With yesterday's disclosure of the Intel Downfall speculative execution vulnerability and the updated CPU microcode and Linux kernel patches I have been very busy testing the performance impact of this mitigation. Here are some initial numbers and workloads I have found to be impacted as a result of this security mitigation for Skylake to Icelake/Tigerlake client and server processors.
Following yesterday's disclosure of the AMD "Inception" security vulnerability and the Linux kernel patches merged for reporting the mitigation status as well as the kernel-based handling for earlier generation Zen CPUs, the Family 19h microcode mitigations have now been picked up by the linux-firmware.git repository...
A new set of patches have been posted for the Linux kernel that implement AMD P-State Preferred Core handling for the amd-pstate driver...
As a lot of active development continues around the KDE Plasma 6 desktop and the developers eyeing a beta in a few months, it appears work on this Qt6-ported desktop environment is coming together quite nicely...
The long-in-development Bcachefs file-system driver was submitted for Linux 6.5 but never merged this cycle due to various technical issues and developer in-fighting. Linus Torvalds himself has now gotten around to reviewing the proposed code and chiming in on the situation...
The intel-speed-select tool that lives within the Linux kernel source tree has seen a set of patches prepared for the upcoming Linux 6.6 merge window. Arguably most interesting with this updated Intel Speed Select tool is now the ability to work with more than eight CPU sockets per platform -- the new limit is 32...
As soon as the AMD Inception CPU vulnerability was made public yesterday, the Linux kernel mitigation patches were merged and within hours appeared in six new stable point releases for the kernel along with the Intel Downfall mitigation patches. Today though these patches are seeing a rework to clean-up this mitigation...
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