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posted by takyon on Wednesday January 09 2019, @07:52AM   Printer-friendly
from the five-fingers-make-a-fist dept.

Linux reaches the big five (point) oh

Linux fans will be relieved to know that while 2019 should feature a gentler, softer and less sweary Torvalds, the man's ability to make arbitrary decisions remains undiminished. The reason version 4.21 became 5.0 is because "I ran out of fingers and toes to count on."

As Torvalds observed, there are a ton of changes in the new kernel with toys aplenty. Raspberry Pi fans get touchscreen support and there is the usual array of GPU and CPU enhancements, including some early support for Nvidia's Turing GPUs, which will be of interest to those following CES 2019.

AMD has also seen some love in the form of tweaks to the handling of CPU microcode as well as the arrival of FreeSync, which synchronises the refresh rate of a compatible display to the frame rate of a similarly equipped Radeon card.

Not to be left out, work has continued on Intel's Icelake graphics and, of course, ongoing mitigation for Spectre V2 and its ilk. NXP PowerPC processor received mitigation this time around while Linux's networking subsystem has been tweaked to at least partially deal with the performance hit introduced in 2018 as a result of handling the Meltdown issue.

You know you want to - crank up the theme song!


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  • (Score: 2, Disagree) by mmcmonster on Wednesday January 09 2019, @10:59AM (4 children)

    by mmcmonster (401) on Wednesday January 09 2019, @10:59AM (#784049)

    Not quite that many. Your fourth digit doesn't have independent musculature.

    Don't believe me? Try sticking up your 4th digit (as if you were giving them 'the middle finger' but with the 4th finger) while curling the rest of your digits.

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  • (Score: 2) by isostatic on Wednesday January 09 2019, @11:10AM (3 children)

    by isostatic (365) on Wednesday January 09 2019, @11:10AM (#784055) Journal

    You can get it much of the way up (form the kuckle out)

    Based on a quick test with one hand I can put my 4 fingers and thumb into 100 different positions (two for thumb and ring three for first/middle/little), or 10000 combinations on my two hands. There may be a few combinations that I can't achieve, but still well into the many thousands.

    • (Score: 2, Funny) by shrewdsheep on Wednesday January 09 2019, @11:15AM (2 children)

      by shrewdsheep (5215) on Wednesday January 09 2019, @11:15AM (#784057)

      You are clearly looking at a 7mm process. Most current processes are still at 13mm or even 15mm. Not to mention the GF fab (giant fingers, commonly seen around these cricles).