Intel announced at their Innovation 2023 conference that they are collaborating with software vendors such as Red Hat, Canonical, and SUSE to provide Intel-optimized Linux distributions, Phoronix reports. This is part of Intel’s push for “optimized performance” in the Linux world.

The collaboration aims to provide Intel-optimized distributions of enterprise software releases, ensuring optimized performance for the latest Intel architectures. This is an extension of previous collaborations, such as Canonical and Intel’s work on Ubuntu optimized for select Intel CPUs.

In addition to the collaboration on Linux distributions, Intel and Red Hat announced an expanded collaboration with Intel contributing to upstream RHEL through CentOS Stream. Intel will also continue contributing performance optimizations to tools and frameworks in the AI space, such as PyTorch and TensorFlow.

These collaborations are expected to bring new optimizations for performance and power efficiency. Intel’s Clear Linux platform will continue to be maintained with aggressive performance optimizations. The enterprise Linux distributions, such as Red Hat and SUSE, are exploring raising their baseline requirements and implementing optimized libraries based on the CPU in use.

Phoronix promises to report on the results of these collaborations, including benchmarking.

Source: Phoronix.

NVIDIA is making advancements in their Linux InfiniBand driver to support 800Gb/s (XDR) speeds. The company has posted a set of six patches for the upstream Linux kernel, aiming for inclusion in Linux 6.7. These patches will enable the 800Gb/s support in the InfiniBand core networking code and the Mellanox MLX5 driver. The NVIDIA Mellanox Skyway GA100 InfiniBand to Ethernet Gateway is believed to be the first product capable of achieving the XDR speeds. This development showcases NVIDIA’s commitment to delivering high-speed networking solutions for servers.

The details of the preparations for the 800Gb/s (XDR) speed implementation in the Linux kernel’s InfiniBand code can be found in the patch series provided by NVIDIA.

Source: Phoronix.

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.

Phoronix is reporting that Linux 6.6-rc2 has been released by Linus Torvalds, coinciding with the 32nd anniversary of the introduction of the Linux 0.01 kernel version. Torvalds notes that this release does not have any standout features, but includes various fixes and changes in drivers, along with some tracing fixes and other minor updates.

Source: Phoronix.

The New Stack has posted a guide on how to harden n Ubuntu server. Ubuntu is a popular choice for container deployments, but many admins and DevOps teams overlook the importance of securing the operating system itself. The article provides a guide to hardening Ubuntu to ensure a secure foundation for deployments. The steps include:

1. Schedule regular upgrades to ensure the server is patched against the latest threats.

2. Change sudo and SSH settings.

3. Install and configure fail2ban to automatically ban IP addresses that attempt to compromise the server via SSH.

4. Secure shared memory by mounting /run/shm with certain privileges.

5. Enable and configure the Uncomplicated Firewall (UFW) and allow SSH connections.

By following these steps, admins and DevOps teams can significantly enhance the security of their Ubuntu Server deployments. Head over to The New Stack and read the guide!

Source: The New Stack.

Phoronix reports that early testing of the Linux 6.6 kernel shows impressive gains for AMD’s high core count server processors, particularly the EPYC 9754 “Bergamo.” The new Linux 6.6 kernel features the Earliest Eligible Virtual Deadline First (EEVDF) scheduler, which is a major improvement over the existing Completely Fair Scheduler (CFS). The EEVDF scheduler has shown to help with latency sensitive tasks and has led to a lot of CFS code being removed. Additionally, the Linux 6.6 workqueue improvements benefit AMD CPUs and other chiplet-based CPUs with multiple L3 caches. In testing, Linux 6.6 has shown dramatic improvements on higher core count processors like the AMD EPYC 9754.

The article discusses the testing of the Linux 6.6 kernel on an AMD EPYC 9754 server configuration with 128 cores and 256 threads per socket. The benchmarks were carried out using Linux 6.5.1 stable and then with Linux 6.6-rc1. The results showed significant performance improvements with the Linux 6.6 kernel.

Source: Phoronix.