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Showing posts from October, 2020

Intel considering CPU undervolting driver for Linux

Windows users have it easy. The XTU (Intel Extreme Tuning Utility) allows laptop users to undervolt their laptop processors. On Linux, you have to rely on either a good fan setup in your notebook, or on intel-undervolt , the unofficial undervolting project. It seems like Intel is considering to implement their own Kernel driver solution for undervolting Intel CPUs in laptops. See this Kernel mailing list:  https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20200907094843.1949-1-Jason@zx2c4.com/T/#u There is some discussion going on about the undocumented MSR and if it should be permitted to play around with it for the sake of cooler laptop CPUs. Most developers seem to agree that it would be indeed a good idea to implement CPU undervolting on the Kernel level. Intel needs to provide better documentation of their CPU features, including MSR. Since Intel has a huge team of open source developers on their payroll, the development of a new Intel undervolting solution for Linux users seems to be very likely in t

NetBSD 9.1 Released With X11 Fixes

On October 18th, NetBSD 9.1 was released. A few of the highlights included in the latest NetBSD upgrade are listed below: Parallelized disk encryption with cgd(4) Added support for Xen 4.13 Added support for more hardware RNGs in the entropy subsystem Various reliability fixes and improvements for ZFS X11 improvements, default window manager switched to ctwm(1) Improved framebuffer console performance on amd64 Various instances of kernel memory corruption and information leakage were fixed Many other miscellaneous bug fixes, and additions to existing device drivers see the full changelog here NetBSD 9.1 was released on the same day as OpenBSD 6.8 , giving BSD users an interesting choice between two very stable operating systems based on a BSD Kernel. The last update before 9.1 was NetBSD 9.0 in February 2020. NetBSD is known to support dozens of different host machines and architectures. The following are probably the most no