Android Leftovers

• Android 9.0 Pie is set to roll out to Samsung's Galaxy M10, M20, and M30

• LG V40 ThinQ gets Android Pie in the US, only second update from the company

• Google just removed the Huawei P30 Pro & Mate X from Android's website

• Android Q Beta 3 spontaneously rebooting for some people to "test mainline update"

• Android Q is heading to OnePlus 5/5T, OnePlus 7 Pro features heading to 6/6T

• 11 things my Android phone does way better than your iPhone

• Google Pixel 3a XL Review: Full-Featured, Affordable Pure Android

• Gameloft Developing Another LEGO Game For Android

Ubuntu 19.10 Puts Nvidia's Proprietary GPU Driver Right On The ISO

In Ubuntu 19.04, Canonical introduced the ability to download Nvidia's propriety graphics driver during the OS installation process (provided the user has an internet connection). That was a welcome step toward making gaming more accessible for newcomers. With the upcoming Ubuntu 19.10, however, Canonical is following in the footsteps of System76's Pop!_OS and slapping Nvidia's driver (both 390 and 418) right onto the ISO. Phoronix spotted the update via Ubuntu's Launchpad platform. What this means is that users can have the proprietary Nvidia driver -- a better option for gaming compared to the open source "Nouveau" driver -- ready to go at first boot. They also have the option to install the Nvidia binary at any point in the future without needing to add or activate a repository or download the driver.

Benchmarking AMD FX vs. Intel Sandy/Ivy Bridge CPUs Following Spectre, Meltdown, L1TF, Zombieload

Now with MDS / Zombieload being public and seeing a 8~10% performance hit in the affected workloads as a result of the new mitigations to these Microarchitectural Data Sampling vulnerabilities, what's the overall performance look like now if going back to the days of AMD FX Vishera and Intel Sandybridge/Ivybridge processors? If Spectre, Meltdown, L1TF/Foreshadow, and now Zombieload had come to light years ago would it have shaken that pivotal point in the industry? Here are benchmarks looking at the the performance today with and without the mitigations to the known CPU vulnerabilities to date. As I've already delivered many benchmarks of these mitigations (including MDS/Zombieload) on newer CPUs, for this article we're looking at older AMD FX CPUs with their relevant Spectre mitigations against Intel Sandybridge and Ivybridge with the Spectre/Meltdown/L1TF/MDS mitigations. Tests were done on Ubuntu 19.04 with the Linux 5.0 kernel while toggling the mitigation levels of off (no coverage) / auto (the default / out-of-the-box mitigations used on all major Linux distributions for the default protections) / auto,nosmt (the more restricted level that also disables SMT / Hyper Threading). The AMD CPUs were tested with off/auto as in the "auto,nosmt" mode it doesn't disable any SMT as it doesn't deem it insecure on AMD platforms.