Intel News Archives

There's a follow-up to yesterday's surprising story of Alyssa Rosenzweig stepping away from Asahi Linux and that ARM graphics driver work where she led reverse engineering and development of the Asahi Gallium3D and HoneyKrisp Vulkan drivers within Mesa. She's now working at Intel on their Linux graphics drivers.

Earlier this month Intel released LLM-Scaler 1.0 as part of their Project Battlematrix initiative. This is a Docker container effort to deliver speedy AI inference performance with multi-GPU scaling and PCIe P2P support and more.

Released minutes ago was the newest monthly feature release to the Intel Compute Runtime providing open-source OpenCL and Level Zero capabilities on Intel graphics hardware.

As part of Intel's ongoing Project Battlematrix efforts that include SR-IOV support for Arc Pro cards as well as multi-device (multi-GPU) support for allowing up to eight Intel Arc Pro graphics cards in a single system, today Intel engineers posted their preliminary Linux driver patches for pinned device memory functionality that is important for multi-GPU usage.

Intel's newest contribution to the upstream LLVM compiler stack is XeVM as their Multi-Level Intermediate Representation "MLIR" dialect catering to modern Intel graphics processors.

Ahead of the next Intel Compute Runtime oneAPI/OpenCL release, a new version of the Intel Graphics Compiler "IGC" has been released for Windows and Linux.

Released on Friday were the Linux 6.16.1 and Linux 6.15.10 stable kernel point releases. Notable there is an Intel i915 kernel graphics driver performance regression fix with some users having reported as much as a 30% performance hit on prior Linux kernel versions.

Intel FRED has been seeing Linux software enablement going on for the past three years. FRED is the Flexible Return Event Delivery that overhauls CPU transitions between privilege levels with a goal of lower ring transition latency and more robust software support. Unfortunately it has a late breaking incompatible change to the architecture and the Linux kernel is now being patched for it.

One of the latest departures from Intel amid their ongoing restructuring is the official maintainer of the "habanalabs" accelerator Linux kernel driver that provides support for their range of Gaudi AI accelerator products.

SR-IOV for virtualization with the Intel Xe kernel graphics driver will only be supported on the Arc Pro products and -- unfortunately -- not the consumer Arc B-Series graphics cards.

While it looked like Linux 6.17 was going to be a good baseline for support with upcoming Intel Panther Lake powered laptops given that this next kernel release ships with the Xe3 graphics enabled by default and other bits coming together, it looks like there is at least one late item only being presented today in patch form: a new "SoC Power Slider" feature as part of the Intel thermal driver for this new feature of Panther Lake SoCs.

A new version of the Intel Implicit SPMD Program Compiler "ISPC" was just published for supporting that C programming language variant optimized for single program. multiple data (SPMD) programming that is optimized for Intel's various hardware offerings. While catering to Intel hardware, ISPC 1.28 notably adds new AMD Zen 4 and Zen 5 processor targets.

The IDXD Linux kernel driver used for the Data Streaming Accelerator (DSA) support on recent Xeon processors is being cleaned up for some "not so happy code paths" after an Intel engineer uncovered memory leaks and other troubles with the open-source driver code.

This Patch Tuesday has brought a slew of Intel CPU microcode updates for the past few processor generations to address six new high severity vulnerabilities.

Intel has introduced another new PCI device ID to their open-source Linux graphics driver stack for signifying another likely product on the way based on the Battlemage BMG-G21 GPU.

Intel today announced their August 2025 Software Update to Project Battlematrix and the release of the LLM-Scaler 1.0 container for optimized AI inference support on Intel Arc B-Series graphics hardware.

For over a year now Intel has been working on a new DRM sharpness property for making use of Lunar Lake's new adaptive sharpening filter capabilities built into its display engine. This new sharpening filter with Lunar Lake and future SoCs can hep with sharpening blurred or upscaled content and over the past year has gone through several rounds of code review. The latest patches were sent out last week for this DRM sharpness property.

Well, it's an unpleasant afternoon in Linux land with more signs of the ongoing impact from Intel's corporate-wide restructuring. Just after writing about Intel's CPU temperature monitoring driver now left unmaintained/orphaned, more patches hit the public Linux kernel mailing list to mark additional Intel drivers as orphaned and removing maintainer entries for Linux developers no longer at Intel.

There is yet more apparent fallout from Intel's recent layoffs/restructurings as it impacts the Linux kernel... The coretemp driver that provides CPU core temperature monitoring support for all Intel processors going back many years is now set to an orphaned state with the former driver maintainer no longer at Intel and no one immediately available to serve as its new maintainer.

Intel is phasing out 16x multi-sample anti-aliasing (MSAA) with modern upscaling tech like XeSS / FSR / DLSS being superior and more performant plus there being alternative anti-aliasing techniques. Upcoming Xe3 graphics are seeing 16x MSAA support retroactively disabled as the Intel graphics driver moves away from this highest-level MSAA sampling count.

On top of all the Linux 6.17 kernel graphics driver feature changes that landed last week like promoting Panther Lake's Xe3 graphics to on-by-default, SR-IOV for Battlemage GPUs, multi-GPU preparations, Wildcat Lake enablement work, and more, some additional Intel Xe kernel graphics driver changes were submitted today for merging to Linux 6.17 in the coming days.

Last year Intel's open-source Compute Runtime stack for OpenCL and oneAPI Level Zero support discontinued its support for Broadwell through Ice Lake integrated graphics to focus strictly on Tigerlake with Intel "Gen12" graphics and newer. Today though they issued an update to their legacy driver branch for helping with the graphics compute support on those older hardware platforms.

Today the first Linux kernel patch was posted for Intel's Nova Lake as the anticipated successor to the Intel Core Ultra Series 2 "Arrow Lake" processors. Today's patch confirms that Intel Nova Lake will be the first Intel processors under their new "Family 18" umbrella.

Following the recent Intel driver being orphaned due to layoffs at the company and other Intel Linux engineering changes due to the ongoing restructuring at the company, for the Linux 6.17 kernel there are some additional Intel driver maintainer changes spotted.

The Error Detection And Correction "EDAC" driver improvements were merged earlier this week for the ongoing Linux 6.17 merge window and with that comes a number of Intel hardware platforms now being supported.

This evening Intel released XeSS 2.1 as the newest version of their Xe Super Sampling library with upscaling, frame generation, and low latency optimizations for gamers. Notable with XeSS 2.1 is that it introduces XeSS Frame Generation with Xe Low Latency support now for non-Intel GPUs.

Intel's accelerator efforts in recent generations of Xeon processors have been challenging to say the least. From limited software support and configuration obstacles to some current-generation accelerators not being safe for VM use due to security issues to having to deal with higher latency and other nuances if wanting to achieve decent performance. One of the Linux kernel users of Intel's QuickAssist Technology "QAT" accelerators has been the FSCRYPT code for native file encryption support. But the Linux kernel with the FSCRYPT usage is now demoting the Intel QAT accelerator support along with other problem-causing accelerator drivers.

The Linux support for Intel's next-generation Panther Lake SoCs appears to be largely set with Linux 6.16 ahead of the Core Ultra Series 3 laptops debuting in the coming months. There are though a few stragglers of Panther Lake support such as the performance events code in Linux 6.17 only now landing the perf integration.

Released on Friday was a new version of the oneDNN deep neural network library maintained by Intel and the UXL Foundation. This library used by various deep learning applications continues preparing for upcoming Intel CPUs and GPUs.

Another hit to the open-source Intel software ecosystem this year was the company formally archiving/discontinuing work on the PlaidML deep learning software. PlaidML was the deep learning framework that Intel acquired back in 2018 as part of their acquisition of Vertex.AI. PlaidML had a goal of "deep learning for every platform" but unfortunately those ambitions didn't materialize.

Intel Linux software engineers have recently been busy working on Wildcat Lake support primarily for the kernel drivers while now that work has been extended to Mesa for the Intel Iris Gallium3D (OpenGL) and ANV Vulkan drivers.

The most depressing news of the week: Intel is ending their performance-optimized Clear Linux distribution. Over the past decade the Clear Linux operating system has shown what's possible with out-of-the-box performance on x86_64 hardware... Not just for Intel platforms but even showing extremely great performance results on AMD x86_64 too. But with the cost-cutting going on at Intel, Clear Linux is now being sunset.

Intel is out today with its monthly feature update to the Compute Runtime as their open-source GPU compute stack providing Level Zero and OpenCL API support on Windows and Linux systems. This month there is new hardware support, more performance optimizations, and some new features.

Intel engineers yesterday released QATlib 25.08 as the first new update in nearly one year for this QuickAssist Technology library. Intel QuickAssist allows hardware-accelerated offloading of various security authentication and compression operations from the CPU onto dedicated accelerator IP found in recent Xeon processors. Intel's QATlib is the open-source library for enabling that magic to happen from the user-space side.

The Intel Media Driver is out with its quarterly feature release for bringing all of the latest open-source video acceleration improvements for Intel graphics hardware on Linux. Enhancing support for upcoming Panther Lake SoCs continues to be a primary focus.

The upcoming Linux 6.17 kernel is going to be an especially nice release for users of modern Intel graphics hardware on Linux. The very latest feature being enabled for this next Linux kernel version is SR-IOV for Battlemage GPUs to vastly enhance the Intel Linux graphics experience in virtualized environments.

While the Intel Media SDK with VA-API has long supported accelerated video decoding, the latest Mesa 25.2 development code has now landed support for AV1 decoding using the Vulkan Video API with the Intel ANV driver for Xe2 Battlemage / Lunar Lake graphics and Gfx125 Xe graphics too.

The latest round of cost-cutting at Intel seems to be having a larger impact on their software engineering efforts than some of their previous rounds of layoffs. In addition to a prominent Linux kernel developer veteran leaving Intel last week where he worked for the past 14 years and responsible for many great upstream improvements, other Intel software engineers working on their Linux/open-source affairs have also been departing. In just the latest instance, one of the upstream Intel Linux kernel drivers is now "orphaned" due to the developer departing and no one experienced left to maintain the code.

With the upcoming Linux 6.17 kernel the Intel Xe kernel graphics driver is enabling Panther Lake graphics out-of-the-box. Now going along with that Linux 6.17+ support out-of-the-box, the Mesa OpenGL and Vulkan user-space drivers are also ready to declare their Xe3 Panther Lake graphics support by default.

One of the interesting new additions with the upcoming Intel Xe3 integrated and discrete graphics is the Variable Register Thread "VRT" feature. Making use of Variable Register Thread can reduce register splitting, reduce bandwidth consumption, and improve overall performance. More background information on Intel VRT can be found in that aforelinked Phoronix article. But now the ability is coming to optionally disable VRT.

Amid Intel's ongoing financial difficulties and multiple rounds of layoffs some Linux engineers at Intel left last year and there's been at least one prominent departure this week amid the latest round of challenges at the company.

In addition to Intel preparing Bartlett Lake S EDAC driver support for Linux 6.17, several other recent and upcoming Intel processors are also set to see Error Detection and Correction (EDAC) driver coverage with this next version of the Linux kernel.

Intel has some terrific improvements lined up for their modern "Xe" kernel graphics driver with the upcoming Linux 6.17 kernel cycle. New hardware support, SR-IOV preparations for Battlemage, other Intel Battlemage work, and also preparations for the upcoming multi-device support.

Intel discontinued Graphics Virtualization Technology (GVT-G) support several generations ago in favor of supporting SR-IOV for graphics virtualization with Iris Xe and newer integrated/discrete graphics hardware. But with the transition as well from the Linux i915 to Xe kernel graphics drivers, the official SR-IOV support state on Intel graphics is in a bit of an awkward state.

In addition to Intel upstreaming the Xe3 graphics firmware needed for upcoming Panther Lake SoCs to linux-firmware.git so those firmware binaries can get picked up by Linux distributions ahead of Panther Lake laptops shipping, Intel also upstreamed fan control firmware as a first for their graphics card efforts.

With the upcoming Linux 6.17 kernel cycle Intel is further building out their Platform Monitoring Technology (PMT) capabilities with the introduction of a new discovery driver.

As a good sign of the progress being made on the Xe3 integrated graphics Linux support and of the Core Ultra Panther Lake launch approaching, the necessary graphics firmware binaries have now been upstreamed to the linux-firmware.git repository.

Intel software engineers continue ironing out their Linux support for Bartlett Lake.

Intel today sent out a batch of new kernel graphics/display driver code for queuing ahead of the Linux 6.17 merge window opening in a few weeks. There is now DRM Panic support for the Intel i915 and Xe kernel drivers, Wildcat Lake "WCL" display enablement, and experimental flip queue support for Lunar Lake and Panther Lake hardware, among other changes coming for the Intel drivers in Linux 6.17.

Sent out today was the newest drm-misc-next pull request of changes built up over the past week for DRM-Next ahead of the Linux 6.17 kernel cycle. The drm-misc-next material is the usual random assortment of DRM display/graphics driver changes and core improvements, which this week includes some TTM eviction work.