Phoronix

Intel's Software Guard Extensions (SGX) as security-related extensions to their processors that allow for protected memory enclaves has had a rather bouncy journey. Intel continues supporting SGX on their latest Xeon processors but on the client side have been deprecated since 11th Gen Core. Over the years SGX has been found vulnerable to various attacks from speculative execution exploits to Plundervolt. It also turns out under Linux until now was also open to crashing under memory pressure...

The Linux kernel's printk() function for printing messages to the kernel log continues to be improved upon in 2022...

Back in 2020 Intel engineers working on the Linux kernel added split lock detection to provide a warning when an atomic operation spans multiple cache lines and requires a global bus lock for atomicity. A warning is now deemed not useful enough so instead the intent moving forward is to "make life miserable" for such misbehaving user-space applications by slowing down the performance with hopes of the app developers better handling their code...

If release trends hold, we should be roughly half-way through the PHP 8.2 development cycle with the annual feature releases normally out toward the end of November. Given that, this weekend I decided to try out the state of PHP 8.2 Git and carry out some early benchmarks to get an idea where things are headed...

The Motorola 68000, Xtensa, and C-SKY processor architectures all saw notable additions for the in-development Linux 5.19 kernel...

The Linux 5.19 kernel is adding a new make x86_debug.config build target as a set of defaults in enabling a variety of recommended debugging features for x86/x86_64 kernel builds...

Sent in this morning for Linux 5.19 is AMD SEV-SNP support for that hardware feature introduced last year with AMD EPYC Milan 7003 series processors. Meanwhile Intel's alternative technology, Trust Domain Extensions (TDX) is coming with Xeon Scalable "Sapphire Rapids" and also with Linux 5.19 that functionality is being readied on the software side...

It was just last October that Mesa's V3DV driver achieved Vulkan 1.1 conformance for this Broadcom Vulkan open-source driver most notably used by the Raspberry Pi 4 and newer. Now Vulkan 1.2 is just on the horizon...

Last year with the launch of AMD EPYC 7003 "Milan" processors one of the new security features was SEV-SNP, or the "Secure Nested Paging" update to the Secure Encrypted Virtualization functionality that has built up with succeeding EPYC generations. While AMD published out-of-tree kernel patches in a GitHub repository to enable SEV-SNP and has been volleying several revisions to them on the kernel mailing list, one year later it's finally arriving in mainline with the Linux 5.19 kernel...

While not marked as a pull request yet for mainlining to the kernel, Miguel Ojeda this morning sent out an updated set of patches adding in the Rust programming language support for the Linux kernel. Separately, a new version of Uutils was released this weekend as the Rust language implementation of GNU Coreutils...

Adding to the many changes expected for Linux 5.19, block subsystem maintainer and IO_uring creator Jens Axboe has submitted his several pull requests for this now-open new kernel development cycle...

AMD CEO Lisa Su keynoted this morning for Computex 2022 where she talked up some of the company's processor plans for the rest of the year. The focal points were on the much anticipated Ryzen 7000 series desktop processors as well as announcing the "Mendocino" APUs that will be coming to affordable laptops later in the year...

Building off yesterday's release of the Linux 5.18 kernel, the GNU FSFLA folks have released GNU Linux-Libre 5.18-gnu kernel as their downstream that strips out support for using proprietary microcode/firmware or the ability to load binary-only kernel modules...

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 5.18 on-time as the newest stable kernel release...

Unless Linus Torvalds has reservations today about the changes to land in the kernel this past week and decides to issue an extra RC, Linux 5.18 is expected to be christened as stable today and that in turn will mark the start of the Linux 5.19 merge window. Based on the "-next" activity, here is a look at the many changes expected to be merged for Linux 5.19...

As I've written about since last year the Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" has been working on experimental mesh shader support and more recently in Mesa Git code around task shaders for RADV have been landing. Timur Kristóf who is contracted by Valve to work on the open-source Linux graphics stack has been working on the mesh/task shader support in preparation for an upcoming cross-vendor Vulkan extension around mesh shading...

With NVIDIA's recent R515 Linux driver beta that ushered in their new open-source GPU kernel driver in development, NVIDIA posted a list of their known Wayland implementation issues/shortcomings affecting users...

The PostgreSQL 15 database server will be releasing in a few months and is yet another major release to this open-source relational database system when it comes to performance...

Back in 2019 Chinese CPU company Zhaoxin introduced "LuJiaZui" as their 16nm x86 CPU design for use from laptops up through servers. LuJiaZui is much improved from their earlier chips though still well behind AMD and Intel performance. Proper GCC compiler support for LuJiaZui was sent out again this week after their previous upstreaming attempt hadn't made it into GCC 12 due to being late in the cycle...

With Linux 5.18 expected to be released as stable tomorrow and that opening up the Linux 5.19 merge window, feature work aimed for this next kernel should be largely wrapped up. Within the RISC-V architecture's "for-next" branch is several interesting additions...