Matt's Homepage

Game audio has come a long way from the days of Pac-man. Those original games could manage some beeps and bloops from a single channel speaker. As time went on, sampled sounds and stereo allowed for more realistic material sounds and music. Then was the introduction of surround sound systems and directional effects.

Like most modern games, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild relied on a standard library of sound effects blended into the gameplay. But this would not work for The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. It needed a much more complex system to meld sounds together and interact anywhere in the game world. It would simply become to much work to simulate an arrow shot in all the different environments found in the game. Caves need to echo, desert sands absorb sound, and what if the arrow lands in water, or ice, or on stone? Further, all of this must be attenuated based on distance and obstructions so players can tell where things are coming from and how far away they are.

Junya Osada, the lead audio engineer for The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, started sharing the mechanisms of how they achieved this. They use a variety of specialized filters that were attached to informational voxel geometry under the map used to describe the environmental characteristics above it. Those voxels were used for game mechanics – and were co-oped to also help the sound. This environmental information is then combined with the players distance and direction from the sounds using their unique method to create some interesting emergent properties.

The system isn’t a full-fledged sound rendering system that has been explored before, but it’s a very interesting halfway ground from what we have today to such a system. It’s definitely worth a listen (which happens after the equally interesting talk about the physics engine):

(Gamedev link)

Ars Technica reports that, researchers at security firm Binarly found that Secure Boot is completely compromised on more than 200 older device models sold by Acer, Dell, Gigabyte, HP, Intel, Lenovo, Supermicro and others. The cause: a cryptographic key underpinning Secure Boot on those models that was compromised in 2022.

They found that more than 10% of firmware images had this vulnerability. The cure – update your bios to ones without compromised keys.

We discovered the private component of one Platform Key in a data leak where a suspected ODM employee published the source code containing the PK on a public GitHub repository. The private key was stored in an encrypted file, which was “protected” by a weak 4-character-long password and thus easily guessable with any password-cracking tool.

-Binarly report

I have written about how Amazon’s Graviton4 CPU is starting to out-perform x86 offerings from Intel and AMD. Now there is yet another front that should worry Intel and AMD: security.

Like many custom chip designs coming from Apple, Google, and Amazon, Graviton4 is an ARM-based architecture. While AMD, Intel, and some other chip designers have struggled with the various forms of Spectre and Meltdown attacks, new designs are defending against them at their hearts.

ARM8.5-A and subsequent security extensions have been slowly and steadily introduced to combat the vulnerabilities found in classic chip designs. These features include things like Branch Target Identification to avoid branch prediction and speculative execution attacks. Memory addresses can be accessed only if they have been marked as valid for that execution prediction. Pointer Authentication adds a cryptographic signature to authenticate memory pointers and prevents data alteration. All data sent across high-speed hardware interfaces such as Graviton memory and AWS Nitro cards is encrypted to prevent man-in-the-middle attacks. All of this is enabled by default for customers that use Amazon Linux 2023.

“Many people told me it was impossible to build a chip that could compete with the x86 CPUs and didn’t use the x86 architecture,” Ali Saidi, senior principal engineer at AWS, said in an interview published by Amazon’s A to Z blog. “But 25 years ago, x86 wasn’t the dominant architecture. The innovation and economies of scale of the PC drove success in other areas like servers. Since it happened before, I knew it could happen again.”

Are the days of SR-IOV (Single Root I/O Virtualization) numbered? SR-IOV was originally designed for 20 or so VMs with most instances using 8 vCPUs or less. Now that we have 60-128 cores/120-256 hw threads and beyond with multiple sockets and CXL, things have changed.

Scalable IO offers better scalability, flexibility, over-provisioning, and a Scalable IO system can still support traditional SR-IOV in backwards compatibility mode.

It does this with hardware-assisted, efficient routing and has different modes for direct and intercepted path functionality. I won’t claim I fully grock all the details, but it does seem like a great way to start taking advantage of newer architecture enhancements we’re seeing in a wide variety of upcoming hardware platforms.

Give the spec a read to learn more.

Links:

• https://www.opencompute.org/documents/ocp-scalable-io-virtualization-technical-specification-revision-1-0-version-1-3-pdf
• https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/docs/programmable/813754/24-1-4-0-0/scalable-iov.html
• https://www.servethehome.com/microsoft-and-intel-scalable-io-virtualization-replacing-sr-iov-ocp/

After 4 years, Windows 11 installations finally reached an adoption rate of just over 50% – likely due to dire sounding announcements about the end of Windows 10 support. And just one month later, install rate immediately starts a retreat and Windows 10 sees an increase of installs.

The OS wars are long since over, but it is obvious some folks at Microsoft clearly haven’t learned, or just don’t care, about disappointing your customers.

Links:

• https://gs.statcounter.com/os-version-market-share/windows/desktop/worldwide
• https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Software-Survey-Welcome-to-Steam