Category Archives: Linux

AMD “sbtsi_temp” Driver Being Updated For Linux 6.18 To Handle Freezing CPU Temperatures

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Two years ago the AMD Linux CPU temperature driver was updated to handle negative temperature reporting. That’s for some users with exotic cooling systems and then also use within some industrial applications where the systems may be subject to sub-zero temperatures. The AMD sbtsi_temp driver is also now being similarly updated for handling freezing CPU temperatures…

LLVM Clang 21 Compiler Helping Squeeze More Performance On 5th Gen AMD EPYC “Turin”

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With LLVM 21.1 having been released last week as the newest half-year feature update to this open-source compiler stack, I have begun benchmarking Clang 21 on a variety of systems for getting a feel for the performance over Clang 20. Eventually it will be extended as well to looking at the Clang 21 performance against GCC and vendor compilers. For some initial Clang 21 benchmarking, here is a look at how the Clang 21 C/C++ compiler is performing on 5th Gen AMD EPYC “Turin” Zen 5 processors compared to the prior release.

[$] Removing Guix from Debian

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As a rule, if a package is shipped with a Debian release, users can
count on it being available, and updated, for the entire
life of the release. If package foo is included in the stable
release—currently Debian 13
(“trixie”)—a user can
reasonably expect that it will continue to be available with security
backports as long as that release is supported, though it may not be
included in Debian 14 (“forky”). However, it is likely that the
Guix package manager will soon
be removed from the repositories for Debian 13 and
Debian 12 (“bookworm”, also called oldstable).

The hidden vulnerabilities of open source (FastCode)

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The FastCode site has a
lengthy article on how large language models make open-source projects
far more vulnerable to XZ-style attacks.

Open source maintainers, already overwhelmed by legitimate
contributions, have no realistic way to counter this threat. How do
you verify that a helpful contributor with months of solid commits
isn’t an LLM generated persona? How do you distinguish between
genuine community feedback and AI created pressure campaigns? The
same tools that make these attacks possible are largely
inaccessible to volunteer maintainers. They lack the resources,
skills, or time to deploy defensive processes and systems.

The detection problem becomes exponentially harder when LLMs can
generate code that passes all existing security reviews,
contribution histories that look perfectly normal, and social
interactions that feel authentically human. Traditional code
analysis tools will struggle against LLM generated backdoors
designed specifically to evade detection. Meanwhile, the human
intuition that spot social engineering attacks becomes useless when
the “humans” are actually sophisticated language models.