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In September, we were the first to report that Intel was developing “Software Defined Silicon” support to enable additional licensed hardware features not otherwise disclosed. Intel hasn’t spoken about the controversial feature in terms of product plans, but this weekend they released a new revision of this Intel “SDSi†Linux driver.
Intel Software Defined Silicon “SDSi” safely enables additional features of the processor silicon that would not otherwise be exposed out of the box. It is probably with Intel Xeon processors in mind where Intel could offer additional extra features for those who wish to opt for additional features like, for example, theoretically AVX-512 or AMX, but without that license the feature would not even be exposed. with being baked in the processor. Ten years ago, Intel tried a similar concept with the “Intel Upgrade Service” which, if you pay for an activation code, could allow the exposure of additional cache, clock frequencies. higher and / or Hyper Threading for some processors.
Intel Software Defined Silicon seems to be more workstation / server oriented given how fast Linux works. Officially, this Linux SDSi driver provides a “post-manufacturing mechanism to enable additional silicon functionality”. The SDSi kernel driver allows user space to provide a certificate that would be written to internal NVRAM and then activate it, while still being able to read the existing SDSi configuration state for a processor.
The Linux SDSi code is the generic infrastructure that surrounds it and does not expose the kind of hardware features that Intel can play with as possible licensed upgrade features for future processors. These four fixes were sent out on Saturday to make more changes to the Intel Platform (Platform Monitoring Technology) code and finally introduce this Intel SDSi driver. As part of the series is also the introduction of the Intel Vendor Specific Extended Capabilities (VSEC / DVSEC) driver code.
We’ll see if Intel is trying to bring in the Software Defined Silicon driver for the 5.17 kernel cycle or if it keeps crawling the mailing list for a while, which would indicate how well Intel may or may not be looking to announce this feature. with certain products. .
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