Phoronix

AMD's ROCm AOMP Compiler 11.7-1 Brings OMPD Support, ROCgdb

Thu, 07/30/2020 - 17:09

The AMD ROCm developer tool engineers have released a new build of AOMP, their LLVM Clang compiler downstream that adds OpenMP support for Radeon GPU offloading until that support ultimately makes it back upstream into LLVM/Clang...

Intel Prepping Bus Lock Detection For Linux To Avoid This Performance Pitfall

Thu, 07/30/2020 - 14:56

Building off the recently mainlined Intel work on split lock detection, Intel engineers have now been extending that with bus lock detection support...

MSM Open-Source Driver Continues On Qualcomm Adreno 640/650 Series Bring-Up

Thu, 07/30/2020 - 12:09

The open-source MSM DRM driver developed by Google, Qualcomm's Code Aurora, and other parties as what started out as part of the "Freedreno" driver initiative is continuing to see better support for the newer Adreno 640 and 650 series...

Linux Quietly Makes It Harder To Guess Network RNG's Internal State

Thu, 07/30/2020 - 08:43

Merged today to mainline for Linux 5.8 Git and also marked for back-porting is a change to make it more difficult to guess the network random number generator's internal state. It looks like it could be for a yet-to-be-published vulnerability...

GCC Sees More Progress On Ability To Parallelize The Compilation Of Large Source Files

Thu, 07/30/2020 - 06:17

While GCC with GNU Make and other build systems can scale nicely in compiling many files concurrently, there has been an ongoing GCC effort to be able to parallelize more of the GNU Compiler Collection work when compiling large source files...

BootHole Blows Hole In GRUB2 Bootloader Security, Including UEFI SecureBoot

Thu, 07/30/2020 - 03:00

A major vulnerability in the GRUB2 boot-loader has been made public today that compromises its UEFI SecureBoot capabilities...

Samsung 870 QVO SSD Performance On Ubuntu Linux

Wed, 07/29/2020 - 23:30

The Samsung 870 QVO solid-state drives announced at the end of June have begun appearing at Internet retailers. The Samsung 870 QVO is the company's latest QLC NAND solid-state drive offering 1TB of storage for a little more than $120 USD all the way up to 4TB for $500 and an 8TB variant for $900. For those curious about the EXT4 file-system Linux performance out of the Samsung 870 QVO, here are some benchmarks.

Nano 5.0 Released As A Big Feature Update To This Easy-To-Use Terminal Text Editor

Wed, 07/29/2020 - 22:20

The popular GNU Nano terminal text editor has reached version 5.0...

Apache Software Foundation Estimates Its Code Value Increased ~$600M For FY2020

Wed, 07/29/2020 - 21:55

For fiscal year 2019 the Apache Software Foundation valued their codebase at around $20 billion USD. The open-source organization has now published their annual report for fiscal year 2020...

Google Sends Patches For AMD Zen / Zen 2 RAPL PowerCap Support

Wed, 07/29/2020 - 20:07

Building off the work sent out by Google engineers in recent months and merged for Linux 5.8 around RAPL support for AMD Zen / Zen 2 CPUs with supporting the "runtime average power limiting" counters on Linux similar to Intel's longstanding support, that work has continued now with Zen RAPL support in the PowerCap driver...

Intel Making It Easier To Flash Ethernet Device Firmware On Linux

Wed, 07/29/2020 - 18:41

For those using the Intel ICE Linux network driver that is used for the likes of the E800 series, it's now going to be easier updating the device firmware from Linux...

L1d Flushing Patches Revived After It Was Rejected From Linux 5.8 As "Beyond Stupid"

Wed, 07/29/2020 - 14:57

Worked out in recent months by an Amazon engineer was optional L1 data cache flushing on context switches to allow for greater computer security in an era of data sampling vulnerabilities and other data leakage issues via side channels. It was sent in for Linux 5.8 but Linus Torvalds characterized it as "beyond stupid" and not being convinced by it. Well, now it's been revised but isn't yet clear if it will appease Torvalds for mainline inclusion...

Linux 5.9 To Support New EF100 NIC Architecture Developed By Xilinx

Wed, 07/29/2020 - 12:06

One of the new network drivers now queued up for Linux 5.9 is the SFC EF100 driver for the EF100 NIC architecture...

LLVM 11.0-RC1 Now Available For Testing

Wed, 07/29/2020 - 08:21

While LLVM 11.0 was branched almost two weeks ago with many new/improved features for this open-source compiler stack, it has taken until today to get into shape for issuing the first release candidate...

AMD "Navy Flounder" Support Merged Into Mesa 20.2

Wed, 07/29/2020 - 04:27

"Navy Flounder" as the codename for another Navi 2 GPU following the "Sienna Cichlid" Linux driver work has made it into Mesa 20.2 for the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver...

Microsoft Engineer Proposes "TRAMPFD" For Improving Linux Security

Wed, 07/29/2020 - 02:00

A Microsoft engineer is proposing the Trampoline File Descriptor "TRAMPFD" as a new kernel API for securely dealing with trampoline code on systems. There are concerns already over the potential performance implications but there does seem to be some interest in this approach...