Summary of the week of August 14, 2023

[cobito]

Security flaw in Arc GPUs

A security flaw has been found in Intel's Arc A770 and A750 graphics cards. Curiously, it only affects some batches sold between October and December last year. The flaw allows a local user without privileges to reveal personal information.

Core i9-13900KF

Someone has brought us a Raptor Lake with 8 P-cores and 16 E-cores. The Core i9-13900KF is very similar to the 13900KF and identical to the 13900K (the difference is in the iGPU). This version of the 13900 takes the bronze medal in the overall ranking.

Repercussions of the patch for Inception

This entry compares the performance of an Epyc 7763 (Zen 3) before and after applying the patch for Inception. A generalized drop in performance is observed where PostgreSQL, Nginx, and MariaDB fall by double-digit percentages.

Alternative to ls

Exa is an alternative to ls that comes with default options that improve the presentation of information. It uses colors to differentiate types of files and highlights symbolic links and extended attributes.

LK-99 is not a superconductor

After a few weeks of studies on the superconductivity of LK-99, some of them positive in simulation, it has finally been understood why the experimental results were what they were and it is now known that it does not behave as a superconductor at room temperature. It seems that impurities of one of its components called Cu2S caused a significant drop in the material's resistivity at certain temperatures and made it appear to be a superconductor.

Firefox incorporates fractional scaling in Wayland

Support for fractional scaling of Wayland has been included in Firefox. This will help to display the elements of the browser correctly on HiDPI screens.

Tool to detect errors in AMD GPUs

AMD has published a tool called Radeon GPU Detective intended to provide information on why the GPU has stopped working when an error occurs. The program is included in the Radeon Developer Tool Suite package, which is free software.

Debian turns 30

About 30 years ago, Ian Murdock wrote in the comp.os.linux.development newsgroup about the completion of a new version of Linux that he called "The Debian Linux Release". It was the first version of the distro.