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Glibc Dynamic Loader Hit By A Nasty Local Privilege Escalation Vulnerability
Glibc Dynamic Loader Hit By A Nasty Local Privilege Escalation Vulnerability
7 Hours Ago - GNU - Nasty Bug - 9 Comments

A nasty vulnerability has been made public today concerning Glibc's dynamic loader that can lead to full root privileges being obtained by local users. This affects Linux distributions of the past two years with the likes of Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, 23.04, Fedora 38, and others vulnerable to this local privilege escalation issue.

Intel Comes Up With A Way For Vulkan Sparse Support On Their Existing Linux Driver
Intel Comes Up With A Way For Vulkan Sparse Support On Their Existing Linux Driver
8 Hours Ago - Intel - i915 + Vulkan Sparse - 5 Comments

The biggest hindrance for using Intel Arc Graphics for Linux gaming has been the lack of Vulkan sparse support as needed for running many newer Windows DirectX 12 games atop Valve's Steam Play with Proton using VKD3D-Proton. Intel recently did implement Vulkan sparse support for ANV in Mesa 23.3 but it only works with their yet-to-be-upstreamed and still-experimental Xe kernel driver. But now Intel Linux graphics driver engineers have managed to pull off a solution for getting the sparse resources supported while using the existing i915 kernel DRM driver.

X.Org Hit By New Security Vulnerabilities - Two Date Back To 1988 With X11R2
X.Org Hit By New Security Vulnerabilities - Two Date Back To 1988 With X11R2
9 Hours Ago - X.Org - X.Org Vulnerabilities - 41 Comments

It was a decade ago that a security researcher commented on X.Org Server security being even "worse than it looks" and that the GLX code for example was "80,000 lines of sheer terror" and hundreds of bugs being uncovered throughout the codebase. In 2023 new X.Org security vulnerabilities continue to be uncovered, two of which were made public today and date back to X11R2 code from the year 1988.

AMD Ryzen Powered Framework Laptop Linux Testing Held Up By BIOS Issue
AMD Ryzen Powered Framework Laptop Linux Testing Held Up By BIOS Issue
12 Hours Ago - Hardware - AMD Framework Laptop - 12 Comments

Today the review embargo lifts on the first AMD-powered Framework laptop. There's one of the AMD Framework laptops in the lab for Linux testing and benchmarking but unfortunately no review for launch day due to being held up by a BIOS regression and thus unable to properly utilize accelerated graphics until a new BIOS revision is made available in the coming days.

AMD PMF Firmware Added To Linux-Firmware.Git For Smart PC Solution Builder
AMD PMF Firmware Added To Linux-Firmware.Git For Smart PC Solution Builder
14 Hours Ago - AMD - AMD PMF Firmware - 3 Comments

As written about last month, AMD Linux engineers have been working on PMF Linux driver support for a "Smart PC Solutions Builder". The AMD Smart PC Solutions Builder feature is intended to provide OEMs with more control over system power/performance policies. It looks like systems making use of this feature are already to the marketplace or imminent with AMD having already landed the PMF firmware.

2 October

Tweaking SteamOS For Better Steam Deck Performance
Tweaking SteamOS For Better Steam Deck Performance
2 October 04:20 PM EDT - Linux Gaming - 11 Comments

A Phoronix reader recently published a guide that at its heart is a set of commands aimed at boosting the performance of SteamOS on the AMD APU powered Steam Deck. Here are some benchmarks showing the performance impact from these changes on the SteamOS 3.5 Preview release.

Linux Will Finally Indicate Via /proc/cpuinfo If AMD SVM Virtualization Is Disabled
Linux Will Finally Indicate Via /proc/cpuinfo If AMD SVM Virtualization Is Disabled
2 October 03:18 PM EDT - AMD - AMD SVM Enabled? - Add A Comment

Checking for the presence of Intel virtualization (VMX) support and it being enabled can be easily achieved by looking at the flags in /proc/cpuinfo. But to this point AMD virtualization (SVM) has always been shown to user-space via /proc/cpuinfo even when the BIOS/platform has disabled SVM functionality. Finally for Linux 6.7 this oversight is being corrected.

Loongson Preparing LoongArch KVM Virtualization For Linux 6.7
Loongson Preparing LoongArch KVM Virtualization For Linux 6.7
2 October 06:38 AM EDT - Virtualization - LoongArch KVM - 8 Comments

The past several Linux kernel cycles has seen Loongson engineers working on implementing more kernel features for LoongArch, the MIPS-derived and RISC-V-inspired architecture out of China for domestic PCs. The performance of LoongArch CPUs so far still aren't competitive to x86_64 or Arm hardware but at least slowly are becoming more practical with more features being wired up. The latest milestone is the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) virtualization support appearing ready ahead of Linux 6.7.

1 October

Linux To Try Again To Disable All RNDIS Protocol Drivers
Linux To Try Again To Disable All RNDIS Protocol Drivers
1 October 02:52 PM EDT - Hardware - Disabling All RNDIS Drivers - 40 Comments

Several months back was work to disable all Microsoft Remote Network Driver Interface Specification (RNDIS) drivers in the Linux kernel on the basis of being insecure and other factors. That plan of disabling the RNDIS drivers was faced by opposition around concerns of potentially disrupting USB tethering support and the like. It's been months since hearing anything about updated plans for disabling or dropping the RNDIS drivers but the Git branch was updated today for disabling this class of drivers.

30 September

Canonical's Snap Store Hit By Malicious Apps
Canonical's Snap Store Hit By Malicious Apps
30 September 12:35 PM EDT - Ubuntu - Bad Apps - 61 Comments

Stemming from reports of several fake crypto apps appearing in Canonical's Snap Store that aimed to steal user funds, temporary restrictions have been put in place while Canonical investigates the security matter.

29 September

AMD FSR 3 Now Available - Open-Source Code To Come Soon
29 September 09:52 AM EDT - Radeon - FidelityFX Super Resolution 3 - 19 Comments

AMD announced today that the Windows games Immortals of Aveum and Forspoken are available today with their FidelityFX Super Resolution 3 (FSR 3) upscaling technology. More games making use of FSR 3 are on the way and the open-source code drop of FSR 3 is coming at a later date.

28 September

Mesa 23.2 Stable Released For Improved Open-Source Vulkan & OpenGL Drivers
28 September 08:08 PM EDT - Mesa - Mesa 23.2.1 - 6 Comments

After being delayed by many weeks, Mesa 23.2 has been released as the quarterly feature release for this collection of open-source OpenGL and Vulkan drivers used by AMD Radeon, Intel graphics, Apple Silicon, Qualcomm Adreno (Freedreno), Nouveau (open-source NVIDIA), Broadcom / Raspberry Pi, Arm Mali and other hardware.

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