Kernel: Straight Line Speculation, Serial Console, and x86

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x86 Straight Line Speculation CPU Mitigation Appears For Linux 5.17 - Phoronix
The Linux 5.17 kernel is introducing support for the x86 straight-line speculation "SLS" mitigation with it becoming increasingly clear modern x86_64 CPUs are susceptible to speculatively executing linearly in memory past an unconditional change in control flow.
Back in mid-2020 Straight Line Speculation was made public for Arm CPUs based on research by Google's SafeSide initiative. Arm processors were found to be able to speculatively execute linearly in memory beyond what should be an unconditional change in control flow, such as for exception returns, other exception generating instructions, unconditional direct/indirect branches, and function returns. If speculatively executing a "Spectre revelation gadget" it could in turn make secrets vulnerable to revelation through timing analysis.
Following that disclosure, open-source software quickly mitigated for Arm SLS via GCC and LLVM/Clang compiler hardening around BLR and RETBR instructions.
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Linux Serial Console Driver Lands Patch For Possible ~25% Performance Improvement - Phoronix
It's not an area of Linux hardware performance we normally look at, but thanks to a Red Hat engineer discovering very low serial console performance, there is an improvement queued up for introduction in Linux 5.17...
Red Hat's Wander Lairson Costa was noticing the serial console throughput on an HP Proliant DL380 Gen9 server was coming in well below expectations: expecting 10KB/s but with the current Linux kernel only hitting around 2.5KB/s. The Linux 8250 serial console driver was taking around 410 microseconds just to dispatch one single byte.
With the Linux 8250/16550 serial port console driver, Wander has managed to improve the performance in 2022. The 16550 UARTs have an on-chip FIFO buffer to which is now being used on supported systems by the 8250 serial driver's write function.
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Intel Core i5 12400 "Alder Lake": A Great ~$200 CPU For Linux Users Review - Phoronix
Formally announced at CES, the Core i5 12400 and other Alder Lake non-K desktop CPUs are beginning to appear in retail channels. Last week I was able to buy an Intel Core i5 12400 "Alder Lake" from a major Internet retailer for $209 USD -- and one week later there remains availability during these turbulent supply chain times. The i5-12400 has wound up being a very nice processor for Linux use that exceeded my initial expectations.
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Samsung, Red Hat to Work on Linux Drivers for Future Tech
The metaverse is expected to uproot system design as we know it, and Samsung is one of many hardware vendors re-imagining data center infrastructure in preparation for a parallel 3D world.
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