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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...

Microsoft Defender ATP Coming to Linux! What Does it Mean?  It's FOSS

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...

VirtualBox SF Driver Ejected From The Linux 5.4 Kernel  Phoronix

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.

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...

Intel's Linux Graphics Driver Updated For Denial Of Service + Privilege Escalation Bugs  Phoronix

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...

Linux Kernel Gets Mitigations For TSX Aync Abort Plus Another New Issue: iITLB Multihit  Phoronix

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...

How to install the Tor Browser on your computer running Manjaro Linux or CentOS  H2S Media

Here's KDE Plasma Mobile Running on the PinePhone Open Source Linux Smartphone  Softpedia News

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, 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...

As part of my role as a senior product marketing manager at an enterprise software company with an open source development model, I publish a regular update about open source community, market, and industry trends for product marketers, managers, and other influencers. Here are five of my and their favorite articles from that update.

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Here’s a list of 200+ smartphones that can run Linux distributions  XDA Developers

By Bharath Vedartham

Operating systems, computer architectures and compilers have always fascinated me. I like to go in depth to understand the important software components we depend on! My life changed when engineers from IBM LTC (Linux Technology Center) came to my college to teach us the Linux Kernel internals. When I heard about the Linux Kernel Mentorship program, I immediately knew that I wanted to be a part of it to further fuel my passion for Linux.

One of the project in the lists of projects available to work during the Linux Kernel Mentorship program was on “Predictive Memory Reclamation”. I really wanted the opportunity to work on the core kernel, and I began working with my mentor Khalid Aziz immediately during the application period where he gave me a task regarding the identification of anonymous memory regions for a process. I learned a lot in the application period by reading various blogs, textbooks and commit logs.

During my mentorship period, I worked to develop a predictive memory reclamation algorithm in the Linux Kernel. The aim of the project was to reduce the amount of time the Linux kernel spends in reclaiming memory to satisfy processes requests for memory when there is memory pressure, i.e not enough to satisfy the memory allocation of a process. We implemented a predictive algorithm that can forecast memory pressure and proactively reclaim memory to ensure there is enough available for processes.

We achieved a reduction of upto 8% in the amount of time the kernel spends in reclaiming memory! We submitted RFCs on the kernel mailing lists of our work. [1]

I also worked with John Hubbard on his project to track get_user_pages(). I converted a couple of drivers to use the new get_user_pages API as proposed by John. John was a real pleasure to work with!

Throughout my internship, I have learned that the kernel community is very helpful, kind and willing to help new developers. The key was to take the feedback and put in the required effort and work as well as accept constructive feedback and act on it. Working on open source projects was a very liberating experience for me. There are no barriers in open source space. Anyone can work on open source code irrespective of their nationality, creed or company affiliations, which I find very beautiful and liberating. I believe it is a very intellectually stimulating experience for anyone.

I would like to thank my mentor Khalid Aziz and the Linux Kernel community for helping me throughout the mentorship program. I also would like to thank the Linux Foundation for providing this opportunity and especially Shuah Khan for her guidance on how to work with the community.

https://lkml.org/lkml/2019/8/12/1302

The post The Linux Kernel Mentorship program was a life changing experience appeared first on The Linux Foundation.

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...

Conducting A Vulnerability Assessment: A Step-By-Step Guide For Linux Workloads In The Cloud  Security Boulevard