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Linus Torvalds' Initial Comment On Rust Code Prospects Within The Linux Kernel
Kernel developers appear to be eager to debate the merits of potentially allowing Rust code within the Linux kernel. Linus Torvalds himself has made some initial remarks on the topic ahead of the Linux Plumbers 2020 conference where the matter will be discussed at length.
[...] Linus Torvalds chimed in though with his own opinion on the matter. Linus commented that he would like it to be effectively enabled by default to ensure there is widespread testing and not any isolated usage where developers then may do "crazy" things. He isn't calling for Rust to be a requirement for the kernel but rather if the Rust compiler is detected on the system, Kconfig would enable the Rust support and go ahead in building any hypothetical Rust kernel code in order to see it's properly built at least.
Linus Torvalds Wishes Intel's AVX-512 A Painful Death
According to a mailing list post spotted by Phoronix, Linux creator Linus Torvalds has shared his strong views on the AVX-512 instruction set. The discussion arose as a result of recent news that Intel's upcoming Alder Lake processors reportedly lack support for AVX-512.
Torvalds' advice to Intel is to focus on things that matter instead of wasting resources on new instruction sets, like AVX-512, that he feels aren't beneficial outside the HPC market.
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(Score: 5, Informative) by Subsentient on Monday July 13 2020, @11:49PM (2 children)
I agree with Linus on this -- 99% of my code in all my projects just uses straight integers of 64-bits width or smaller. The only time I end up using floats is when something else uses floats and wants a float. I suspect that to be true unless you're doing a lot of graphics or scientific work.
Integer performance is what really matters. Just optimize that.
That said, Intel has become so evil that I don't want them to succeed. I don't want them to improve -- I want them to die. And I want ARM64 and RISC-V to rise as new competitors for AMD.
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." -Jiddu Krishnamurti
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 14 2020, @07:42AM (1 child)
not to rain on your parade, but people use computers mostly for media consumption and games.
i.e. floating point operations are happening all the time and everyone wants them to be fast.
now that I think about it, you may have a point in saying servers only need integer operations though.
if I was a chip-maker, I'd worry about both integers and floating point numbers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 14 2020, @11:02PM
That may be, but AVX-512 doesn't help you there either.