Last year Linux kernel developers began clearing out code for Intel's nearly two decade old "Carillo Ranch" platform that was a 90nm 32-bit single core processor for embedded devices in the sub 20 Watt space. It was a ~2007 product that never shipped but the Linux kernel code was left in the upstream tree until beginning to see it removed last year.
Intel News Archives
2,912 Intel open-source and Linux related news articles on Phoronix since 2006.
Intel has published SVT-AV1 2.0 as the newest major feature release to this leading open-source CPU-based AV1 video encoder. Along with various API changes, SVT-AV1 2.0 has yet more encode performance optimizations.
Intel today is introducing the Core i9 14900KS as their newest "world's fastest desktop processor" with up to 6.2GHz clock frequencies.
The current Intel Data Center GPU Flex Series products that were announced in 2022 built off Arctic Sound M are the Data Center GPU Flex 140 and Data Center GPU Flex 170 while now a new "170G" variant was added for Intel's open-source Mesa OpenGL and Vulkan drivers.
While the new Intel Xe kernel graphics driver was upstreamed in Linux 6.8 as this modern DRM driver that is opt-in for current generation hardware and aims to be the default for Lunar Lake / Xe2, currently with Mesa you must build the Intel ANV Vulkan and Iris Gallium3D driver code with the "intel-xe-kmd" option to enable compatibility for this alternative kernel driver to i915. With Mesa 24.1 coming next quarter, that Intel Xe kernel driver support will be enabled out-of-the-box.
Intel has released new CPU microcode for addressing five security issues and additionally there is newly-merged Linux kernel code for mitigating the new Register File Data Sampling "RFDS" micro-architectural vulnerability affecting Atom / E cores.
Nearly one year ago Intel published the X86S specification (formerly stylized as "X86-S") for simplifying the Intel architecture by removing support for 16-bit and 32-bit operating systems. X86S is a big step forward with dropping legacy mode, 5-level paging improvements, and other modernization improvements for x86_64. With the Linux 6.9 kernel more x86S bits are in place for this ongoing effort.
After two years of talking about Intel FRED as Flexible Return and Event Delivery for overhauling how transitions are done between privilege levels (CPU rings), the support code was finally in good shape for merging now with the Linux 6.9 kernel.
Intel this morning released Continuous Profiler as open-source, a software solution developed by Intel Granulate for aiming to help boost CPU performance.
Intel today released their open-source OpenVINO 2024.0 toolkit for optimizing and deploying AI inference across a range of hardware.
The VK_EXT_descriptor_buffer extension was made public in November 2022 with Vulkan 1.3.235 while finally this past week Intel's open-source Mesa "ANV" driver has merged support for this extension. This Vulkan extension is important for Linux gaming and other scenarios to lower CPU overhead.
Intel has made open-source its NPU Acceleration Library (intel-npu-acceleration-library) as a user-space library for Windows and Linux systems for interfacing with the Neural Processing Unit (NPU) found initially on their new Meteor Lake laptops.
Intel has published oneDNN 3.4 as the newest version of this Deep Neural Network Library that is part of their oneAPI software collection. The oneDNN library provides deep learning primitives for software like PyTorch, MXNet, ONNX Runtime, OpenVINO, MATLAB Deep Learning Toolbox, and other sotware.
A last set of drm-intel-next feature patches were submitted this week for DRM-Next to stage ahead of the upcoming Linux 6.9 kernel merge window.
Upstreamed for Linux 6.8 is the experimental Xe kernel graphics driver that is a modern replacement to the "i915" Direct Rendering Manager driver. The Xe kernel driver targets Tigerlake graphics and newer while it won't be until Lunar Lake / Xe2 when it aims to become the default driver for Intel iGPU/dGPU graphics. For the upcoming Linux 6.9 kernel merge window are more feature changes and fixes to this new open-source Intel kernel graphics driver.
The Linux kernel has supported the Intel Hardware Feedback Interface "HFI" via the "intel_hfi" driver since 2022 for bettering supporting Core hybrid processors. The Intel HFI can be used for communicating performance and energy efficiency capabilities of individual CPU cores of the system. In turn the Linux kernel can leverage Intel HFI details for better task placement among the available CPU cores/threads. With a new patch series, the Intel HFI driver can "save tons of CPU cycles" by only enabling it when needed.
Intel confirmed at their MWC 2024 briefings that Granite Rapids D will debut in 2025 as the successor to Ice Lake D for Xeon D edge processors.
Sent in this morning via the "x86/urgent" pull request ahead of the Linux 6.8-rc6 kernel later today is a set of patches from Intel to ensure clearing of CPU buffers using the VERW instruction happens at the latest possible point in the return-to-userspace code path. This is being done to better protect against CPU bugs like Microarchitectural Data Sampling (MDS).
Back in 2020 Intel announced OSPRay Studio as its new oneAPI app for ray-tracing and photorealistic rendering built atop its OSPRay ray-tracing engine. Since then we've continued to watch OSPRay Studio pickup new features, add GPU rendering support, and more. On Friday night the OSPRay Studio 1.0 release was finally christened.
Intel's latest release of their Intel Extension for PyTorch "IPEX" now officially supports their consumer Arc A-Series Graphics hardware across Linux, Windows, and also WSL2.
Intel has released a new version of QATlib, their user-space support library for the QuickAssist Technology (QAT) via add-in hardware and recent Xeon Scalable processors.
Intel's Iris Gallium3D driver for modern OpenGL support works on hardware going back to old Broadwell processors with "Gen8" integrated graphics as does the HasVK Vulkan driver for Haswell/Broadwell. But in allowing to focus on the common Skylake "Gen9" graphics and newer/future Intel graphics architectures, pending Mesa code is working to split-off that old Broadwell/Gen8 code. The Gen8 support will continue to be in-tree but separated from the rest of the compiler code so that the code can continue to be improved for newer Intel hardware without risking regressions/breaking those still on Broadwell era processors.
At the end of last year Intel hosted a survey of open-source developers to collect their feeback on various open-source software issues. Intel’s 2023 Open Source Community Survey is all wrapped up, the data tallied up, and the results emailed out today to participants.
There are some new Linux kernel patches that were posted by Intel on Monday that aim to help enhance the overall performance and power efficiency of new Meteor Lake laptop processors under Linux.
Intel is upstreaming the necessary Lunar Lake "LNL" graphics firmware nice and early to linux-firmware.git for their "Xe2" integrated graphics.
The Intel "i915" LInux kernel graphics driver has been working to wrap-up support for enabling Adaptive Sync SDP for DisplayPort (DP) for their graphics cards.
Intel on Friday released Open Image Denoise 2.2 as the newest version of this open-source denoising library used by Blender and other software.
Intel engineers working on their open-source Mesa OpenGL/Vulkan driver code currently replay captured error state / GPU hangs using a simulator, but a new patch proposal allows for replaying GPU hangs on the actual hardware. In turn this will hopefully help Intel driver developers better address some real-world issues.
As part of the AMD color management and HDR efforts worked on by AMD Linux engineers along with Valve and other stakeholders like Igalia developers, Intel engineers have posted their plane color pipeline implementation that follows the cross-vendor API proposal.
A new feature coming with the display engine on Intel Lunar Lake's Xe2 graphics is an adaptive sharpening filter that has minimal power and performance impact.
Intel's oneDNN Deep Neural Network Library used for building deep learning applications is preparing another release that continues going heavy on performance optimizations and preparing for future Intel hardware generations.
While Intel is the company behind XeSS - Xe Super Sampling, under Linux it's an ongoing story of having to hide the fact that Intel graphics are in use when trying to enjoy Windows games running on Steam Play that are XeSS-enabled. The latest example is the HITMAN 3 game that can work on modern Arc Graphics as long as you conceal the fact under Linux that Intel graphics are being used.
Intel's Iris Gallium3D driver for providing open-source OpenGL support on Linux systems has implemented indirect draw generation. For software relying heavily on indirect draws will see a "massive boost" in performance.
It's been nearly one year to the day since outlining intel's AVX-512 powered sorting library to offer blazing fast sort speeds. Over the past year has brought the 1.0 release, new algorithms in v2.0, AVX2 support and more AVX-512 optimizations in v4.0, and now today Intel is out with x86-simd-sort 5.0 with yet more performance improvements.
Webcamera support on recent generations of Intel laptops have tended to be a mess due to the Intel IPU6 requiring an out-of-tree kernel driver and a proprietary user-space component. But fortunately thanks to the work of Linar and Red Hat on a "SoftISP" implementation within libcamera, it's becoming possible to leverage these recent MIPI-based webcameras on an open-source software stack.
Along with the recently merged Intel OpenGL and Vulkan driver support for Arrow Lake next-generation Core processors with Mesa 24.1, it looks like the i915 kernel graphics driver support for Arrow Lake will be all-set with the upcoming Linux 6.9 kernel cycle.
Intel Arrow Lake platform support has been merged to Mesa 24.1 for providing the ANV Vulkan and Iris Gallium3D (OpenGL) open-source drivers with support for the next-generation Intel Core integrated graphics.
Ahead of any processors being released with support for Advanced Performance Extensions (APX) and Advanced Vector Extensions 10 (AVX10), Intel's in-house Clear Linux distribution is already beginning to roll-out binaries compiled for APX+AVX10 use.
Intel's hybrid core handling for modern Intel Core CPUs with a mix of P and E cores has largely been in good shape under Linux for a while. Intel Thread Director support has come along with various Linux kernel improvements to better handle task placement between the P and E cores. One area seeing new work now though is for virtual machines (VMs) running on Intel hybrid systems with a new Linux kernel patch series working on Thread Director Virtualization.
Intel's open-source oneAPI components continue to not only embrace Intel's diverse range of CPUs / GPUs / accelerators but continues to better support competing platforms too. Today's Open Image Denoise release candidate brings more for Apple hardware, AArch64 processors, and NVIDIA CUDA.
Webcameras on newer Intel laptops have been challenging for Linux use without resorting to an out-of-tree driver and proprietary user-space components, but that's been thankfully changing with progress being made on an open-source stack. There's still proprietary firmware necessary for enabling the IPU6 image processing unit, but at least that too is now in linux-firmware.git for easy distribution and packaging by Linux distributions.
While Intel typically does a great job with their open-source Linux hardware support with enabling all features under Linux and doing so in a timely manner -- often well in advance of the client and server hardware availability -- an exception in recent years has been around the web cam support for many newer Intel laptops. Since Alder Lake an increasing number of Intel-powered laptops have been relying on a raw MIPI camera sensor connected to the IPU6 IP. Intel has been tightly controlling the intellectual property around IPU6 so in turn their Linux support has consisted of an out-of-tree kernel driver and a proprietary user-space component. But thanks to Linaro and Red Hat, an open-source alternative has been forming.
For the better part of two years we've seen Intel open-source software engineers working on preparing the Linux kernel for FRED, the Flexible Return and Event Delivery for defining new transitions for changing privilege levels. Intel's been working hard on the FRED kernel plumbing for better performance, lower response times, and improved robustness and it's looking like FRED could be set to land come Linux 6.9.
Intel engineers on Wednesday released OpenVINO 2023.3 as the latest major update to this leading open-source AI toolkit. The OpenVINO 2023.3 brings "full support" for new Emerald Rapids and Meteor Lake processors, other Intel hardware support improvements, and continuing to expand support around generative AI (GenAI) and large language models (LLMs).
While AMD's GPUOpen team developed the Radeon Memory Visualizer for their own Radeon graphics processors, thanks to the software working out well and being open-source and the profiling/dump format being public, the Intel open-source Vulkan Linux driver has added support for it. With the Intel ANV Mesa driver you can now generate Radeon Memory Visualizer (RMV) compatible dumps that can then be loaded into the GPUOpen software for analyzing the video memory behavior of Intel's integrated and discrete graphics.
While Intel's Sierra Forest as their first all-E-core Xeon processor with up to 288 cores per socket isn't launching until around the middle of this calendar year, Intel Linux engineers already sent out their first kernel patch in beginning to target its successor: Clearwater Forest.
When it comes to the Linux kernel's "crypto" subsystem for various cryptographic and compression algorithms and various hardware drivers, the new additions for Linux 6.8 are particularly interesting on the Intel side.
Linux 6.7 introduced the "ia32_emulation=" boot option for enabling/disabling support for x86 32-bit programs and the ability to execute 32-bit system calls. This is part of the effort of some Linux distributions working to restrict x86 32-bit user-space support where not needed in order to reduce the software attack surface while still having a boot-time option for those wanting to enable 32-bit support or to otherwise disable it if your kernel build keeps it enabled.
Following last week's Linux 6.8 power management updates, Linux PM/ACPI subsystem maintainer Rafael Wysocki of Intel sent out a secondary set of changes this morning. Most notable with this second round of power management material is allowing Intel Core Ultra "Meteor Lake" processors to clock higher with the P-State CPU frequency scaling driver.
Intel engineer Dan Williams continues leading the charge around Compute Express Link (CXL) enablement for the Linux kernel.
2912 Intel news articles published on Phoronix.