kernel.

Intel released a new version of their SPMD Program Compiler (ISPC) this weekend that brings new improvements for this compiler that supports a variant of C focused on single-program, multiple-data programming for Intel's CPU and GPU targets.

It's been seven years since Intel last provided a stable release of their "xf86-video-intel" X.Org driver and nearly six years to the day since they even provided their last development snapshot of what was to be xf86-video-intel 3.0. But there still are the occasional commits to this Intel DDX driver such as this week enabling the "TearFree" functionality by default.

For the past several months we've seen Intel Key Locker support being worked on for Linux as a new feature coming to future processors for better securing AES keys. That initial Key Locker support was initially focused on the open-source compilers with the new instructions while now the Linux kernel patches have been published in preliminary form.

The networking subsystem updates have landed for the in-development Linux 5.11 kernel.

Initially found with "Elkhart Lake" SoCs and likely to be found on further future Intel client SoCs is the integrated memory controller supporting in-band ECC (IBECC). Coming with Linux 5.11 is the "IGEN6" EDAC driver for handling this error detection and correction on Intel SoCs sporting IBECC.

Back in October Intel announced Iris Xe MAX as discrete graphics for laptops. The overall Linux state for Xe MAX hasn't been too clear and we haven't had any hardware access to this Intel laptop discrete graphics hardware to report our own findings, but their developers have now cleared up the situation. The good news is the Xe MAX graphics can be used for a GPU-accelerated Linux virtual machine. The bad news is the Xe MAX support doesn't yet allow for dGPU usage by the host outside of a virtual machine context as it needs "two different [Linux] kernels" for operation in conjunction with the integrated graphics.

Adding to the new features coming for Linux 5.11, the Intel "RFIM" driver has been queued up as the company's latest open-source driver. The RFIM driver tweaks the DDR memory rates and fully integrated voltage regulator stemming if believed to be causing WiFi/5G interference.