Phoronix

As soon as the AMD Inception CPU vulnerability was made public yesterday, the Linux kernel mitigation patches were merged and within hours appeared in six new stable point releases for the kernel along with the Intel Downfall mitigation patches. Today though these patches are seeing a rework to clean-up this mitigation...

As a result of the AMD INCEPTION and Intel DOWNFALL speculative execution vulnerabilities published this Patch Tuesday, Linux 6.5 Git quickly picked up the patches on embargo expiration and now there are six new stable point releases for back-porting these CPU security vulnerabilites to the supported stable kernel series...

NVIDIA today rolled out a new stable point release in their R535 series for Linux users to provide a handful of bug fixes...

In addition to the Linux kernel patches for GDS/Downfall for reporting the mitigated state and handling around Intel's latest speculative execution vulnerability, the updated CPU microcode has now been published on GitHub. In addition to having the Downfall mitigations for Skylake through Icelake/Tigerlake, there are also other security updates and functional issues resolved by this Intel 20230808 CPU microcode release...

This Patch Tuesday brings a new and potentially painful processor speculative execution vulnerability... Downfall, or as Intel prefers to call it is GDS: Gather Data Sampling. GDS/Downfall affects the gather instruction with AVX2 and AVX-512 enabled processors. At least the latest-generation Intel CPUs are not affected but Tigerlake / Ice Lake back to Skylake is confirmed to be impacted. There is microcode mitigation available but it will be costly for AVX2/AVX-512 workloads with GATHER instructions in hot code-paths and thus widespread software exposure particularly for HPC and other compute-intensive workloads that have relied on AVX2/AVX-512 for better performance.

There used to be a time when Patch Tuesday wasn't so busy in the Linux space, but certainly not this month... Linus Torvalds just pushed the kernel code changes around AMD INCEPTION and Intel DOWNFALL as well as other security patches...

AMD has kicked off a busy Patch Tuesday by disclosing INCEPTION, a new speculative side channel attack affecting Zen 3 and Zen 4 processors...

Go 1.21 is now available as the latest version of this popular programming language...

The Universal Chiplet Interconnect Express Consortium today published the UCe 1.1 specification for helping to standardize die-to-die connectivity with multi-die SoCs...

The GNOME 45 Beta release is imminent and this morning the "45.beta" milestones were tagged for the GNOME Shell and Mutter components...

Last month Intel announced APX and AVX10 as the successor to AVX-512 that will see both P and E cores in the future supporting this updated Advanced Vector Extensions implementation. Delightfully, today Intel engineers began posting GCC compiler patches for beginning to enable AVX10 support...

Those running Intel Arc Graphics on Linux can now enjoy the Hogwarts Legacy game under Valve's Steam Play. Intel engineers were able to get this open-world action RPG game running on their open-source Vulkan driver by hiding the fact that Intel graphics were rendering this game...

Merged into the GCC 14 codebase is initial support for gprofng, the new GNU profiler...

Rhino Linux has rolled out of beta as a community-based, rolling-release Linux distribution derived from Ubuntu...

Another change that has now landed in Mesa 23.3 is enabling support in the TURNIP Vulkan driver for running atop the VirtIO GPU kernel driver in virtualized scenarios...

As a follow-up to the first-on-Phoronix article last month that highlighted Linus Torvalds' frustrated views on the AMD fTPM random number generator continuing to cause problems for users even with updated firmware/BIOS, as of today the Linux kernel has gone ahead and blanket disabled RNG use for all current AMD fTPMs...

AMD last week launched the Radeon PRO W7500 and Radeon PRO W7600 professional graphics cards built on RDNA3. Due to AMD's unique position with their open-source Linux graphics driver stack, I decided to see how these new Radeon professional GPUs compare to FirePro hardware from 13 years ago for the raw performance and power efficiency.

Following Canonical deciding to pull in control of the LXD project and LXD maintainership being limited to Canonical employees, the Linux Containers project has announced the forking of LXD as Incus...

Last year Google decided to deprecate JPEG-XL image support within their Chrome/Chromium web browser. They expressed not enough interest and other factors for so quickly removing JPEG-XL support from their browser. They went ahead and removed the support for this next-gen JPEG standard while now a half-year later they may be having second thoughts...

For those that have fond memories of the NeXTSTEP days and in particular its graphical user interface during the pre-Apple times, Window Maker 0.96 was released this weekend for that X11 window manager inspired by the NeXTSTEP GUI...