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Debian: Russell Coker's Work, Birger Schacht's Status and Steve McIntyre on Microsoft-Controlled Kill Switch and Back Door
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Russell Coker ☛ Russell Coker: CPUs and Debian Package Building
Introduction
I have just bought a HP Z4 G4 with W-2125 CPU for $320 and I decided it was a good time to do some benchmarks on Debian package building to see which system I should use for that.
The W-2125 CPU scores only 9,954 on the passmark multithread test but scores 2,546 on single thread [1]. Passmark seems to have some limitations as the only DDR3 system that’s important to me at the moment (the HP Z420 workstation my parents use which cost me $750 in 2021) with a E5-2620 CPU scoring 5,325 for multithread and 1,113 for single thread [2]. From the passmark results one would expect that the system is slightly more than twice as fast as the Z420 for operations that involve less than 4 CPU cores.
For the initial tests of the Z4 G4 I ran them with hyper-threading enabled as 4 cores isn’t much by today’s standards and also the machine in question is going to be less exposed to hostile data and contain less secret data than most of my systems so the security risks of hyper-threading are less of a concern.
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Bisco ☛ Birger Schacht: Status update, May 2026
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Steve McIntyre ☛ Steve McIntyre: Secure Boot and Abusive Monopolist Microsoft CA Rollover - user-facing documentation
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Digital Restrictions (DRM)
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[Old] Extreme Tech ☛ Linux's worst-case scenario: Windows 10 makes Secure Boot mandatory, locks out other operating systems
With Windows 10, Microsoft will mandate Secure Boot -- and the ability to turn the feature off has gone from mandatory to optional. This could cripple the ability to install any other OS on OEM hardware.
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