Linux News of the Week: Kernel 6.10, Memory Stamping, Anti-Lag+

It is not always possible to report every news about the free operating system in a timely manner, but some events are still worth mentioning. In this summary, the editorial team provides an overview of all the important news from the Linux world from the previous week.

Linux Kernel 6.10 Released

The new Linux kernel brings many improvements to the free operating system. The improvements to hard disk and file encryption are particularly interesting for end users. Using modern AVX instructions in current processors from Intel and AMD for XTS-AES implementations, the speed of encryption operations can be significantly increased. Thus, up to 155% acceleration can be achieved on the Zen 4 platform under suitable conditions.

RISC-V systems are only capable of working with AMD graphics cards. A prerequisite for this was support for the floating point unit, which is necessary for the AMDGPU display core to work.

There are also innovations in the security area with 6.10. A new extension pushed by the Google Chrome team called com.mseal It takes advantage of the functions found in modern processors to protect memory allocations from modifications, hence the name. Memory stampThe developers describe the function in English as follows:

Modern CPUs support memory permissions such as RW and NX bits. Memory permissions improve security against memory corruption errors, i.e. an attacker cannot write to RAM and point code at it, and the memory must be marked with X bit, otherwise an exception will occur.

Memory sealing also protects the mapping itself from modification. This is useful for mitigating memory corruption issues where a corrupted pointer is passed to the memory management system, for example, such a primitive attacker could break control flow integrity guarantees because read-only memory that is supposed to be reliable could become writable or .text pages could be remapped. Memory sealing can be applied automatically by the runtime loader to lock .text and .rodata pages and applications can also lock security-critical data at runtime.

Phoronix.com has published a comprehensive summary of all the innovations in the new kernel 6.10.

Nobara 40 released

Nobara is the distribution project of Red Hat developer Thomas Crider, also known for projects like the Custom Proton releases that are well-known among Linux gamers. With Nobara, the developer also known as GloriousEggroll offers a Fedora-based Linux distribution aimed at gamers. In addition to pre-configured drivers, kernel tweaks for increased gaming performance, and pre-installed tools like OpenRGB RGB control, Nobara wants to provide an out-of-the-box experience for Linux newcomers with a focus on gaming. Like the Fedora baseline, Nobara offers several updates to several software components at the same time as a point release, which is reflected in the corresponding release jumps. Linux kernel 6.8.12 forms the base. Due to issues, version 6.9 was skipped, so the team is already testing kernel 6.10. The Gnome and KDE desktop environments have been brought to version 46 and 6.1.1, respectively. This was developed internally system update The application is now implemented as a Python GUI instead of a bash script. This also now runs in the system tray and notifies you of available updates. Nopara Package Manager It gets expanded functionality and now allows you to search for, install, and remove Flatpaks without having to go through KDE Discover or Gnome Software. Mesa 24.1.3 provides graphics drivers for AMD and Intel as well as Nvidia's version 555.58.02. Full release notes are available on the project website.

AMD Anti-Lag Technology for Vulkan

AMD has already shown in the ComputerBase test how far it has come with its competitor Nvidia Reflex. In addition to the small selection of games, there were also limitations in the interface. With update 1.3.291, the Anti-Lag feature is now also available for Vulkan. This is an extension of the Vulkan interface called VK_AMD_anti_lagHowever, it should be noted that this is an Anti-Lag+ implementation. The work on this comes directly from AMD and the developers describe the new feature as follows:

This extension automatically adjusts the CPU speed to ensure that it doesn’t get too far ahead of the GPU, reducing latency between inputs received and screen updates. Additionally, Anti-Lag+ gives apps the ability to notify the driver when input processing starts, in order to align the timing of display updates, allowing for lower latency between inputs received and screen rendering.