The Linux 6.6 kernel version seems to be delivering significant performance improvements for AMD EPYC server CPUs according to Phoronix. Tests conducted on Genoa and Genoa-X processors as well as Intel Xeon Scalable “Sapphire Rapids” processors showed that the performance of AMD EPYC servers was greatly enhanced with Linux 6.6 compared to Linux 6.5 stable. The improvements were especially notable for certain workloads.

The Linux 6.6 kernel introduces the EEVDF scheduler and workqueue enhancements that benefit chiplet-based CPUs with multiple L3 caches, such as those used by AMD. Overall, the new features in Linux 6.6 seem to be positively impacting AMD server CPU performance.

Source: Phoronix.

The Linux Foundation and Intel have announced the formation of the Unified Acceleration (UXL) Foundation, which will be an evolution of Intel’s oneAPI initiative.

The UXL Foundation aims to create an open standard programming model for compute accelerators, making the ecosystem more open and unified across vendors. Founding members of the UXL Foundation include Arm, Fujitsu, Google Cloud, Imagination Tech, Intel, Qualcomm Technologies, and Samsung. Notably absent are AMD and NVIDIA, who continue to focus on their own compute stacks. Intel has been open with oneAPI, bringing various oneAPI toolkit components to work on non-x86 CPUs and different levels of GPU support.

The UXL Foundation will focus on open accelerated compute across CPUs, GPUs, FPGAs, and other accelerators. The foundation’s website can be found at UXLFoundation.org. While the absence of AMD and NVIDIA may impact the GPU compute space, the UXL Foundation is an exciting development that will be monitored closely.

Source: Phoronix.

Kubernetes 1.28 introduces several security enhancements to improve the user experience and address the evolving needs of its users. The enhancements include the use of CEL-based admission policies and webhook match conditions, reduction of secret-based service account tokens, ensuring secure image pulling, container image signature handling based on sigstore, KMS v2 improvements, and an Auth API to get self-user attributes. These enhancements provide better security, performance, and management of Kubernetes clusters, ensuring that only verified and secure images are used and that sensitive data remains encrypted. As Kubernetes becomes more essential, these enhancements play a critical role in ensuring the security and reliability of container orchestration platforms.

Source: CNCF Blog.

K3s has released version v1.28.2-rc1+k3s1. The update includes several improvements and bug fixes, such as updating to v1.28.2 of Kubernetes and v1.20.8 of Go. It also includes upgrades to containerd and stargz versions. Additionally, the update addresses issues related to upgrade failures, tunnel dial failures, and delays in apiserver readiness.

Source: K3s.

Here is this months roundup of the changes to the awesome-sysadmin repository. The repository describes itself as

A curated list of amazingly awesome Free and Open-Source sysadmin resources.

Here are the new additions for September 2023:

• Ceph - Distributed object, block, and file storage platform. (Source Code) LGPL-3.0 C++
• GitLab CI - Gitlab’s built-in, full-featured CI/CD solution. (Source Code) MIT Ruby
• glances - Open-source, cross-platform real-time monitoring tool with CLI and web dashboard interfaces and many exporting options. (Source Code) GPL-3.0 Python

Linkerd 2.14 has been released with improved support for multi-cluster deployments, full Gateway API conformance, and various other enhancements. The update introduces a new “gateway-less” mode for cross-cluster communication, allowing for improved performance, security, and reduced cloud spend.

Linkerd now fully conforms with the mesh profile of the Gateway API, offering standardized mechanisms for configuring complex resources. The release also includes numerous bug fixes and performance enhancements.

Source: CNCF.