Oracle Engineers Send Out Linux Patches For Trenchboot Secure Late-Launch Kernel Support
Going back to over a year ago were discussions by Oracle engineers and others about a secure launch boot protocol for the Linux kernel to in turn tie into the Trenchboot open-source project working on various system integrity features. We are now finally seeing new patches out of Oracle for wiring more Trenchboot support into the Linux kernel...
Fedora Adopts A New Vision Statement
Fedora Project Leader Matthew Miller has sent out a reminder to Fedora contributors to "be excellent to each other" while announcing the project has a new vision statement...
OpenJDK 8/11 vs. GraalVM 20 vs. Amazon Corretto JVM Benchmarks
Following last week's benchmarks of OpenJDK 8 through the newly-released OpenJDK 14 JVM benchmarks, some Phoronix readers expressed interest in seeing Java benchmarks with Oracle's GraalVM as well as Amazon's Corretto JVM implementations. Here are some benchmarks of those benchmarks up against OpenJDK both for Java 8 and Java 11 releases.
Cloudflare Improving Linux Disk Encryption Performance - Doubling The Throughput
Cloudflare employs Linux disk encryption on their servers and with some optimizations have made it at least two times faster throughput while also lowering the latency...
AMD Developers Looking At GNU C Library Platform Optimizations For Zen
It's long overdue but AMD engineers are now looking at refactoring the GNU C Library (Glibc) platform support to enhance the performance for AMD Zen processors...
Android-x86 9.0-r2 Released With Updated Kernel, UEFI Boot Fix
Released at the end of February was the long overdue stable release of Android-x86 9.0 that re-based this Intel/AMD focused Android spin atop the 9.0 "Pie" Android Open-Source Project state plus with various additions/improvements for running on x86_64 laptop/desktop hardware. Out today is the second stable update to the Android-x86 9.0 series...
TTM Huge Page Table Entries Pending For Lowering Graphics Driver CPU Usage
Longtime open-source Linux graphics developer Thomas Hellström of VMware has sent out a patch series aiming for Linux 5.7 or 5.8 to introduce support for huge and giant page-table entries for the TTM memory management code and TTM-enabled graphics drivers...
Intel IWD 1.6 Wireless Daemon Released With MAC Randomization, Per-Network MAC Addresses
Intel open-source developers have released IWD v1.6 as their open-source, embedded-friendly wireless daemon for Linux systems as an alternative to WPA_Supplicant...
LLVM Developers Are Still Debating How To Handle The Intel JCC Erratum Mitigation
Disclosed back in mid-November was the Intel JCC Erratum that required a CPU microcode update to mitigate and that in turn had broad performance hits. But via toolchain updates, some of that overhead can be offset. The GNU Assembler patches were quickly merged and new options exposed for helping to decrease that performance hit but on the LLVM side the developers are still working on their mitigation with some design decisions still to be made...
Glibc's Usage Of Performance-Boosting "RSEQ" Is Still Coming Together
Introduced into the Linux 4.18 kernel back in June 2018 was the new RSEQ system call for "Restartable Sequences" to provide faster user-space operations on per-CPU data by avoiding atomic operations updates. Sadly, seeing user-space make use of RSEQ has been a slow process...