
Linux Hardware Reviews, Performance Benchmarks & Open-Source / Free Software News
Updated: 1 hour 4 min ago
Khronos Next Pursuing An Analytic Rendering API
The Khronos Group has been expanding into a lot of new areas in recent times from OpenXR to 3D Commerce to NNEF and now forming an exploratory group for creating an analytic rendering API...
Phoronix Test Suite 9.2 Milestone 2 Released
The second development release of Phoronix Test Suite 9.2-Hurdal is now available for open-source, cross-platform and fully-automated benchmarking...
The Linux Kernel Disabling HPET For Intel Coffee Lake
Another Intel change being sent off for Linux 5.4 and to be back-ported to current stable series is disabling of HPET for Coffee Lake systems...
AMD GCN OpenMP/OpenACC Offloading Patches For The GCC 10 Compiler
Over the past year Code Sourcery / Mentor Graphics has been working extensively on the new AMD Radeon "GCN" back-end for the GCC code compiler. With the code that is found in GCC 9 and up to now in GCC 10 hasn't supported OpenMP/OpenACC parallel programming interfaces but that could soon change with patches under review...
GNU Assembler Patches Sent Out For Optimizing The Intel Jump Conditional Code Erratum
Now that Intel lifted its embargo on the "Jump Conditional Code" erratum affecting Skylake through Cascade Lake processors, while Intel's own Clear Linux was first to carry these patches they have now been sent out on the Binutils mailing list for trying to get the JCC optimization patches into the upstream Binutils/GAS code-base...
VirtualBox SF Driver Ejected From The Linux 5.4 Kernel
Merged to the mainline Linux kernel last week was a driver providing VirtualBox guest shared folder support with the driver up to now being out-of-tree but important for sharing files between the host and guest VM(s). While the driver was part of Linux 5.4-rc7, Linus Torvalds decided to delete this driver on Tuesday...
The Gaming Performance Impact From The Intel JCC Erratum Microcode Update
This morning I provided a lengthy look at the performance impact of Intel's JCC Erratum around the CPU microcode update issued for Skylake through Cascade Lake for mitigating potentially unpredictable behavior when jump instructions cross cache lines. Of the many benchmarks shared this morning in that overview, there wasn't time for any gaming tests prior to publishing. Now with more time passed, here is an initial look at how the Linux gaming performance is impacted by the newly-released Intel CPU microcode for this Jump Conditional Code issue.
Intel's Linux Graphics Driver Updated For Denial Of Service + Privilege Escalation Bugs
Of the 77 security advisories Intel is making public and the three big ones of the performance-sensitive JCC Erratum, the new ZombieLoad TAA (TSX Asynchronous Abort), and iTLB Multihit No eXcuses, there are also two fixes to their kernel graphics driver around security issues separate from the CPU woes...
Linux Kernel Gets Mitigations For TSX Aync Abort Plus Another New Issue: iITLB Multihit
The Linux kernel has just received its mitigation work for the newly-announced TSX Asynchronous Abort (TAA) variant of ZombieLoad plus revealing mitigations for another Intel CPU issue... So today in addition to the JCC Erratum and ZombieLoad TAA the latest is iITLB Multihit (NX) - No eXcuses...
New ZombieLoad Side-Channel Attack Variant: TSX Asynchronous Abort
In addition to the JCC erratum being made public today and that performance-shifting Intel microcode update affecting Skylake through Cascade Lake, researchers also announced a new ZombieLoad side-channel attack variant dubbed "TSX Asynchronous Abort" or TAA for short...
Benchmarks Of JCC Erratum: A New Intel CPU Bug With Performance Implications On Skylake Through Cascade Lake
Intel is today making public the Jump Conditional Code (JCC) erratum. This is a bug involving the CPU's Decoded ICache where on Skylake and derived CPUs where unpredictable behavior could happen when jump instructions cross cache lines. Unfortunately addressing this error in software comes with a performance penalty but ultimately Intel engineers are working to offset that through a toolchain update. Here are the exclusive benchmarks out today of the JCC erratum performance impact as well as when trying to recover that performance through the updated GNU Assembler.
Mozilla + Intel + Red Hat Form The Bytecode Alliance To Run WebAssembly Everywhere
Mozilla, Fastly, Intel, and Red Hat have announced the Bytecode Alliance as a new initiative built around WebAssembly and focused on providing a secure-by-default bytecode that can run from web browsers to desktops to IoT/embedded platforms...
LinuxBoot Continues Maturing - Now Able To Boot Windows
LinuxBoot is approaching two years of age as the effort led by Facebook and others for replacing some elements of the system firmware with the Linux kernel...
Librsvg Continues Rust Conquest, Pulls In CSS Parsing Code From Mozilla Servo
For about three years now GNOME's SVG rendering library has been transitioning to Rust. This library, librsvg, now makes further use of Rust around its CSS parsing code and Mozilla's Servo is doing some of that heavy lifting...
Coreboot Support Is Being Worked On For Fwupd/LVFS
In making it more easy to update Coreboot system firmware, the ability to update Coreboot via the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) with Fwupd is finally being worked out...
Qualcomm's Adreno 640 GPU Is Working Easily With The Freedreno OpenGL/Vulkan Drivers
The Adreno 640 GPU that is used by Qualcomm's Snapdragon 855/855+ SoCs is now working with the open-source Freedreno Gallium3D OpenGL and "TURNIP" Vulkan drivers with the newest Mesa 20.0 development code...
Intel's Vulkan Linux Driver Lands Timeline Semaphore Support
A change to look forward to with Mesa 20.0 due out next quarter is Vulkan timeline semaphore support (VK_KHR_timeline_semaphore) for Intel's "ANV" open-source driver...
GStreamer Conference 2019 Videos Now Available Online
Taking place at the end of October during the Linux Foundation events in Lyon, France was the GStreamer Conference to align with the annual developer festivities...
KDE Frameworks 5.64 Released
Sunday marked the release of KDE Frameworks 5.64 as the latest monthly update to this collection of libraries complementing Qt5...
Google Chrome To Begin Marking Sites That Are Slow / Fast
Chrome has successfully shamed web-sites not supporting HTTPS and now they are looking to call-out websites that do not typically load fast...