Phoronix

A nasty vulnerability has been made public today concerning Glibc's dynamic loader that can lead to full root privileges being obtained by local users. This affects Linux distributions of the past two years with the likes of Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, 23.04, Fedora 38, and others vulnerable to this local privilege escalation issue...

The biggest hindrance for using Intel Arc Graphics for Linux gaming has been the lack of Vulkan sparse support as needed for running many newer Windows DirectX 12 games atop Valve's Steam Play with Proton using VKD3D-Proton. Intel recently did implement Vulkan sparse support for ANV in Mesa 23.3 but it only works with their yet-to-be-upstreamed and still-experimental Xe kernel driver. But now Intel Linux graphics driver engineers have managed to pull off a solution for getting the sparse resources supported while using the existing i915 kernel DRM driver...

It was a decade ago that a security researcher commented on X.Org Server security being even "worse than it looks" and that the GLX code for example was "80,000 lines of sheer terror" and hundreds of bugs being uncovered throughout the codebase. In 2023 new X.Org security vulnerabilities continue to be uncovered, two of which were made public today and date back to X11R2 code from the year 1988...

Today the review embargo lifts on the first AMD-powered Framework laptop. There's one of the AMD Framework laptops in the lab for Linux testing and benchmarking but unfortunately no review for launch day due to being held up by a BIOS regression and thus unable to properly utilize accelerated graphics until a new BIOS revision is made available in the coming days...

GNU Binutils has added support for the ARCv3 32-bit and 64-bit CPU architecture...

Rust bindings are coming to the Linux kernel's workqueue (WQ) infrastructure that is used for deferring work to a kernel thread for asynchronous process execution...

As written about last month, AMD Linux engineers have been working on PMF Linux driver support for a "Smart PC Solutions Builder". The AMD Smart PC Solutions Builder feature is intended to provide OEMs with more control over system power/performance policies. It looks like systems making use of this feature are already to the marketplace or imminent with AMD having already landed the PMF firmware...

Adding to the list of notable features coming with Mesa 23.3 later this quarter is enabling delta color compression (DCC) for multi-sample anti-aliasing (MSAA) images on AMD RDNA3 (GFX11) graphics processors...

A Phoronix reader recently published a guide that at its heart is a set of commands aimed at boosting the performance of SteamOS on the AMD APU powered Steam Deck. Here are some benchmarks showing the performance impact from these changes on the SteamOS 3.5 Preview release.

Checking for the presence of Intel virtualization (VMX) support and it being enabled can be easily achieved by looking at the flags in /proc/cpuinfo. But to this point AMD virtualization (SVM) has always been shown to user-space via /proc/cpuinfo even when the BIOS/platform has disabled SVM functionality. Finally for Linux 6.7 this oversight is being corrected...

Similar to Embree 4.0 adding Intel graphics acceleration earlier this year via SYCL, Intel's OpenVKL library that is also part of their oneAPI rendering toolkit has now added SYCL graphics aceleration with OpenVKL 2.0...

Python 3.12 is out today as the latest major feature release for this extremely popular programming language. Python 3.12 continues the trend of recent releases of enhancing the performance while continuing to introduce exciting new functionality...

The Linux kernel's Fair Queue "FQ" network packet scheduling algorithm that is celebrating its 10th anniversary since being mainlined in the Linux 3.12 kernel cycle is celebrating by rolling out some performance optimizations with the next version of the Linux kernel...

The long ongoing saga of upstreaming AMD's Pensando Elba SoC support is now partially over with the initial enablement patches around the DeviceTree being queued as part of the SoC changes destined for the Linux 6.7 kernel cycle...

The Linux Mint project has released an "Edge" ISO of Linux Mint 21.2 that is intended for users of new PC hardware where it's unable to boot the current Linux Mint release due to its older kernel version...

The past several Linux kernel cycles has seen Loongson engineers working on implementing more kernel features for LoongArch, the MIPS-derived and RISC-V-inspired architecture out of China for domestic PCs. The performance of LoongArch CPUs so far still aren't competitive to x86_64 or Arm hardware but at least slowly are becoming more practical with more features being wired up. The latest milestone is the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) virtualization support appearing ready ahead of Linux 6.7...

A newly-opened merge request for GNOME's Mutter compositor adds hardware acceleration for the NVIDIA proprietary driver for secondary GPUs such as in the case of hybrid systems and other setups with multiple monitors whereby the NVIDIA GPU with proprietary driver is powering some of those outputs...

After Steam on Linux usage topped to nearly 2% in July with the phenomenal success of the Steam Deck and with greater marketshare than Apple macOS, in August it took a dip and now the September numbers are out and points to a second consecutive month of the Linux percentage receding...

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 6.6-rc4 as the newest test release for this kernel that is looking to be released as stable around the end of October...

Several months back was work to disable all Microsoft Remote Network Driver Interface Specification (RNDIS) drivers in the Linux kernel on the basis of being insecure and other factors. That plan of disabling the RNDIS drivers was faced by opposition around concerns of potentially disrupting USB tethering support and the like. It's been months since hearing anything about updated plans for disabling or dropping the RNDIS drivers but the Git branch was updated today for disabling this class of drivers...