Plus an update on ZoL SIMD acceleration, your feedback, and an interesting new neuromorphic system from Intel.

Links:

• ZFS On Linux Has Figured Out A Way To Restore SIMD Support On Linux 5.0+ — Those running ZFS On Linux (ZoL) on post-5.0 (and pre-5.0 supported LTS releases) have seen big performance hits to the ZFS encryption performance in particular. That came due to upstream breaking an interface used by ZFS On Linux and admittedly not caring about ZoL due to it being an out-of-tree user. But now several kernel releases later, a workaround has been devised.
• ZFS On Linux Runs Into A Snag With Linux 5.0
• NixOS Takes Action After 1.2GB/s ZFS Encryption Speed Drops To 200MB/s With Linux 5.0+ — A NixOS developer reports that the functions no longer exported by Linux 5.0+ and previously used by ZoL for AVX/AES-NI support end up dropping the ZFS data-set encryption performance to 200MB/s where as pre-5.0 kernels ran around 1.2GB/s
• Linux 5.0 compat: SIMD compatibility · zfsonlinux/zfs@e5db313 — Restore the SIMD optimization for 4.19.38 LTS, 4.14.120 LTS, and 5.0 and newer kernels. This is accomplished by leveraging the fact that by definition dedicated kernel threads never need to concern themselves with saving and restoring the user FPU state. Therefore, they may use the FPU as long as we can guarantee user tasks always restore their FPU state before context switching back to user space.
• no SIMD acceleration · Issue #8793 · zfsonlinux/zfs — 4.14.x, 4.19.x, 5.x all have no SIMD acceleration, it is like a turtle. very slow.
• Chris's Wiki :: ZFS on Linux still has annoying issues with ARC size — One of the frustrating things about operating ZFS on Linux is that the ARC size is critical but ZFS's auto-tuning of it is opaque and apparently prone to malfunctions, where your ARC will mysteriously shrink drastically and then stick there.
• Software woven into wire, Core rope and the Apollo Guidance Computer — One of the first computers to use integrated circuits, the Apollo Guidance Computer was lightweight enough and small enough to fly in space. An unusual feature that contributed to its small size was core rope memory, a technique of physically weaving software into high-density storage.
• Virtual Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC) software — Since you are looking at this README file, you are in the "master" branch of the repository, which contains source-code transcriptions of the original Project Apollo software for the Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC) and Abort Guidance System (AGS), as well as our software for emulating the AGC, AGS, and some of their peripheral devices (such as the display-keyboard unit, or DSKY).
• The Underappreciated Power of the Apollo Computer - The Atlantic — Without the computers on board the Apollo spacecraft, there would have been no moon landing, no triumphant first step, no high-water mark for human space travel. A pilot could never have navigated the way to the moon, as if a spaceship were simply a more powerful airplane. The calculations required to make in-flight adjustments and the complexity of the thrust controls outstripped human capacities.
• Brains scale better than CPUs. So Intel is building brains | Ars Technica — Neuromorphic engineering—building machines that mimic the function of organic brains in hardware as well as software—is becoming more and more prominent. The field has progressed rapidly, from conceptual beginnings in the late 1980s to experimental field programmable neural arrays in 2006, early memristor-powered device proposals in 2012, IBM's TrueNorth NPU in 2014, and Intel's Loihi neuromorphic processor in 2017. Yesterday, Intel broke a little more new ground with the debut of a larger-scale neuromorphic system, Pohoiki Beach, which integrates 64 of its Loihi chips.
• Dancing Demon - YouTube — Written in 1979 by Leo Christopherson for the Radio Shack TRS-80 Model I computer. This is the best game ever for at that time.

Plus some good news for OpenBGP and the wider internet community, and a handy tool for inspecting docker images.

Links:

• Firecracker – Lightweight Virtualization for Serverless Computing — Firecracker is an open source virtualization technology that is purpose-built for creating and managing secure, multi-tenant containers and functions-based services.
• Firecracker — Firecracker is an open source virtualization technology that is purpose-built for creating and managing secure, multi-tenant containers and functions-based services.
• Firecracker Design Docs
• Firecracker Roadmap
• QEMU — QEMU is a generic and open source machine emulator and virtualizer.
• Qemu : Security vulnerabilities
• VENOM Vulnerability — VENOM, CVE-2015-3456, is a security vulnerability in the virtual floppy drive code used by many computer virtualization platforms. This vulnerability may allow an attacker to escape from the confines of an affected virtual machine (VM) guest and potentially obtain code-execution access to the host.
• s2n — s2n is a C99 implementation of the TLS/SSL protocols that is designed to be simple, small, fast, and with security as a priority.
• OpenBGPD - Adding Diversity to the Route Server Landscape — Thanks to the RIPE NCC Community Project Fund we were able to revive the OpenBGPD daemon and bring more diversity to the Route Server landscape.
• OpenBGPD — OpenBGPD is a FREE implementation of the Border Gateway Protocol, Version 4. It allows ordinary machines to be used as routers exchanging routes with other systems speaking the BGP protocol.
• LSI Questions from Anton
• ServeTheHome
• Sennheiser Headset Software Could Allow Man-in-the-Middle SSL Attacks — When users have been installing Sennheiser's HeadSetup software, little did they know that the software was also installing a root certificate into the Trusted Root CA Certificate store.  To make matters worse, the software was also installing an encrypted version of the certificate's private key that was not as secure as the developers may have thought.
• evilginx2: Standalone man-in-the-middle attack framework used for phishing login credentials along with session cookies, allowing for the bypass of 2-factor authentication
• dive: A tool for exploring each layer in a docker image