As the Steam Deck slowly marches toward its fifth birthday next February, owners are likely eager for a way to extend its life rather than investing in expensive high-end competition. A new patch for AMD's Linux drivers could substantially reduce low-end frame hitches when the Steam Deck or other AMD-based gaming hardware is running in Energy Performance Preference (EPP) mode.
Writing on the Linux kernel mailing list (thanks, Phoronix), kernel coder David Vernet lays out the basic problem that games often face in EPP mode. When a busy thread frequently goes to sleep for short periods, the current AMD driver can misinterpret that behavior as a signal to lower its average performance target. When those threads wake up, they start at a lower-than-desired frequency, leading to increased frame latency, stale frames, and longer frame generation times at the low end of the distribution.
Shifting the processor to "performance" mode fixes this problem but eliminates the energy savings that EPP mode is supposed to provide. And simply boosting the affected thread's minimum performance target permanently actually makes low-end performance worse, thanks to the complexities of CPU/GPU boost management.
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Researchers have analyzed a high-severity vulnerability in Linux that’s able to escalate untrusted users to root by exploiting a bug you don't often see: a single errant character inside the kernel.
The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-23111, is located in nf_tables, a subsystem of the Linux kernel that provides packet filtering capabilities. It’s used to manage firewall rules and replaces older subsystems such as iptables, ip6tables, arptables, and ebtables.
The presence of a single mis-issued exclamation point in code implementing nf_tables introduced a use-after-free, a class of vulnerability that corrupts memory by placing malicious code at memory addresses that haven’t been properly freed of their previous contents. CVE-2026-23111 can be exploited by an unprivileged user or process to elevate system rights to root.
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