The Current CPU Driver Usage Difference Between RADV/RadeonSI & NVIDIA

Yesterday I posted some fresh GPU/driver benchmark results for discrete AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards. These were some of the most competitive numbers yet we've seen out of the open-source RadeonSI OpenGL and RADV drivers while using the latest Linux 4.15 kernel, especially for the GTX 1060 vs. RX 580 battle. In the comments were requests to see some CPU utilization numbers, including from one of the Radeon Linux developers, so here is a look at how the CPU usage compares.

11 January 12:54 PM EST - Hardware - CPU Usage Impact - 22 Comments
KPTI + Retpoline Linux Benchmarking On Old Laptops

Over the past week and a half of running many benchmarks looking at the performance impact of the Linux KPTI and Retpoline patches for Spectre and Meltdown mitigation, one of the most common test requests is some thorough benchmarks on older systems. Why that's important is with older (pre-Westmere) CPUs there isn't PCID (Process Context Identifier) support that's used by KPTI, which helps offset some of the performance loss. So for some test results to share today are two old ThinkPads from the Clarksfield and Penryn days compared to a newer Broadwell ThinkPad in looking at the performance difference.

11 January 10:00 AM EST - Software - 21 Comments
RADV Gets Another Optimization For Micro-Benchmarks

David Airlie and Bas Nieuwenhuizen's work on the RADV open-source Vulkan driver is quite relentless. David has posted yet another patch working on further optimizing the performance of this unofficial Radeon Vulkan driver living within Mesa.

11 January 05:44 AM EST - Radeon - RADV Vulkan - 3 Comments

10 January

AMDGPU Queues More Fixes For Linux 4.16

AMD sent in a fair number of AMDGPU updates slated for Linux 4.16 but now hitting the cut-off for major feature updates for DRM-Next code looking to make it into 4.16, AMD has submitted some fixes.

10 January 08:18 PM EST - Radeon - AMDGPU Linux 4.16 - 5 Comments
Some Of The Other Changes Slated For Linux 4.16

There's still a week and a half to go until the Linux 4.15.0 stable kernel release is expected and that rings in the Linux 4.16 merge window. On top of various Linux 4.16 changes already talked about, here's a look at some of the other kernel features/additions expected for this next release cycle.

10 January 03:16 PM EST - Linux Kernel - Linux 4.16 Features - Add A Comment
DragonFlyBSD Posts Initial Kernel Fix For Spectre

Last week DragonFlyBSD lead developer Matthew Dillon posted initial patches for addressing Meltdown on this popular BSD distribution. Dillon has now posted his initial patch for targeting the Spectre CPU vulnerability.

10 January 05:14 AM EST - BSD - DragonFly - 3 Comments

9 January

The Combined Impact Of Retpoline + KPTI On Ubuntu Linux

Over the past week I have posted many KPTI and Retpoline benchmarks for showing the performance impact of these patches to combat the Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities. But with my testing so far I haven't done any showing the combined impact of KPTI+Retpoline on Ubuntu versus a completely unpatched system. Here are some of those results.

9 January 05:57 PM EST - Ubuntu - Meltdown + Spectre - 29 Comments
Benchmarking Clear Linux With KPTI + Retpoline Support

Yesterday Intel landed KPTI page table isolation and Retpoline support in their Clear Linux distribution. Given that one of the pillars of this Intel Open-Source Technology Center platform is on delivering optimal Linux performance, I was curious to see how its performance was impacted. Here are before/after benchmarks on seven different systems ranging from low-end Pentium hardware to Xeon servers.

9 January 08:39 AM EST - Operating Systems - 20 Comments

8 January

Linux 4.17 To Likely Include Intel DRM Driver's HDCP Support

Back in November a Google developer proposed HDCP content protection support for the Intel Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) Linux driver that is based upon their code from Chrome OS / Chromium OS. It looks like that High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection support in the i915 DRM driver will come for Linux 4.17.

8 January 06:08 PM EST - Intel - HDCP Protection - 23 Comments
GCC 8 Will Enter Its Last Stage Of Development Next Week

The GNU Compiler Collection 8 (GCC 8) is currently in "stage three" development whereby general bug fixing can still happen along with allowing new ports to be added. But that is changing next week as it enters its final stage of development prior to release.

8 January 04:04 PM EST - GNU - GCC 8 - 3 Comments
Benchmarking Linux With The Retpoline Patches For Spectre

While the Kernel Page Table Isolation (KPTI) patches were quick to land in the mainline Linux kernel for addressing the Meltdown CPU vulnerability, the "Retpoline" patches are still being worked on as the leading approach on the Linux side for dealing with the Spectre CPU vulnerability. The Retpoline patches are said to have little impact on performance, but here are our benchmarks of these kernel patches for seeing how they affect a variety of AMD and Intel systems.

8 January 10:00 AM EST - Software - 51 Comments
GCC 8 Patches Posted For Spectre Mitigation

There's been a well-published branch the past few days of a patched GCC 7.2 code-base with the code changes for fending off Spectre while now patches have arrived on the mailing list for Spectre/CVE-2017-5715 of mainline GCC 8.

8 January 05:55 AM EST - GNU - GCC 8 Patches - 11 Comments

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