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Updated 2025-07-08 14:15
Docker Performance With KPTI Page Table Isolation Patches
Overall most of our benchmarks this week of the new Linux Kernel Page Table Isolation (KPTI) patches coming as a result of the Meltdown vulnerability have showed minimal impact overall on system performance. The exceptions have obviously been with workloads having high kernel interactions like demanding I/O cases and in terms of real-world impact, databases. But when testing VMs there's been some minor impact more broadly than bare metal testing and also Wine performance has been impacted. The latest having been benchmarked is seeing if the Docker performance has been impacted by the KPTI patches to see if it's any significant impact since overall the patched system overhead certainly isn't anything close to how it was initially hyped by some other media outlets.
Marek Working On 32-bit GPU Pointers For RadeonSI
Well known open-source AMD 3D driver developer Marek Olšák has published a set of new patches featuring his latest optimization work: 32-bit GPU pointers...
Retpoline v5 Published For Fending Off Spectre Branch Target Injection
David Woodhouse of Amazon has sent out the latest quickly-revising patches for introducing the "Retpoline" functionality to the Linux kernel for mitigating the Spectre "variant 2" attack...
Vulkan 1.0.67 Released With Conservative Rasterization Extension
The Khronos Group has released their first Vulkan graphics/compute programming specification update of 2018...
UBports Is Making Progress With Unity 8 On The Desktop
While it's approaching one year since Canonical decided to divest from Unity 8 and mobile/convergence, the UBports community continues making some progress in getting their forked desktop environment ready for their forked Ubuntu Touch environment as well as the desktop...
OpenBSD & FreeBSD Are Still Formulating Kernel Plans To Address Meltdown+Spectre
On Friday DragonFlyBSD's Matthew Dillon already landed his DragonFly kernel fixes for the Meltdown vulnerability affecting Intel CPUs. But what about the other BSDs?..
AMD Did NOT Disable Branch Prediction With A Zen Microcode Update
With the plethora of software security updates coming out over the past few days in the wake of the Meltdown and Spectre disclosure, released by SUSE was a Family 17h "Zen" CPU microcode update that we have yet to see elsewhere... It claims to disables branch prediction, but I've confirmed with AMD that is not actually the case...
Ubuntu 17.10 To Be Re-Released Next Week
Last month Ubuntu 17.10 ISOs were pulled due to a BIOS/UEFI corrupting problem. They got the problem under control by the end of December and there is a software fix available for affected laptops, particularly a number of Lenovo laptops and those from a few other vendors. Next week a fixed Ubuntu 17.10 release is now expected...
AMD PSP Affected By Remote Code Execution Vulnerability
While all eyes have been on Intel this week with the Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities, a disclosure was publicly made this week surrounding AMD's PSP Secure Processor in an unrelated security bulletin...
Wine 3.0-RC5 Released With More Bug Fixes
We are stepping closer to the official Wine 3.0 release but not quite there yet though it's looking like it could be here within the next week or two...
DragonFlyBSD Lands Fixes For Meltdown Vulnerability
Linux, macOS, and Windows has taken most of the operating system attention when it comes down to the recently-disclosed Meltdown vulnerability but the BSDs too are prone to this CPU issue. DragonFlyBSD lead developer Matthew Dillon has landed his fixes for Meltdown...
Wine Takes Minor Performance Hit Running Windows Programs On Linux With KPTI
With word this morning that Wine performance may be impacted by the Linux KPTI patches stealing the spotlight this week, I ran some basic benchmarks of Wine in different configurations looking at the performance impact of the kernel page table isolation patches.
NVIDIA Mainlining Tegra186 DRM Support For Linux 4.16
Nearly one year after rolling out the Jetson TX2 developer board with the "Tegra186" SoC, the Tegra DRM driver in Linux 4.16 will finally be offering basic display support with this open-source driver...
Fedora 28 Taking To Modularizing Their Anaconda Installer
When talking about the Fedora/RedHat Anaconda installer it still brings back bad memories from the Anaconda fallout a few years ago when they went through some painful transitions that also led to release delays. In 2018, Fedora/RedHat developers are taking up the initiative of modularizing the Anaconda installer...
Wine Performance May Be Impacted By Linux KPTI Patches
Besides VM performance and databases and heavy I/O taking a performance hit in the "Kernel Page Table Isolation" patches in the wake of the Spectre and Meltdown attack, it looks like Wine's performance may also be impaired...
Red Hat's Latest Nouveau Developer Posts Updated NIR Code
Not only is RadeonSI working on NIR support but Red Hat has begun working on NIR support for the open-source NVIDIA "Nouveau" driver as part of a compute effort and possible Vulkan support in the future...
AMD Posts Last KFD Kernel Patches For Discrete GPUs, Needed For Upstream ROCm
AMD has posted their remaining patches for now for getting the discrete GPU support upstream in the AMDKFD "Kernel Fusion Driver" that is part of their ROCm compute stack...
Xilinx ZynqMP DisplayPort DRM/KMS Driver Posted
Xilinx is interested in contributing the latest DRM/KMS driver upstream...
Tessellation Shaders Land For RadeonSI NIR Backend
The work led by Valve Linux driver developer Timothy Arceri on adding tessellation shader support to RadeonSI's NIR code-path has been merged to Mesa 17.4-dev Git...
Valve Ships Its First SteamOS Brewmaster Beta Of 2018
While SteamOS has felt like it's just been on life-support the past year, Valve is starting off 2018 by a fairly sizable SteamOS Brewmaster Beta update...
Linux KPTI Tests Using Linux 4.14 vs. 4.9 vs. 4.4
Yet another one of the avenues we have been exploring with our Linux Page Table Isolation (KPTI) testing has been looking at any impact of this security feature in the wake of the Meltdown vulnerability when testing with an older Linux Long Term Support (LTS) release. In particular, when using a kernel prior to the PCID (Process Context Identifier) support in the Linux kernel that is used to lessen the impact of KPTI.
Solus Experimenting With Qt Wayland Compositor, NVIDIA EGLStreams Support
Solus taking a break from their Steam Linux integration improvements and their other open-source desktop innovations has been experimenting with their own Qt Wayland compositor over the holiday period...
RADV Supports Android Native Buffer, Increasing Likelihood Of Chrome/Android AMD Device
The open-source Mesa RADV Vulkan driver, RADV, now has patches for supporting VK_ANDROID_native_buffer...
NVIDIA Gaming Performance Minimally Impacted By KPTI Patches
Earlier this week when news was still emerging on the "Intel CPU bug" now known as Spectre and Meltdown I ran some Radeon gaming tests with the preliminary Linux kernel patches providing Kernel Page Table Isolation (KPTI) support. Contrary to the hysteria, the gaming performance was minimally impacted with those open-source Radeon driver tests while today are some tests using the latest NVIDIA driver paired with a KPTI-enabled kernel.
NVIDIA 390.12 Linux Driver Reaches Beta
NVIDIA has released their first beta driver in the long-awaited 390 series...
Fedora 28 To Work On Better VirtualBox Integration, Hardening Packages & Stronger Crypto
With more developers returning to their activities after the holidays, feature work on Fedora 28 is heating up...
Mesa 17.3.2 Being Prepped With Fixes For RADV Vulkan, Unreal Engine 4 Games
For those of you riding the Mesa 17.3 stable train, the second point release is expected for release this weekend with many fixes...
Dell Rolls Out New XPS 13 Laptop For 2018
Just ahead of the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, Dell has unveiled a new XPS 13 high-end laptop...
Broadcom's Open-Source VC5 OpenGL & Vulkan Support Improving
Broadcom open-source driver developer Eric Anholt has written his first status update on the VC5 driver activities of the new year...
ARM Preps ARMv8.4-A Support For GCC Compiler
ARM Holdings has submitted patches implementing support for the ARMv8.4-A instruction set update for the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC)...
10-bit Color Visual Support Lands In Mesa
Mario Kleiner's work on plumbing Mesa for handling 10-bit colors has landed in Mesa 17.4-dev Git...
Etnaviv DRM Updates Roll Out For Linux 4.16
Lucas Stach has submitted the DRM driver updates for Etnaviv that are requested to be pulled for Linux 4.16...
More Linux Kernel & GCC Patches Come Out In The Wake Of Spectre+Meltdown
Besides the already-merged Kernel Page Table Isolation (KPTI) patches, other Linux kernel patches are coming out now in light of the recent Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities...
RADV Vulkan Driver Picks Up Support For ETC2 Textures
RADV developer Bas Nieuwenhuizen has wired in support for ETC2 texture compression to this Mesa-based, open-source Radeon Vulkan driver...
VM Performance Showing Mixed Impact With Linux 4.15 KPTI Patches
Continuing on with our Linux Kernel Page Table Isolation (KPTI) performance testing are some benchmark results when running tests within a virtual machine on Xeon class hardware.
Purism Planning To Release Their Librem Tablet In 2018
Not only is Purism working on their Librem 5 smartphone this year with hopes of still readying the software and hardware for shipping to consumers in 2019, but they are also planning to unveil their tablet this year...
Google Makes Disclosure About The CPU Vulnerability Affecting Intel / AMD / ARM
We're finally getting actual technical details on the CPU vulnerability leading to the recent race around (K)PTI that when corrected may lead to slower performance in certain situations. Google has revealed they uncovered the issue last year and have now provided some technical bits...
Further Analyzing The Intel CPU "x86 PTI Issue" On More Systems
2018 has been off to a busy start with all the testing around the Linux x86 PTI (Page Table Isolation) patches for this "Intel CPU bug" that potentially dates back to the Pentium days but has yet to be fully disclosed. Here is the latest.
Linux Will End Up Disabling x86 PTI For AMD Processors - Update: Now Disabled
While at the moment with the mainline Linux kernel Git tree AMD CPUs enable x86 PTI and are treated as "insecure" CPUs, the AMD patch for not setting X86_BUG_CPU_INSECURE will end up being honored...
OpenWRT + LEDE Move Ahead With Their Re-Merge
Last summer the embedded Linux OpenWRT and LEDE projects voted in favor of re-merging their efforts while now in 2018 that effort is coming back together now that the logistics have been addressed...
LLVM 7.0 / Clang 7.0 Is Now Under Development
LLVM/Clang 6.0 has been branched, thus making LLVM/Clang 7.0 open for development on master...
Calamares 3.2 Upgraded Linux Installer Could Be Here In March
The Calamares project as a reminder aims to be the universal installer framework for Linux systems that is distribution-agnostic and already used by Manjaro and KaOS and OpenMandriva. Calamares 3.2 is being worked on as the installer framework's next major release...
Better Browser-Desktop Integration Coming For KDE Plasma 5.13
One of the new features being worked on by KDE developers in the new year is better desktop integration with web browsers...
Intel Coffee Lake Graphics Support Added To DragonFlyBSD
DragonFlyBSD should now have initial support for Intel's latest-generation "Coffee Lake" graphics...
GNOME's BuildStream Reaches v1.0
GNOME's BuildStream project has declared its first stable release, v1.0, after being in development for the past year...
For Now At Least AMD CPUs Are Also Reported As "Insecure"
Right now with the big mysterious security vulnerability causing the rush of the x86 Page Table Isolation work that landed in the Linux kernel days ago, it's believed to be a problem only affecting Intel CPUs. But at least for now the mainline kernel is still treating AMD CPUs as "insecure" and is too taking a performance hit...
Linux Gaming Performance Doesn't Appear Affected By The x86 PTI Work
With the recently published Initial Benchmarks Of The Performance Impact Resulting From Linux's x86 Security Changes, one of the common questions that came up is whether gaming performance is adversely affected by the x86 Page Table Isolation changes recently merged to the Linux kernel...
Initial Benchmarks Of The Performance Impact Resulting From Linux's x86 Security Changes
Over the past day you've likely heard lots of hysteria about a yet-to-be-fully-disclosed vulnerability that appears to affect at least several generations of Intel CPUs and affects not only Linux but also Windows and macOS. The Intel CPU issue comes down to leaking information about the kernel memory to user-space, but the full scope isn't public yet until the bug's embargo, but it's expected to be a doozy in the data center / cloud deployments. Due to the amount of interest in this issue, here are benchmarks of a patched kernel showing the performance impact of the page table isolation patches.
Flashrom 1.0 Officially Released For Programming BIOS/EFI/ROM Flash Chips
The Flashrom utility that's associated with the Coreboot project for reading/writing/erasing/verifying flash chips commonly for motherboard BIOS/UEFI/firmware chips has reached its long-awaited v1.0 milestone...
Wine 2.0.4 Released While Wine 3.0 Is Just Around The Corner
While Wine 3.0 is expected to be released later this month, Wine 2.0.4 is available right now as the current stable release for running Windows programs on Linux...
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