Phoronix

Being made public this Patch Tuesday is "RETBLEED" as two new CVEs for the latest speculative execution attacks affecting today's hardware. Retbleed exploits return instructions and is able to undermine existing defenses against Spectre Branch Target Injection (BTI)...

Intel today announced the release of open-source "AI Reference Kits" to help in the development of artificial intelligence software around healthcare, manufacturing, and other fields...

Back in March when AMD Milan-X rolled out I published a number of EPYC 7773X benchmarks as well as Milan-X benchmarks in the cloud. Since then there have been new Linux kernel improvements and other changes in the ever-advancing open-source world. Plus simply more time to conduct additional tests over the summer. Here is the latest round of my AMD EPYC 7773X 1P and 2P benchmarking compared to the Milan EPYC 7713/7763 SKUs as well as Intel's Xeon Platinum 8380 "Ice Lake" competition.

Getting things started for this "Patch Tuesday" are the disclosure of two new X.Org Server vulnerabilities...

The Document Foundation has made available this morning the LibreOffice 7.4 release candidate as the newest test version of this cross-platform, open-source office suite...

Last month Intel began publishing the Linux kernel driver changes needed for Habana Labs' Gaudi2 AI accelerator. That enablement and subsequent kernel review process has went well and that hardware support has now been queued into char-misc ahead of the upcoming Linux 5.20 merge window...

IBM this morning announced more Power10 servers being added to their portfolio, now including mid-range and scale-out platforms based on this latest POWER architecture...

While AMD's open-source Linux graphics driver stack is wonderful if living on the bleeding-edge with a modern Linux distribution, for those on enterprise Linux distributions that tend to stick to older versions of packages for the support lifetime or where wanting to run a vetted/qualified driver stack, it can be more of a pain. For AMD's packaged Linux driver stack it only supports those select enterprise Linux distributions and can run into pain points trying to run elsewhere or even say running brand new LTS distributions at times can lack support. There are also challenges in installing/running the ROCm compute stack outside of the few officially supported Linux distributions by AMD. Fortunately, they are now hiring Linux build engineer(s) to work on such issues...

Merged prior to the weekend into LLVM 15 was a basic web server implementation...

The GCC Steering Committee has approved of the GCC Rust front-end providing Rust programming language support by the GNU Compiler Collection. This Rust front-end will likely be merged ahead of the GCC 13 release next year...

With the very popular HP Dev One that is powered by an AMD Ryzen 7 PRO SoC and running Pop!_OS, a number of Phoronix readers inquired about seeing benchmarks of some of the alternative kernel flavors on the device. So here is a look at the stock Linux 5.17 kernel up against the Linux 5.18 and 5.19 (Git) kernels and then Liquorix and XanMod tossed in as alternative flavors running on the Pop!_OS 22.04 installation.

LVFS/fwupd lead developer Richard Hughes at Red Hat has released Fwupd 1.8.2 as the newest version of this open-source solution for handling firmware updates under Linux and other platforms...

While no new X.Org "katamari" releases are planned for a collection of all the X.Org component updates combined, this weekend longtime X.Org contributor Alan Coopersmith of Oracle issued many new updates to various old, seldom-maintained X.Org projects...

One of the newest extensions now supported by the RADV Vulkan driver is VK_KHR_performance_query, which can be used by RenderDoc and other utilities...

In gearing up for the GNOME 43 Alpha release coming out soon, this weekend marked the release of the new alpha versions of GNOME Shell and Mutter...

Rob Clark as the lead developer of the MSM DRM kernel driver and the Freedreno/TURNIP Mesa drivers for open-source Qualcomm Adreno graphics driver support has submitted the Direct Rendering Manager driver changes for the upcoming Linux 5.20 merge window...

Linus Torvalds just announced the availability of Linux 5.19-rc6 as the latest routine test release for the upcoming Linux 5.19...

A set of proposed patches promise to make the Linux kernel's memchr() implementation faster for locating a character within a block of memory. In tests carried out by the developer, the new implementation can be nearly four times faster on large searches...

Intel's open-source Compute Runtime for providing OpenCL and oneAPI Level Zero support on their graphics hardware appears to be in roughly good shape now for DG2/Alchemist based on external/independent monitoring of the effort...

The Linux kernel has long honored the "nordrand" kernel parameter to disable kernel use of the Intel RDRAND and RDSEED instructions if not trusting them -- either out of security concerns that they could be compromised by the vendor or running into hardware/firmware issues around RdRand usage. But the Linux kernel is preparing to drop that kernel parameter with users encouraged to use the more generic "random.trust_cpu" parameter...