Items tagged with Kernel
All major Linux kernel releases carry a handful of special updates, but there are some that are still a lot more notable than others. Linux 4.12 is one of those kernels, with even Linus Torvalds stating that it's one of the "bigger releases historically". A big reason for that? Well, for starters, it include introductory AMD Radeon Vega support. This comes hot on the heels of AMD unleashing its Vega Frontier Edition to the world, and close to a month before the consumer variants launch at SIGGRAPH 2017 in Los Angeles. AMD's Vega architecture is now supported in Linux - to some extent It's important to note that this is truly introductory Vega support. Phoronix's Michael Larabel notes that with...
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Whether you use Linux at home or manage a Linux server, you'll want to waste no time in making sure your OS is completely up-to-date. An exploit called "Dirty COW" has now been revealed, and while it's not the most dangerous one ever released, the fact that it's been around for nine years is causing some serious alarm throughout the Linux community. If not for the fact that Linux developer Phil Oester was impacted by this exploit, we might still not even know about it. With his own servers, Oester has been capturing all incoming traffic so as to spot issues easier, this one included. While the binary found on his server was compiled in the summer of 2015, there's no reason to believe that this...
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If you're a Linux fan, then you should know that this week is a very special one. On August 25, 1991 - 25 years ago - Linus Torvalds shot out a simple message to a Minix usergroup which stated that he was working on a Minix replacement. Within, he famously said that his creation wouldn't "be big and professional like GNU". Not even Linus Torvalds could have predicted what his OS - eventually called Linux - would become. While it might have taken a little while to get off the ground in a big way, Linux was a pet project that had no goals of world domination, but over time, that eventually happened anyway. To say that Linux is "everywhere" would be accurate. Android users are using a variant of...
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One of the coolest aspects of Linux is its ability to support hardware long before other OSes - and even well before consumers can even get their hands on the hardware. Take USB 3.0, for example, which hit the kernel months before the first products hit the market, in September of 2009. And then there's the SSD command TRIM, which was first launched to the kernel in December of 2008 - six months before Windows 7 introduced the same thing as standard. Of course, supporting something and actually having people be able to use it are two entirely different things. In the case of TRIM, the file system tools had to catch up, and the same was probably true for USB 3.0. Overall, this is common, but what's...
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When pimping Windows Vista prior to its release, Microsoft called it "the most secure OS ever." Of course, software is just software, and there are bugs in anything. And on Friday, security firm Phion AG announced they had discovered a TCP/IP stack buffer overflow. As researcher Thomas Unterleitner indicated: Since this buffer overflow overwrites kernel memory, it could be possible that members of the Network Configuration Operator group exploit this and take control over the operating system without any restriction. This buffer overflow could be exploited to inject code, hence compromising client security. It's a new vulnerability, meaning it is not reproducible on Windows XP. Microsoft was...
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Well, if you can hold out for three years, maybe you can skip Windows Vista altogether. Windows 7 is due out in 2010 (snicker). Microsoft is working on a stripped down operating system kernel they're calling MinWin as part of it, aimed at being small enough to work on the exploding number of devices that can run an OS; but geez, not that OS."A lot of people think of Windows as this large, bloated operating system, and that's maybe a fair characterization, I have to admit," Traut said. "But at its core, the kernel, and the components that make up the very core of the operating system, is actually pretty streamlined." Traut showed a demonstration of MinWin, which lacks a graphical user interface....
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