News briefs for September 19, 2018.
Ampere, in partnership with Lenovo, announced availability of the Ampere eMAG[1] for hyperscale cloud computing. The first-generation Armv8-A 64-bit processors provide "high-performance compute, high memory capacity, and rich I/O to address cloud workloads including big data, web tier and in-memory databases". Pricing is 32 cores at up to 3.3GHz Turbo for $850 or 16 cores at up to 3.3GHz Turbo for $550.
LLVM 7.0.0 is out. This release is the result of six months of work by the community and includes "function multiversioning in Clang with the 'target' attribute for ELF-based x86/x86_64 targets, improved PCH support in clang-cl, preliminary DWARF v5 support, basic support for OpenMP 4.5 offloading to NVPTX, OpenCL C++ support, MSan, X-Ray and libFuzzer support for FreeBSD, early UBSan, X-Ray and libFuzzer support for OpenBSD, UBSan checks for implicit conversions, many long-tail compatibility issues fixed in lld which is now production ready for ELF, COFF and MinGW, new tools llvm-exegesis, llvm-mca and diagtool." See the release notes[2] for details, and go here[3] to download.
Alibaba Cloud and MariaDB announce AsparaDB RDS for MariaDB TX, which is "the first public cloud to incorporate the enterprise version of MariaDB and provide customer support directly from the two companies. ApsaraDB RDS for MariaDB TX provides Alibaba Cloud customers the latest database innovations and most secure enterprise solution for mission-critical transactional workloads." See the press release[4] for more information.
Unit 42 researchers have discovered a new malware family called Xbash, which they have connected to the Iron Group, that targets Linux and Microsoft Windows severs. Besides ransomware and coin-mining capabilities, "Xbash also has self-propagating capabilities (meaning it has worm-like characteristics similar to WannaCry or Petya/NotPetya). It also has capabilities not currently implemented that, when implemented, could enable it to spread very quickly within an organizations' network (again, much like WannaCry or Petya/NotPetya)." See the