Inception & Downfall, Linux 6.6 Development Kicking Off & Other August Highlights
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During August there was the release of Linux 6.5, the Linux 6.6 merge window getting started, the AMD Inception and Intel Downfall CPU vulnerabilities drawing much attention, and more. In case you missed out on any Phoronix stories, the most popular news for August included:
Firefox Finally Outperforming Google Chrome In SunSpider
Mozilla developers are celebrating that they are now faster than Google Chrome with the SunSpider JavaScript benchmark, although that test has been superseded by the JetStream benchmark.
Linux 6.6 To Better Protect Against The Illicit Behavior Of NVIDIA's Proprietary Driver
The Linux 6.6 modules infrastructure is changing to better protect against the illicit behavior of NVIDIA's proprietary kernel driver.
LibreOffice 24.2 Will Succeed LibreOffice 7.6
One nugget of information in the LibreOffice 7.6 release announcement for those who missed it and deserves calling out specifically... Succeeding LibreOffice 7.6 will not be v7.7 or v8.0 but rather v24.2.
Linux 6.5 Last Minute Fixes A Performance Regression - 34% Drop In A Micro-Benchmark
While Linux 6.5 is expected for release tomorrow, the flow of last minute fixes isn't over.
FreeBSD Experimenting With A Port Of NVIDIA's Linux Open DRM Kernel Driver
The new nvidia-drm-kmod is a FreeBSD port of Linux's nvidia-drm.ko open-source kernel module.
Firefox 117 Beta 8 vs. Google Chrome 116 Linux Browser Performance
Given all the interest this week in Firefox outperforming Google Chrome in SunSpider, I decided to run some fresh Linux desktop web browser benchmarks on my end. For today's comparison is a look at the newly-released Chrome 116 up against Firefox 117b8 that will be released as stable in just over one week.
Steam On Linux Usage Spikes To Nearly 2% In July, Larger Marketshare Than Apple macOS
The Steam Survey results for July 2023 were just published and it points to a large and unexpected jump in the Linux gaming marketshare.
Linus Torvalds Reviews The Bcachefs File-System Code
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.
NVIDIA BIOS Signature Lock Broken - What Caused Open-Source Pains For Years
New (Windows) tools have been released that break the NVIDIA BIOS Signature Lock, the "security" functionality in use since the GeForce GTX 900 days around signed firmware/BIOS handling. This authentication mechanism is what in turn has led to the GeForce GTX 700 series still being the best supported series by the open-source Nouveau driver while the GTX 900 series and later have been crippled to their low boot clock speeds due to PMU/re-clocking restrictions. While Nouveau developers have been working on the GPU System Processor (GSP) approach for RTX 20 "Turing" GPUs and newer to workaround this limitation as NVIDIA's blessed path forward, the NVIDIA BIOS Signature Lock has now been broken by Windows modders.
Rust Abstractions Posted For Sockets & Other Fundamental Network Bits
While Linux 6.1 added the initial Rust infrastructure as an alternative programming language for writing new kernel modules, so far as of Linux 6.5 much of the upstreaming effort has been around adding new abstractions and supporting additional subsystems for making the Rust capabilities in the kernel more complete. The latest patch series is working on adding Rust abstractions for networking sockets and other fundamental networking bits.
Linux Decides To Disable RNG On All AMD fTPMs
As a follow-up to the first-on-Phoronix article last month that highlighted Linus Torvalds' frustrated views on the AMD fTPM random number generator continuing to cause problems for users even with updated firmware/BIOS, as of today the Linux kernel has gone ahead and blanket disabled RNG use for all current AMD fTPMs.
Linux 6.6 To Finish Gutting Wireless USB & UWB
The upcoming Linux 6.6 kernel will finish removing old remnants of Wireless USB support.
SUSE To Be Taken Private By Its Largest Shareholder
The SUSE organization has changed hands many times over the years... From being its own independent company to the notable acquisition by Novell two decades ago. Over the past decade SUSE has changed hands between Attachmate, Micro Focus, EQT Partners, and then went public back in 2021 on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange. Now two years later it is being taken private.
AMD "INCEPTION" CPU Vulnerability Disclosed
AMD has kicked off a busy Patch Tuesday by disclosing INCEPTION, a new speculative side channel attack affecting Zen 3 and Zen 4 processors that require new microcode while prior Zen CPUs require a kernel-based solution.
SELinux In Linux 6.6 Removes References To Its Origins At The US NSA
Security Enhanced Linux (SELinux) has been part of the mainline kernel for two decades to provide a security module implementing access control security policies and is now widely-used for enhancing the security of production Linux servers and other systems. Those that haven't been involved with Linux for a long time may be unaware that SELinux originates from the US National Security Agency (NSA). But now with Linux 6.6 the NSA references are being removed.
AMD Open-Source GPU Kernel Driver Above 5 Million Lines, Entire Linux Kernel At 34.8 Million
With the in-development Linux 6.6 kernel adding support for more upcoming Radeon graphics processors, that means more auto-generated header files for the new IP blocks... I was curious to see the overall size now of the AMDGPU kernel driver along with its associated code like the AMDKFD compute driver. It's now above 5 million lines for the kernel driver portion.
XFS File-System Maintainer Stepping Down
After six years as serving as the XFS file-system maintainer, Darrick Wong announced he'll be stepping down from this role and that really multiple developers need to step up to maintain XFS and help with testing and other responsibilities.
Ubuntu Desktop "Charting A Course For The Future" With Ubuntu 24.04 LTS Next Year
Oliver Smith at Canonical who serves as the Product Manager for Ubuntu Desktop published a post on "charting a course for the future" of the Ubuntu desktop.
Google's BBRv3 TCP Congestion Control Showing Great Results, Will Be Upstreamed To Linux
Google's open-source BBR TCP congestion control algorithm is widely used within Google and its v3 iteration is already proving a success within the company and they are working toward upstreaming BBRv3 into the mainline Linux kernel.
Firefox Lands Wayland Fractional Scaling Support
Mozilla Firefox has merged Wayland fractional-scale-v1 protocol support for handling fractional scaling with the web browser on the Linux desktop.
And the most popular reviews / featured articles:
Benchmarking The Performance Impact To AMD Inception Mitigations
Last week the AMD Inception vulnerability was made public as a speculative side channel attack affecting Zen processors and different mitigation options based on the CPU generation. There wasn't too much communication around the performance implications of mitigating Inception while over the past week I have begun benchmarking the software and microcode updates on Ryzen and EPYC processors.
Initial Benchmarks Of The Intel Downfall Mitigation Performance Impact
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.
StarFive VisionFive 2 Quad-Core RISC-V Performance Benchmarks
SiFive's HiFive Unmatched development board was interesting when it began shipping in 2021 with 16GB of RAM and four U74-MC RISC-V cores along with one S7 core. But pricing was rather steep at $665 USD. Fast forward two years, the StarFive VisionFive 2 has begun to enjoy wide availability and for $100+ this RISC-V development board features a quad-core RISC-V processor via the StarFive JH7110 SoC with integrated GPU, up to 8GB of RAM, HDMI 2.0 output, dual Gigabit Ethernet, dual USB 3.0 ports, and more for around $100 USD. Here are some benchmarks of this most interesting RISC-V single board computer in the ~$100 space to be released yet.
AMD Ryzen 7 7840U Windows 11 vs. Linux CPU Performance
Over the past month I've been delivering a number of Linux laptop tests with the AMD Ryzen 7 7840U for that Zen 4 "Phoenix" SoC within an Acer Swift Edge 16. One of the requests that has come up with my ongoing testing has been how well the default Microsoft Windows 11 installation compares to loading up Linux on this 8-core AMD Zen 4 laptop. Well, in this article is a look at the Linux performance compared to Windows 11, including when making use of the Linux 6.5 development kernel where AMD P-State is now the default and also for seeing what workloads are impacted by the recent AMD Inception vulnerability.
Benchmarking Mercury As The "Fastest Firefox Fork" With AVX, AES, LTO + PGO
Following the news last week of Firefox outperforming Chrome in SunSpider, a Phoronix reader pointed out Mercury that is an open-source web browser claiming to be the "fastest Firefox fork" and making use of Advanced Vector Extensions (AVX) and AES instructions along with compiler features like Link-Time Optimizations (LTO) and Profile-Guided Optimizations (PGO). The project advertises as being 8-20% faster than upstream Firefox. Curious I ran a couple benchmarks on my end of this Firefox fork.
NVIDIA GeForce vs. AMD Radeon Linux Gaming Performance For August 2023
After resorting to buying a NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 graphics card to be able to share Linux performance metrics for that more affordable Ada GPU, last month I posted the Radeon RX 7600 vs. GeForce RTX 4060 benchmarks as well as looking at the GeForce GTX 1060 through RTX 4060 GPU compute and renderer performance across several generations of NVIDIA GPUs. For those considering the RTX 4060 for a Linux gaming system or an upgrade to other recently released AMD or NVIDIA GPUs, here is a fresh round of Linux gaming performance metrics on the newest drivers.
Intel DOWNFALL: New Vulnerability Affecting AVX2/AVX-512 With Big Performance Implications
This Patch Tuesday brings a new and potentially painful processor speculative execution vulnerability... Downfall, or as Intel prefers to call it is GDS: Gather Data Sampling. GDS/Downfall affects the gather instruction with AVX2 and AVX-512 enabled processors. At least the latest-generation Intel CPUs are not affected but Tigerlake / Ice Lake back to Skylake is confirmed to be impacted. There is microcode mitigation available but it will be costly for AVX2/AVX-512 workloads with GATHER instructions in hot code-paths and thus widespread software exposure particularly for HPC and other compute-intensive workloads that have relied on AVX2/AVX-512 for better performance.
Ryzen 9 7950X Performance With The New AMD P-State Default Of Linux 6.5
The Linux 6.5 kernel is expected to be released as stable this weekend barring any last minute issues from being raised. One of the notable changes with this new kernel version is Linux now defaulting to the AMD P-State "EPP" active driver configuration for modern Ryzen systems rather than the long-used generic ACPI CPUFreq driver default. In some cases this can mean better performance but particularly should yield a nice improvement to the power efficiency of Ryzen Zen 2 and newer platforms, especially laptops and other portable Linux systems like the Steam Deck and ROG Ally. I am working on some fresh AMD Ryzen Linux laptop comparison benchmarks but for this article is a look at Linux 6.5 on the desktop side with the AMD Ryzen 9 7950X.
Initial Benchmarks Of The "NVK" Open-Source NVIDIA Vulkan Driver
With the in-development NVK driver merged for Mesa 23.3 to provide open-source NVIDIA Vulkan API support when paired with the Nouveau kernel driver and the necessary Nouveau kernel driver improvements coming with Linux 6.6 for supporting this driver, Phoronix readers have been eager for some benchmarks... Well, here are some benchmarks on the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 20 and RTX 30 series when comparing the latest NVK+Nouveau code compared to the proprietary NVIDIA Linux graphics driver stack.
Amazon's New EC2 M7a AMD EPYC "Genoa" Instances Deliver Leading Performance In The AWS Cloud
While back in November was when AWS originally announced new EC2 instances powered by 4th Gen AMD EPYC "Genoa" processors, only this week did they bring their M7a general purpose instances to a general availability state where anyone can access them. Being very impressed with 4th Gen EPYC bare metal as well as with Azure's HPC cloud, I fired up some benchmarks of the new Genoa-powered EC2 M7a instance compared to the new M7i instances powered by Intel Xeon Scalable "Sapphire Rapids" as well as showing how the competition is to Amazon's in-house Graviton ARM-based server processors.
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