Summary of the week of August 7, 2023

[cobito]

OpenGL in virtual machines

Someone has created a program that allows you to capture the calls to graphic acceleration functions in OpenGL in a virtual machine and transfer them to the guest. It works on both Linux and Windows, although it is in an early stage of development.

Intel drivers do telemetry by default

The latest Intel drivers for the Arc GPU come with telemetry enabled by default. There are two interesting issues: the first is that this change is not reflected in the version's list of changes. The second is that data is sent (obfuscated browsing history) that is of no use for improving the drivers.

TPM RNG is disabled in Linux

The Linux community has decided to disable the TPM RNG (Random Number Generator) due to the stability problems it causes. According to one of the developers, the TPM RNG functionality is not necessary for generating entropy when the CPU already supports the RDRAND instruction.

New vulnerability in Intel processors

DOWNFALL is a security flaw in Intel processors that, once again, exploits speculative execution and this time affects AVX2 and AVX-512 extensions. The patch causes a significant drop in performance.

New vulnerability in AMD processors

Shortly after a security flaw for Intel processors was published, another one was published for AMD CPUs. This one has been called INCEPTION and is also related to speculative execution. The problem affects Zen 3 and Zen 4 and, curiously, Zen 1 and 2 are safe because the cleaning that is done in the jump predictor by the patch is already done from the beginning in older architectures. Notable drops in performance are expected.

New version of Qalculate

Qalculate is a calculator with a large number of functionalities. Among many other things, it allows you to write expressions directly instead of having to click on buttons and corrects some errors (such as closing parentheses).

External SSD drives fail more than expected

It seems that external SSD drives tend to fail more than normal. In this entry they talk about SanDisk SSDs but the problem extends to other brands. The failure seems to be in the controller, which heats up more than normal and ends up burning out.

256 TB SSD

At the flash memory fair in California, Samsung has been presenting its products and has said that it has a 256 TB SSD memory intended for servers. I have also made a presentation of its architecture for future 1 PB memories.