Phoronix

This past week AMD published a security analysis of AMD Zen 3's new Predictive Store Forwarding (PSF) functionality. In there they did acknowledge there is the possibility where bad PSF functionality could lead to a side-channel attack albeit the real-world exposure would be quite low. In any case they are allowing interested users to disable the Predictive Store Forwarding functionality, but what they didn't comment on in that paper was what performance overhead to expect if disabling PSF. So my Easter weekend turned into AMD Zen 3 PSF benchmarking.

This month's Arch Linux install media update now provides "archinstall" as the guided installer for Arch Linux for those preferring a quick and easy route for deploying Arch Linux...

While most haven't even moved to PHP 8.0 yet in their Linux distribution default packages let alone in production environments, PHP 8.1 is under development and like clockwork should be out around the end of November as usual for their yearly release dance. In two months already the PHP 8.1 alpha releases should start up...

Kicked off this past Thursday and running through 7 April is the Ubuntu 21.04 "Testing Week" for helping to test the new changes and catch any remaining issues with there being now just three weeks to go to the final release...

FreeBSD 13.0 was supposed to be out by the end of March but a bumpy past few weeks has led to extra release candidates. Out this weekend is FreeBSD 13.0-RC5 for what might now be the final test release...

The past year there has been work led by Greg Kroah-Hartman on a "READFILE" system call for efficiently reading small files such as for data exposed via sysfs. While not yet mainlined, this week the patches for this new system call were re-based giving us hope that perhaps we'll see it with Linux 5.13...

The pandemic is still not showing any signs of slowing down KDE development but with the new month brings more changes and improvements to this open-source desktop...

For those making use of OBS Studio for screen capturing or streaming from your desktop, the OBS Studio 27.0 release is on the way and it's a big one...

This week Intel's open-source developers released version 2.2 of oneDNN, their deep neural network library that is part of their oneAPI offering after previously being developed under the names MKL-DNN and the Deep Neural Network Library (DNNL)...

AMD published a security whitepaper this week looking at their Predictive Store Forwarding (PSF) feature that is new to Zen 3 series processors. AMD is going to allow customers to disable this performance feature as they think it may be vulnerable to a Spectre-like attack...

For those wondering about the state of speculative execution vulnerabilities and what software-based mitigations are required for Intel's new Rocket Lake processors, here is the rundown along with benchmarks when disabling those present Linux kernel mitigations.

Another round of AMDGPU kernel driver updates were sent out on Thursday to DRM-Next ahead of the Linux 5.13 merge window opening in a few weeks...

While GCC 11 is seeing its first stable release in the form of GCC 11.1 in just a few short weeks, GCC 10.3 is imminent as the latest point release for those on the current GCC 10 stable series...

Mesa 21.1 is looking to be another exciting release to be introduced later this quarter while going into feature freeze around mid-April. The latest work to land is threaded context support for Zink, which means faster performance for this OpenGL-over-Vulkan implementation...

With the start of the new month comes updated Steam Survey figures for the month prior...

The beta of Ubuntu as well as its various flavors/derivatives is out ahead of the official "Hirsute Hippo" launch later this month...

To kick off a new month of Linux gaming, Valve today released Proton 6.3-1 as the latest version of their Wine downstream that powers Steam Play for running Windows games on Linux...

Intel's open-source "ANV" Vulkan driver now supports the Vulkan EXT_conservative_rasterization extension that is most notably used by DXVK for translating Direct3D atop this graphics API and work is also pending too for VKD3D...

Intel's open-source developers have released a new version of IGC, the Intel Graphics Compiler that is used by their open-source Linux compute stack, recently was transitioned for use by their Windows driver too, and might eventually be piped into their Mesa OpenGL/Vulkan drivers...

In the past few weeks since the introduction of the EPYC 7003 "Milan" processors there has finally been AMD Zen 3 "Znver3" tuning work that's been hurried into the GCC 11 compiler code-base ahead of its stable release in the coming weeks. That initial Zen 3 tuning work has also now been back-ported to the GCC 10 branch ahead of its next point release...