Phoronix

Linus Torvalds has released the seventh weekly release candidate for Linux 4.15...

Following the move by Linux to introduced Kernel Page Table Isolation (KPTI) to address the Meltdown vulnerability affecting Intel CPUs, DragonFlyBSD has implemented better user/kernel separation to address this issue. While the Linux performance hit overall was minor, in our tests carried out so far the DragonFlyBSD kernel changes are causing more widespread slowdowns.

Longtime Nouveau Gallium3D contributorIlia Mirkin has landed OpenGL bindless texture (ARB_bindless_texture) support within Mesa 17.4-dev Git...

This weekend our OpenBenchmarking.org online component to the Phoronix Test Suite has crossed another milestone: more than 28 million downloads of test profiles and test suites...

Taking a break from KPTI and Retpoline benchmarks, here are some tests recently conducted with Linux 4.15 when it comes to trying out the different CPUFreq scaling governors with this latest kernel and running various games with a Radeon RX 580 Polaris graphics card.

If Fedora developers are successful, Fedora 28 will feature secure and properly supported Thunderbolt 3 device handling out-of-the-box...

LightNVM is the abstraction layer within the Linux kernel for supporting open-channel NVM Express solid-state drives. LightNVM 2.0 is on the way...

While kernel developers are busy with Spectre and Meltdown bugs right now, 20 years from now is the big "Year 2038" problem. Kernel developers are still working through the massive codebase to allow it to function past this "Unix Millenium Bug."..

For fans of Rust that didn't hear yet, Rust 1.23 was released this week as the newest stable version of this popular programming language focused on safety, speed, and concurrency...

For fans of the BFQ I/O scheduler, more improvements for it are coming with Linux 4.16...

For those happening to use Oracle Solaris on desktops/workstations, Solaris 11.4 will finally be making the transition from GNOME 2 to the GNOME 3.24 Shell...

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.

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...

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...

The Khronos Group has released their first Vulkan graphics/compute programming specification update of 2018...

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...

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?..

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Xilinx is interested in contributing the latest DRM/KMS driver upstream...

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...

The open-source Mesa RADV Vulkan driver, RADV, now has patches for supporting VK_ANDROID_native_buffer...

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 has released their first beta driver in the long-awaited 390 series...

With more developers returning to their activities after the holidays, feature work on Fedora 28 is heating up...

For those of you riding the Mesa 17.3 stable train, the second point release is expected for release this weekend with many fixes...

Just ahead of the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, Dell has unveiled a new XPS 13 high-end laptop...

Broadcom open-source driver developer Eric Anholt has written his first status update on the VC5 driver activities of the new year...

ARM Holdings has submitted patches implementing support for the ARMv8.4-A instruction set update for the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC)...

Mario Kleiner's work on plumbing Mesa for handling 10-bit colors has landed in Mesa 17.4-dev Git...

Lucas Stach has submitted the DRM driver updates for Etnaviv that are requested to be pulled for Linux 4.16...

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 developer Bas Nieuwenhuizen has wired in support for ETC2 texture compression to this Mesa-based, open-source Radeon Vulkan driver...

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...