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LWN.net

[$] Asciinema: making movies at the command-line

In open-source circles there are many situations, such as bug reports, demos, and tutorials, when one might want to provide a play-by-play of a session in one's terminal. The asciinema project provides a set of tools to do just that. Its tools let users record, edit, and share terminal sessions in a text-based format that has quite a few advantages compared to making and sharing videos of terminal sessions. For example, it is easy to use, offers the ability to search text from recorded sessions, and allows users to copy and paste directly from the recording.

LWN.net

Security updates for Monday

Security updates have been issued by Debian (chromium and sogo), Fedora (chromium, foomuuri, libpng, libsodium, mariadb10.11, musescore, nginx, python-pdfminer, python-urllib3, python3.12, seamonkey, wasmedge, and wget2), Mageia (curl, libpcap, sodium, wget2, and zlib), Slackware (lcms2), SUSE (chromedriver, chromium, noopenh264, coredns, curl, dcmtk, fontforge, gdk-pixbuf-loader-libheif, gimp, kernel, libheif, libpng16, libsoup-2_4-1, libvirt, mariadb, php8, poppler, python-filelock, python-tornado6, python311-aiohttp, qemu, sssd, and traefik), and Ubuntu (libheif, libtasn1-6, linux-azure-nvidia, linux-kvm, linux-raspi, linux-raspi-realtime, and php7.2, php7.4, php8.1, php8.3, php8.4).

Phoronix

The Surprising Spectre BHI Mitigation Performance Impact On Meteor Lake

When recently carrying out performance benchmarks of Intel Meteor Lake performance on Linux since launch day two years ago, the geo mean came in at 93% the original performance. Finding the performance trending clearly lower with an up-to-date Linux software stack compared to in December 2023 was quite surprising considering the rather nice gains we have seen over time on other Intel/AMD hardware. As noted in that article though, one of the possible explanations there is the Spectre BHI "Branch History Injection" vulnerability and microcode plus Linux kernel mitigations having come out post-launch and affecting Meteor Lake CPUs. Sure enough, follow-up tests looking at the Spectre BHI impact have revealed a measurable cost in a number of workloads for the Core Ultra processor.