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By: Olaf Kirch

January 29, 2018 11:24 am

5,913 views

These days, nobody needs Enterprise Support, anyw… aaaargh!

It was a dark and stormy day in early November, when the SUSE security team was invited to a heavily NDAed phone conference. During this call, they were briefed about three vulnerabilities involving speculative execution features of various CPUs. What followed were many intense weeks of preparing the mitigating patches for what became known to […]

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By: Olaf Kirch

January 25, 2018 3:15 pm

27,879 views

Meltdown and Spectre Performance

Ever since Meltdown and Spectre were disclosed, quite a few customers have been asking us for guidance on the performance impact of the mitigating patches for these hardware vulnerabilities: Do these patches impact performance? If so, by how much? The first question is answered easily: all these mitigations impact performance - hardly noticeable for some, […]

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By: Olaf Kirch

May 13, 2015 10:49 am

6,551 views

Of Venoms and Antidotes

Today, a new vulnerability was disclosed by the name of VENOM (CVE-2015-3456), already seeing a fair amount of media attention. In order to help you assess the impact of this vulnerability on your systems, we are collecting background information and provide a prelimary risk assessment for our products. What this attack is all about The […]

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By: Olaf Kirch

October 2, 2012 2:40 pm

7,623 views

Geeko Loves Cephalopod

At SUSE, we have been looking at the next level of storage solutions that provide a suitable foundation for the Cloud and for Big Data. While centralized storage will continue to play a major role in these areas, we are seeing an emerging need for massively scalable, distributed, replicated and yet inexpensive storage. For Cloud […]

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By: Olaf Kirch

August 8, 2012 10:13 am

31,331 views

Our Planned Approach to Secure Boot

In this follow-on blog to UEFI Secure Boot, I will describe our plans towards UEFI Secure Boot. Note that when we say "SUSE", we really mean two very distinct distributions -  SUSE Linux Enterprise on one hand, and openSUSE on the other hand. The latter, being a  community project, is rather independent in their […]

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By: Olaf Kirch

August 7, 2012 4:51 pm

41,037 views

UEFI Secure Boot

In case you don't know what this blog is talking about: UEFI is the "Unified Extensible Firmware Interface", and "Secure Boot" is one of its more recent features that is generating a bit of a stir in the Open Source world. At SUSE, we have been looking at UEFI Secure Boot long and […]

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By: Olaf Kirch

March 23, 2012 8:24 am

7,525 views

SUSE Linux Enterprise 11 SP2 Proudly Presents: Linux 3.0

From a developer's point of view, changing a version number is nothing to go crazy about. Outside of the occasional significance to a version number, version numbers are typically more or less random strings – window dressing, if you will. The Linux 3.0 kernel does not fall in the window dressing category, which is […]

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