It seems AES-NI XTS performance regressing hard from Retpolines went unnoticed when mitigating Spectre. This happened due to extensive use of indirect calls when processing small quantities of data. But thankfully Ard Biesheuvel investigated it
AES-NI XTS To See 2~3x Performance Recovery After Regressing Hard From Retpolines
It seems AES-NI XTS performance regressing hard from Retpolines went unnoticed when mitigating Spectre. This happened due to extensive use of indirect calls when processing small quantities of data. But thankfully Ard Biesheuvel investigated it
Systemd Had A Pretty Big 2020 With Homed, OOMD Components Merged
The pandemic didn't slow down work on systemd but was another very busy time continuing to introduce new features and trying to modernize longstanding concepts. Systemd as of today is up to 1.469 million lines of code spanning 48,
GNU's Embed-Friendly Web Server Updated With Better OS Portability, Performance
This lightweight C library providing an HTTP web server that can be used by other applications with ease has been focusing on better operating system / kernel portability as one of the themes for this new release. Libmicrohttpd's buffering/pushing code has been fully rewritten with better portability across environments. There are a reduced number of system calls now used and the operating systems being focused on are the likes of
2020 Was Another Interesting Year For Microsoft Around Open-Source/Linux
Microsoft's efforts in the Linux/open-source space this year were just as interesting as years prior if not even more
Git 2.30 Released As More Projects Shift To "Main" As Their Default Branch Name
Earlier in 2020 the Git 2.28 release brought the support for a configurable/default branch name to replace the "master" usage that has been the default behavior up to this point. That configurable option has been working out well for those wanting to change the default Git branch from the likes of "master" to "main" or "default". Git
Linux 5.12 Could Support Intel's Proprietary HDR Backlight Interface
Lyude Paul of Red Hat has been spending some time the past several months working to properly handle Intel's eDP backlight controls used by newer laptops, dubbed the Intel HDR backlight interface as the implementation appears primarily
Intel Xe Graphics Are Looking Great On Linux 5.11 With Nice Performance Uplift
While Linux 5.11-rc1 was just released yesterday, we have already been closely monitoring the new features of Linux 5.11 as well as carrying out early benchmarks. One area looking quite good so far are the Intel graphics performance and features with Linux 5.11, or more specifically Gen9 and newer while the latest Xe Graphics are obviously the most interesting from a benchmarking perspective.
The Intel kernel graphics driver has some fun features this time like integer scaling support , big joiner enablement,
Linux 5.12 To Support Radeon RX 6000 Series OverDrive Overclocking
One of the missing features of the RDNA 2 "Sienna Cichlid" Linux support has been OverDrive overclocking for the Radeon RX 6800/6900 series. Granted, not the highest priority especially for Linux users where overclocking is predominantly done via writing to sysfs via the command-line given the lack of any nice overclocking GUI control panel from
Bootlin's Pursuit To Let 32-bit ARM NAS Devices Support More Than 16TiB Of Storage
While 64-bit ARM has been available for years, there still are network attached storage (NAS) devices available that rely on 32-bit ARM SoCs. The problem is 32-bit ARM with the mainline kernel only
Intel Sends Out Latest AMX Support For The Linux Kernel
Since this past summer Intel has been posting open-source patches around AMX from the compiler toolchains to the kernel support . Ahead of EOY, Intel's engineers have sent out the latest AMX kernel patches for Linux.
AMX is Intel's new programming paradigm with a focus on better AI performance