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Submission + - Intel starts publishing open-source Linux driver code for discrete GPUs (phoronix.com)

Submitted by fstack
fstack writes: Intel is still a year out from releasing their first discrete graphics processors, but the company has begun publishing their open-source Linux GPU driver code. This week they began by publishing patches on top of their existing Intel Linux driver for supporting device local memory for dedicated video memory as part of their restructuring effort to support discrete graphics cards. Intel later confirmed this is the start of their open-source driver support for discrete graphics solutions. They have also begun working on Linux driver support for Adaptive-Sync and better reset recovery.

Submission + - Linux 4.18 Releases With Steam Controller Kernel Driver / Spectre Updates (phoronix.com)

Submitted by fstack
fstack writes: Linus Torvalds has released Linux 4.18 as the newest kernel bringing a Steam Controller kernel driver, Spectre updates for ARM64, power management updates, a "Restartable Services" system call, AMD Radeon graphics driver improvements, V3D DRM as Broadcom's new graphics driver, DM writecache support, USB 3.2 support, and many other updates.

Submission + - Raspberry Pi 3 B+ Benchmarks Show Much Nicer Performance (phoronix.com)

Submitted by fstack
fstack writes: Pi Day was marked this year by the launch of the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ as the next evolution to this $35 ARM single-board computer. Phoronix has now put out Raspberry Pi 3 B+ benchmarks showing that the Ethernet performance is indeed much faster now but still doesn't stack up to other high performance boards, the SoC temperature is noticeably lower than the very warm Raspberry Pi 3, and the overall performance is a nice upgrade while retaining the same price point as its predecessors. Follow up tests looking at the WiFi performance also show the new 802.11ac dual-band wireless to be much faster as well.

Submission + - AMD Open-Sourcing Their Official Vulkan Linux Driver (phoronix.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: While many of you have likely heard of the "RADV" open-source Vulkan driver, it's been a community-written driver up to this point in the absence of AMD's official, cross-platform Vulkan driver being open-source. That's now changed with AMD now open-sourcing their official Vulkan driver. The code drop is imminent and they are encouraging the use of it for quick support of new AMD hardware, access to the Radeon GPU Profiler, easy integration of AMD Vulkan extensions, and enabling third-party extensions. For now at least it does provide better Vulkan performance than RADV but the RADV developers have indicated they plan to continue development of their Mesa-based Vulkan driver.

Submission + - Oracle Engineer Talks Of ZFS Possibly Still Being Upstreamed On Linux (phoronix.com)

Submitted by fstack
fstack writes: Senior software architect Mark Maybee who has been work Oracle/Sun since '98 says maybe we "could" still see ZFS be a first-class upstream Linux file-system. He spoke at the annual OpenZFS Developer Summit how Oracle's focus has shifted to the cloud, they have reduced investment in Solaris, and admits that Linux rules the cloud. Among the Oracle engineer's hopes is that ZFS needs to become a "first class citizen in Linux" and to do so Oracle should port their ZFS code to Oracle Linux and then upstream the file-system to the Linux kernel, which would involve relicensing the ZFS code.

Submission + - AMD Opteron vs. EPYC Server CPU Performance Over A Decade (phoronix.com)

Submitted by fstack
fstack writes: Phoronix has carried out tests comparing AMD's high-end EPYC 7601 CPU to AMD Opteron CPUs from about ten years ago looking at the EPYC/Opteron Linux performance and power efficiency. Both on the raw performance and perf-per-Watt, the numbers are quite staggering though the single-threaded performance hasn't evolved quite as much. The EPYC 7601 is a $4200 USD processor with 32 cores / 64 threads.

Submission + - Forget the Russians: Corrupt, Local Officials the biggest threat to Elections (securityledger.com)

Submitted by chicksdaddy
chicksdaddy writes: Do you think that shadowy Russian hackers are the biggest threat to the integrity of US elections? Think again. It turns out the bad actors in US elections may be a lot more "Senator Bedfellow" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minor_characters_in_Bloom_County#Senator_Bedfellow) than "Fancy Bear," (https://www.crowdstrike.com/blog/who-is-fancy-bear/) according to Bev Harris, the founder of Black Box Voting. “It’s money,” Harris told The Security Ledger. (https://soundcloud.com/securityledger/episode-58-election-system-hacking-bev-harris-and-eric-hodge) “There’s one federal election every four years, but there are about 100,000 local elections which control hundreds of billions of dollars in contract signings.” Those range from waste disposal and sanitation to transportation.“There are 1,000 convictions every year for public corruption,” Harris says, citing Department of Justice statistics. “Its really not something that’s even rare in the United States.”

We just don't think that corruption is a problem, because we rarely see it manifested in the ways that most people associate with public corruption, like violence or having to pay bribes to receive promised services, Harris said. But it's still there.

How does the prevalence of public corruption touch election security? Exactly in the way you might think. “You don’t know at any given time if the people handling your votes are honest or not,” Harris said. “But you shouldn’t have to guess. There should be a way to check.”

And in the decentralized, poorly monitored U.S. elections system, there often isn't. At the root of our current problem isn’t (just) vulnerable equipment, it’s also a shoddy ‘chain of custody’ around votes, says Eric Hodge, the director of consulting at Cyber Scout, which is working with the Board of Elections in Kentucky and in other states to help secure elections systems. That includes where and how votes are collected, how they are moved and tabulated and then how they are handled after the fact, should citizens or officials want to review the results of an election. That lack of transparency leaves the election system vulnerable to manipulation and fraud, Harris and Hodge argue.

Submission + - AMD Confirms A "Linux Performance Marginality Problem" Affects Ryzen (phoronix.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Ryzen customers experiencing segmentation faults under Linux when firing off many compilation processes have now had their problem officially acknowledged by AMD. The company describes it as a "performance marginality problem" affecting some Ryzen customers and only on Linux. AMD confirmed Threadripper and Epyc processors are unaffected, they will be dealing with the issue on a customer-by-customer basis, and their future consumer products will see better Linux testing/validation.

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