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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) by kazzie on Wednesday January 09 2019, @04:48PM

    by kazzie (5309) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday January 09 2019, @04:48PM (#784165)

    Well it worked for Slackware [wikipedia.org]...

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