Summary of the week of March 30, 2020

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Linux 5.4 available

It's Monday and a new kernel version is out. It comes with the expected Wireguard VPN, with support for USB 4 and support for new Intel and AMD hardware.

Analysis of the Ryzen 4000 series

Until now, the mid-range and high-end segment in laptops was dominated by Intel. With the new Zen 2-based mobile processor, the landscape is going to change. Here are a series of analyses brought from the Anglo-Saxon world.

Solving the Year 2038 problem

In 2038, the time counter overflow will occur in Unix-like systems. This team is working to prevent it.

Matlab improves performance on AMD processors

A few months ago it was discovered that Intel's math library (MKL) used in Matlat, did not use the AVX2 repertoire when a non-Intel processor was detected. Mathworks has fixed the problem, substantially improving the performance of the development program on AMD processors.

Turning Ubuntu into MacOS

Someone has created a script that turns an Ubuntu installation into a MacOS-style environment including visual appearance and keyboard layout.

Linux 5.6 has a flaw with Intel's Wifi driver

The newly released version of Linux comes with a driver for Intel Wifi cards (IWLWIFI) that doesn't work. It seems that Intel itself broke it when it tried to apply a security patch.

Nvidia presents its new mobile GPUs

A couple of days after the announcement of the Ryzen 4000, Nvidia has done the same with its GeForce RTX SUPER. They will have between 1024 and 3072 CUDA cores and between 4 and 8Gb of GDDR5 or 6 RAM depending on the model.

More details revealed about the PlayStation 5

Sony's console will come with several pretty interesting features. On the one hand, the gaming experience will not vary with the ambient temperature, unlike what happens in a PC when derating occurs due to temperature. A Jaguar architecture emulation has also been added for reasons of backward compatibility, which is curious considering that Zen 2, in principle, is backward compatible up to the original x86 repertoire. To finish, the SSD storage has such low latency that it will be possible to send a read request in one frame and have the data available in the next frame.

The Wifi bug in Linux 5.6.2 has been fixed

The bug with the driver for Intel Wifi cards has been fixed in kernel version 5.6.2.

An old project

Clipper shows us the process of building his mod. Don't miss it in this forum thread.