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.
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...
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...
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...
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 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...
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...
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...
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 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...
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.
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...
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.
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...
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...
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.
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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.
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...
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...
With LLVM 6.0 being branched this week and that marking the end of feature development on this next compiler update before its stable debut in February, here are some benchmarks of the very latest LLVM Clang 6.0 compiler on AMD's EPYC 7601 32-core / 64-thread processor as we see how well the AMD Zen "znver1" tuning is working out.
Qt 6.0 planning has begun and we should be hearing more about this next major tool-kit update as the year goes on. Here's some of what we can expect from Qt in the near future...
During the recent holidays when running light on benchmarks to run, I was toying around with LLVMpipe in not having run this LLVM-accelerated software rasterizer in some time. I also ran some fresh tests of Intel's OpenSWR OpenGL software rasterizer that has also been living within Mesa...
For those wondering Mesa's rate of change last year while adding in many OpenGL 4.5~4.6 features, a lot of Vulkan driver activity, countless performance optimizations, and the plethora of other work that took place in 2017, here are some numbers...
With PUBG popularity appearing to decline a bit during December, the Steam Survey results for December 2017 show an increase in the Linux percentage,..
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