Summary of the week of February 10, 2025

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Weekly summary with a one-day delay:

VRAM saving with NTC

Nvidia has a new technology called Neural Texture Compression that can reduce VRAM consumption by up to 96% with minimal performance loss. Tests have been done in a real scenario but specifically designed to test NTC.

Used hard drives sold as new

It's not a new phenomenon to come across used hard drives sold as new. But lately the market seems to be flooded with Seagate drives with tampered records that actually have tens of thousands of hours of operation. Most of these drives seem to come from the end of the Chia fever.

On the Rust policy in the kernel

On this page they explain the kernel's policy regarding Rust. They say that the integration of Rust in Linux is flexible, allowing each subsystem to decide how to manage it. Some use it actively, others delegate responsibilities to other developers, and others choose not to support it due to the workload.

The 12VHPWR problem in the RTX 5090

Nvidia is having problems with the 12VHPWR power connector in their RTX 5090. It seems that the cable reaches 140ºC after 3 minutes running Furmark. During the test, 20A are measured in 16AWG cables, when this section is suitable for 18A at 90ºC.

Plasma 6.3 available

The third revision of Plasma 6 comes with the possibility of cloning panels along with their configurations. In addition, the system monitor consumes much fewer resources than before. They have also managed to square the pixels perfectly to the grid when scaling in KWin, improving sharpness.

Performance improvements in Firefox

Firefox has been using something called ForkServer for 3 months in its test versions. ForkServer helps to parallelize the processing of websites on Linux. According to them, it reduces times by 35% and memory consumption by 50%. Since version 135 it has been included but deactivated by default due to 3 bugs that remain to be resolved.

Linux with a retro look

Someone has created a kind of distribution called Hotdog that comes with interfaces that mimic the look of Windows 3.1, Amiga Workbench, the GEM of the Atari ST, and the Classic and Aqua themes of Mac. In addition, it is designed for screens with low pixel density and does not have Unicode support.