According to the latest findings from Android tipster Mishaal Rahman, MGLRU is enabled by default for all Android 14 kernels (android14-5.15 and android14-6.1). The kernel of the Google Pixel 8 series is based on android14-5.1 GKI and is the world’s first phone to enable the MGLRU function by default.

Mishaal Rahman said that Google’s benchmarks show that after enabling MGLRU, the overall startup time of the app will improve, the number of overall process deaths will decrease, kswapd CPU usage will decrease, and so on. Next-generation flagships with Qualcomm and MediaTek chipsets should also have this feature enabled by default.

▲ Picture source Linux Plumbers Conference official live broadcast

According to Google’s demonstration at the 2022 Linux Plumbers conference, after turning on MGLRU on the Pixel 6 phone:

 Overall app launch time reduced by approximately 6.60%

 Overall background killing decreased by 8.04%

 kswapd CPU usage reduced by 54.50%

 Direct recycling times reduced by 81.10%

Users can use the adb command to check whether their phones enable or support MGLRU:

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Most notably, Linux kernel 6.5 enables the P-State feature by default on some AMD CPUs, which means the kernel can manage cores more efficiently, balancing performance and power consumption. Intel CPUs based on the Alder Lake architecture also get improved load balancing to get the most out of the silicon. The 6.5 kernel also adds tools to boot CPUs in parallel, which improves boot times for multi-socket servers, which makes sense for very large-scale computers.

Linux kernel 6.5 also adds support for the Xuantie 910 TH1520 RISC-V 64-bit processor independently developed by Alibaba Pingtouge.

Also in version 6.5, USB 4.2 makes its first appearance, and Wi-Fi 7 gets preliminary support, although not fully supported.

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As of press time, the Linux 6.4.10 stable kernel and the Linux 6.1.45 / 5.15.126 / 5.10.190 LTS kernel have fixed the vulnerability.

AMD Linux developer Borislav Petkov wrote a kernel patch to address the bug in the Ryzen 1000-series and EPYC 7001-series processors, explaining:

 In some cases, an error occurred when integers were divided by 0, which could leave outdated quotient data from previous division operations on Zen1 architectures.

 Perform a dummy 0/1 division before returning from the #DE exception handler to avoid any potential sensitive data issues leaking w.

In the code, this issue is simply referred to as “AMD DIV0 Speculation Bug”.

Of course, virtual division 0/1 only works on AMD Zen 1 processors. The kernel message added by this patch also states that disabling the SMT technique provides “full” protection against division by zero.

In addition to the AMD Zen 1 fixes, various other bugs were fixed in the Linux stable and LTS kernels this week.

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It’s worth noting that this is a non-LTS release, so not everyone needs to upgrade to this release unless they have specific issues that this kernel release solves.

This update improves the following:

 Initial support for Apple's M2 chip

 Improvements in sensor monitoring

 AMD P-State Boot Autonomous Mode

 Improved storage performance

Initial support for Apple’s M2 chip

The Linux 6.4 kernel provides initial support for Apple’s M2 system-on-a-chip (SoC) and adds device tree files for current MacBook Air, Pro, and Mac Mini systems. But there are still some problems, such as the inability to display output on the Apple M2 Mac Mini, and the lack of support for the keyboard and touchpad of the new Apple laptop, and we can expect that these problems will be better resolved when the Linux 6.5 kernel arrives.

Improvements in sensor monitoring

Similar to the previous kernel version, the Linux 6.4 kernel provides sensor monitoring capabilities for more than 100 ASUS motherboards, including both Intel and AMD platforms. PRIME, ROG, TUF, Pro, ProArt and other series are all supported.

AMD P-State Boot Autonomous Mode

After much effort, AMD Boot Autonomous Mode has finally been integrated into the Linux kernel, which brings better performance and power efficiency to AMD EPYC and AMD Ryzen processors.

Improved storage performance

The Linux 6.4 kernel also brings a number of storage improvements, including:

The EROFS filesystem has been optimized to now allow subpage block support, which matches well with the AArch64 architecture.

Various performance optimizations for the EXT4 file system, and some minor tweaks for the NTFS file system, now remove the “No Access Rules” option.

Also, the Btrfs and F2FS filesystems have received some very nice enhancements, bringing performance improvements for different usage scenarios

Other improvements and fixes

It is noticed that in addition to the improvements mentioned above, there are some changes worth mentioning, such as:

• Support Intel linear address mask function.
• Discontinued support for Intel Thunder Bay.
• Various optimizations for LoongArch.
• Support for Intel Lunar Lake HD Audio.
• Improved performance of VDUSE.

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Dave Chinner, an XFS developer at Red Hat, released a patch last Saturday to help users suffering from XFS metadata corruption. Chinner said: “This patch just fixes the XFS filesystem’s livelock on stripe. I guess in some cases, this problem does not have repeated failures on allocating livelocks, but corrupted mappings returned to writeback code. Thus misleading writeback IO”.

Note: Rune Kleveland, who has been actively dealing with this issue, said that after installing the patch, the hardware has been stable for more than 90 minutes, so I think this patch is effective.

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The kernel.org website has marked the Linux kernel 6.2 series as EOL (end of life), which means it will no longer support bug and security fixes.

In February 2023, Linux kernel 6.2 introduced new features, including Protected Load Balancing (PLB) for the IPv6 stack, a new FineIBT control flow integrity mechanism for x86, support for Intel’s “asynchronous exit notification” mechanism, and more Rust infrastructure.

As a short-lived kernel branch, Linux 6.2 is now end-of-life (EOL), and kernel developer and maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman today released Linux 6.2.16 and urged users to upgrade to the latest Linux 6.3 kernel family as soon as possible.

As a result, GNU/Linux distributions that use the Linux 6.2 kernel family are expected to upgrade to the latest Linux 6.3 kernel family soon. Most rolling distributions, such as Arch Linux or openSUSE Tumbleweed, and some of their derivatives, are already using the Linux kernel 6.3 family.

Linux kernel 6.3 was released in April 2023, and new features include a new Intel VPU DRM acceleration driver, BIG TCP support for IPv4, Rust code support for x86_64 user-mode Linux, “ZBB” bit manipulation extension support for the RISC-V kernel, and native Steam. bit manipulation extensions for the RISC-V kernel and native Steam Deck controller support.

Note that Linux kernel 6.3 is also not in the LTS (Note: Long Term Support) series and is expected to end its life cycle at the end of July, when it will be urged to upgrade to the new Linux 6.4 series — expected to be available in late June or early July 2023.

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Download it at https://kernel.org/

Torvalds’ 6.3-rc4 announcement to read as follows

All is well with Linux Kernel 6.3-rc4 development. All statistics, including most of diffstat, look normal.

The reason I say "most" is that we fixed a number of xfs bugs last week, which made diffstat look more numerous than usual. Even so, the actual size of the modified code is much smaller than expected.

Normally, more than 50% of the diffstat that drives the program is different from 6.3-rc4, where one-third is driver tweaks, one-third is filesystem tweaks, and one-third is other parts.

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Ventana was founded in 2018 to be the “RISC-V performance leader. The company today released a Linux kernel patch that enables Advanced Configuration and Power Interface (ACPI) infrastructure on RISC-V processor architectures.

Ventana presented a presentation back in 2021 at the RISC-V Summit, which contained a wealth of technical information. The presentation also covered the upstream RISC-V ACPI platform specification, which meets the ACPI requirements for the RISC-V server platform.

Advanced Configuration and Power Interface (ACPI), is 1997 by Intel, Microsoft, and Toshiba, was jointly proposed, and developed by the operating system power management, hardware configuration interface, is an open standard, replacing the advanced power management, multi-processor specification, the old plug-and-play specification. In 2000 August Compaq and Phoenix Technology joined, the introduction of ACPI 2.0 specifications. HP replaced Compaq in September 2004 with the ACPI 3.0 specification.

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The developers have managed to resolve most of the issues reported by users in Tails 5.8, including support for certain graphics cards such as the Intel UHD 750 by upgrading the kernel to Linux 6.0.12. These graphics issues occurred because Tails 5.8 switched to Wayland by default and used the Linux kernel 5.10 LTS.

Also fixed in Tails 5.9 are the startup of AppImage binaries using Qt toolkits such as Bitcoin-Qt and Feather, clipboard encryption and decryption in the Kleopatra OpenPGP client, and the display of application menus by some GTK3 applications with additional software features installed.

Persistent storage has also been improved in terms of activation and backup utilities. In addition, KeePassXC Password Manager fixes three clipboard actions, including copying password phrases to unlock the database, automatically clearing passwords from the clipboard after 10 seconds, and using the auto-keying feature.

Tails 5.9 include localizing the Tor browser’s home page when launching from the Tor Connection Assistant, now having a simplified error screen when connecting automatically, and removing the confirmation dialog when launching an insecure browser.

This release comes with the latest Tor Browser 102.7 anonymous web browser based on Mozilla Firefox 102.7 ESR and Tor 0.4.7.13. The system is based on and synchronized with the Debian GNU/Linux 11 “Bullseye” repository.

Users can now download Tails 5.9 from the official website and can view a USB image or a traditional ISO image for media or virtual machines. The next Tails 5.10 release is scheduled for February 21, 2023.

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Remote NDIS (RNDIS) eliminates the need for hardware vendors to write NDIS miniport device drivers for network devices attached to the USB bus.

Remote NDIS does this by defining a bus-independent set of messages and a description of how this set of messages operates over the USB bus.

Because this remote NDIS interface is standardized, a set of host drivers can support any number of network devices attached to the USB bus.

This greatly reduces the development burden for device manufacturers, improves overall system stability because no new drivers are required, and improves the end-user experience because no drivers can be installed to support new USB bus-attached network devices.

RNDIS is not currently widely used in cross-platform environments, and due to security concerns, the upstream Linux kernel is looking to move the RNDIS kernel driver behind the “BROKEN” Kconfig option, effectively disabling them in future kernel releases.

After the RNDIS-related code is marked “BROKEN”, the associated driver is removed from the upstream source tree.

Greg Kroah-Hartman wrote in the proposal.

"The Microsoft RNDIS protocol is, by design, insecure and vulnerable on any system that uses it with an untrusted host or device. Because the protocol is not secure, all rndis drivers need to be disabled to prevent anyone from using them again."

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