Linux News #001 "Patch all the COWs"
In This Weeks News
GNOME dual GPU integration coming 3.24 F25/F26
Dual GPUs are a bit of a pain to use, more recently they've been less painful to setup but its still fairly manual. GNOME developer Bastien Nocera has been working to produce some tighter integration for using dual GPUs within GNOME. Essentially allowing you to right click > Run with second GPU on applications that support it.
Its targeted for GNOME 4.24 but may be backported into 3.22 in Fedora 25.
On the note of switchable graphics, work has been pushing on for improved support of hybrid graphics and that should make its way into Fedora 25 (and subsequently other distros). You can read more about it here.
Along the same note, if you have a hybrid / dual-gpu laptop, you might consider helping out on the Better Switchable Graphics Support test day for Fedora. (@wendell @weskie)
AMDGPU-Pro driver release (16.40)
AMD have released a new version of their PRO drivers (16.40), this release now includes support for Red Hat 7.2 and 6.8 systems.
New in This Version
- Provides support for
- AMD Radeon™ R9 M485X
- AMD Radeon™ R7 M465
- AMD Radeon™ R7 M460
- AMD Radeon™ R7 M445
- AMD Radeon™ R7 M440
- Install scripts for RedHat Enterprise Linux 7.2 and 6.8
- FirePro Features (EDID Management and 30-bit color)
The pro drivers at the moment offer better performance and more features than the open AMDGPU drivers, however, AMD have been working pretty fast to incorporate more features into the open GPU stack.
On a personal note, I've been making use of the open drivers and found the performance to be pretty decent. You can expect big improvements with Linux 4.9 and Mesa 13 when they release soon.
"Dirty COW" privilege escalation vulnerability
CVE Ref: CVE-2016-5195
If you've not been living under a rock in the Linux world, you probably know about dirty COW by now.
This is essentially a 11 year old bug that was recently found to have an in the wild exploit, meaning all systems are potentially vulnerable until patched. It's not as scary as it sounds, an attacker still needs local access to the system, however its still a serious flaw.
An interesting positive side effect (depending on your perspective) is that this exploit essentially allows you to root any version of Android currently in existence.
I wont attempt to explain how it work except that it essentially loads a read only file into memory and exploits the way the kernel works with memory in a certain way to fool it into writing to the read-only file instead of a writable file your allowed to access.
Proof of concept code https://github.com/dirtycow/dirtycow.github.io/blob/master/dirtyc0w.c
This video gives a much better explanation and demonstration of how and why this exploit works.
Community Discussion:
Distribution Security References:
- Red Hat: https://access.redhat.com/security/vulnerabilities/2706661
- Fedora: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1387080
- Debian: https://security-tracker.debian.org/tracker/CVE-2016-5195
- SUSE: https://www.suse.com/security/cve/CVE-2016-5195/
- Canonical (Ubuntu): http://people.canonical.com/~ubuntu-security/cve/2016/CVE-2016-5195.html
Gaming
Deus Ex: Mankind Divided
A port of Mankind Divided from Feral will be released on 2016-11-03.
Feral did a live stream this week of the Linux build so you can check it out for yourself https://www.twitch.tv/feralinteractive/v/97437782
I've not much to say on this. It's expected to require a minimum of OpenGL 4.3, and will officially support Nvidia cards. AMD cards should work if you have the latest Mesa, Linux kernel, and LLVM.
I'm quietly exited.
(and in case your wondering, this (like all Feral games) is a native port.)
Black Mesa Released on Linux (beta)
Black Mesa has announced the release of a beta build of Black Mesa for Linux. You can expect there to be bugs, and yes, the game hasn't been finished yet. But Black Mesa is praised for being a great fan made re-imagination of the classic.
Dawn of War 2
- Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War II
- Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War II - Retribution
- Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War II - Chaos Rising
Released a couple of weeks ago, but in case you're not aware, the entire Dawn of War 2 series of games
has been released on Linux by Feral Interactive, and there pretty good.
Official support is for Nvidia and AMD cards. AMD cards need to support MESA 11.2.
Total War: Warhammer (coming soon)
There's not much to be said here. This is another Feral port in the works, there's little information except that its coming.
https://www.feralinteractive.com/en/games/warhammertw/
Feral and Vulkan
Feral have hinted that they are planning to make use of Vulkan in porting games to Linux in 2017. Watch this space I guess?
The only games on Linux currently with some support for Vulkan (that I know of) are DOTA 2 and The Talos Principle.
Civ 6 on Linux? Maybe.
Civilization VI has come out (yay) with no day 1 Linux support :'( Thats pretty sad, all's not lost though. Although not a concrete yes, Aspyr Media are at least seriously looking at Civ 6 on Linux
And I imagine unless there's a serious technology blocker, we will hopefully see it :)
We'll soon see if cookies help.
Community
Some notable guides from the community in the last week or so, they all revolve around AMDs AMDGPU stack on various distributions, go check them out if your using an AMD card.
AMDGPU for GCN 1.1 on Ubuntu 16.10
Author: @presserscrew
AMDGPU for Fedora 24/25
Author: @Eden
AMDGPU for Arch Linux
Author: @HimTortons
What would you like to see?
I thought this might be a good idea. Thoughts? I plan to try and up my writing stills a bit and include more detail, or do you guys like a short to the point fact and link to more info?
