Linux Weekly 5: Linux 7.0, XEON and France

It's time for another Linux Weekly. And I have tea. Ooh, it's a bit strong. Nice black tea, Taiwanese tea. I'm going there for Computex before too long. We have a lot to talk about. There's new Xeons, there's new Well, there's a lot to talk about. — First up, — Intel has launched new Xeons and I don't have the benchmarks out for that yet, but I I'm working on it and we can chat about it in the forum. So, this is the 658X. This is a 24-core Xeon that is the new W-890E Sage. There's a W-890 and there's a W-890E. W-890E is eight memory channels. 24 cores, eight memory channels. I think this processor was around like $1,500 or $1,800. Like maybe MSRP is $1,800, but you can find it for $1,500 or whatever. And that seems like a lot for a 24-core processor when you look at the price of like the 24-core X-series Threadripper processor, but that is actually a fair sale of a good price on that processor. Now, the spoiler alert on the benchmarks, I'll give you the 30-second version, is that the single-core performance is only about 5% better than their Sapphire Rapids refresh. And if you're doing a mental comparison for Zen 5 Threadripper, yeah, it's not faster than Zen 5 Threadripper for a lot of tasks. For some tasks, it is faster and breathtakingly faster than Threadripper, but for a lot of common tasks, it's not really a lot faster than Threadripper. You got to wait for the full review. There's a lot of nuanced things to unpack there. But, what this platform absolutely nails is memory bandwidth, DDR5 memory bandwidth. It's got it in spades. This 24-core processor is able to fully saturate eight memory channels. AMD can't touch that with their memory. Like you need 64 Well, 48 cores to really saturate high-speed DDR5. This thing can go The fastest memory GDDR memory that I have is 6,400 and I can get 400 GB per second no problem without any tweaking or anything else. We can push almost to 500 GB per second with much faster and higher density memory. So, that's a pretty exciting platform. Also, 128 PCIe lanes and all that. Uh stay tuned for that. This week we're doing project updates first cuz that was a project and it's also kind of exciting. Also, I've got some R9 700 Pros and I I've got two. I'm trying to get my hands on two more so I can, you know, it's 128 gigs and it's like, oh, wait, 128 gigs is kind of the sweet spot right now for doing AI stuff. And it's like, oh, I heard AI stuff. I'm going to tune out. You're welcome to. See you. Whatever. I think I've made clear that yes, we, you know, if this were Roman times, yes, Nero is the emperor and yes, uh there are people that are on fire in the garden just because Nero's a crazy person. But also, this new invention, fire, is probably going to change civilization ultimately for the better. Short term may be worse. And that's funny because Jamie Dimon even said that. And it it's kind of a Linux context, but you know, Jamie Dimon like if Wall Street, the OG Wall Street bro, is looking at the stuff that is happening with Mythos and everything else. And this is a little bit of a follow-up to last week. Uh some of you were upset that I didn't have a more nuanced take on Mythos, but you also missed that I said if Mythos was real. It's like, yeah, it very much is and could be a marketing thing just like uh and for topic is consulting religious authority on, you know, what to do with the AI and is it sentient. I think that is about 60% uh marketing ploy and 40% of the employees are disturbed. But the technology the underlying creation of the thing is also something to talk about. And I don't really want to get into it on this. engage with, you know, dilettantes, but there is some good intellectual debate to be had there, but probably not in the YouTube comment section cuz like more than about three or four sentences and the YouTube just doesn't even really do anything with that. But the reason Jamie Dimon said that is because AI is going to expose a lot of weaknesses and badness in software quickly and then eventually it'll get fixed. And he even concedes so you can take that one of two ways. It's like, yes, there's not going to be enough people or even AI to plug all of the problems that are immediately exposed by AI. So, it's going to be a little bit of a wild west. Or is it going to be like late 1800s or we go back to the tele telegraph days? Probably not, but at the same time, I mean, almost certainly not. there is something to worry about there in terms of we need more people to be on top of that and plug those holes and use these tools and learn things. But we've never the 30-second version is that this is a Promethean moment in human history and a lot of fun stuff with that. But the reason I R9 700 here is because I've automated a task that I want to show you. And

it has a tiny uh glaze of AI, but is mostly not AI. And it's works It works astonishingly well. So, there's clues about that on the forum, but we're not going to talk about that today. We're just going to we're just doing the Linux news cuz it's a lot of fun. And somebody has already angrily put a timestamp at the bottom for, you know, where we're chatting and it's like, mhm. Ah, there's my tea. Linux 7. 0 is out. That's our top story this week. New kernel, new version, lots of optimizations, lots of fun stuff. Rust in kernel support is no longer marked as beta. Woo, Rust. Rust will also evoke some strong emotions. Oh, I'm really rage baiting this week. Rust will definitely evoke some strong emotions. IOU ring has gotten new filtering and lazy preemption becomes the default. And XFS has picked up self-healing. Now, XFS, if you're not familiar with it, that is an OG file system. I was using that file system a very long time ago and for development type workload Historically, this is true. This is less true today, but historically, for very small file workloads, XFS was amazing. Now, mostly, if you have lots of very small and very compressible files, it actually makes sense to use a compressed file system that can be dramatically faster than anything else. Uh BTRFS has some things to address this, but if you're dealing with mostly tiny like C and C++ and header files or the Node. js and modern Node. js web development like that's just hell. And tiny files and blah blah, then XFS can be dramatically faster. So, it's nice to see self-healing. And XFS has journaled metadata. Not journaling proper, but journaled metadata since time immemorial. And that was really nice in the olden days. That's kind of the Mitch Hedberg joke today. It used to be nice. It still is, but it also used to be, too. There's scheduler, networking, and memory updates as well. Now, the networking I've been having a lot of trouble with KS NBD and there's a thread for that on the forum and there's part one. And so if you're using KS NBD in production, I would love to hear from you and what's going on. It turns out some of the problems that I've been having may have been because of Mellanox's kernel drivers, kernel extensions, the DKMS out-of-tree driver. Strange errors. There's an issue for it on GitHub that we found. But if you compiled KS NBD as a module, the kernel would oops whenever a client would try to connect actually with RDMA. And the reason that you want RDMA and not Samba proper is so that you can get full hardware offload from the NIC all the way up the stack. And this makes a big difference even at 10 gigabit. Older Broadcom, like a Broadcom RDMA capable NICs from pushing 10 years ago now with CPU offload means that you can have a potato class NAS that is using 5 or 10 watts of power with one of these NICs, which is going to be 5 or 10 watts of power on its own and achieve a fully saturated, jitter-free 1 GB per second. 10 gigabit. Over You get like 1. 1, 1. 2. And that's really nice end-to-end. The other thing that I've discovered is Microsoft is wrong again. Uh Windows 11, you have to have Windows 11 for workstations for RDMA. For to operate as an RDMA client to KS NBD. I don't know why. Um there's a there's several Microsoft MVPs in the audience and one of them forwarded me a thing from their internal stuff saying that Windows 11 since like 24H2 is supposed to have RDMA support. It's not It was always part of Windows 10 for workstation. And apparently it worked for a little while in Windows 11, but now it doesn't. And so I'm trying to build a full turnkey, ultra-high performance media server with RDMA that scales from one from 10 gigabit to 400 gigabit effortlessly. And every single thing like it has been a black hole of time and a lot of suffering. So, this is a little bit the vlog section of this. But it's nice to see the networking improvements in kernel 7 because I may be able to finally connect the dots on that and everything else. Uh maybe also is OpenZFS going to work in kernel 7? Haven't had a chance to try that. If you've gotten ZFS on kernel 7, the post on the forum, put a how-to together, screenshots. Love to hear from you. That would be great. We will We're going to make the world together better using our robot helpers. Maybe, maybe not. I don't know. Depends on how competent the robot helpers are. If they're not very competent, they'll be relegated to uh linting type tasks. We'll see. KDE turns 30 with Gear 26. 04. Uh KDE's KDE at 30 release gives you both a community milestone and a practical desktop app story. Highlights include Dolphin, Kdenlive, Mercurial, KOrganizer, and NeoChat. I'm using KDE on this. I haven't updated. Ooh. KDE's got a scheduler and personal information management app now, which is nice. Linux becomes more human. It's all grown up. It's so nice. NeoChat. NeoChat is interesting because I think eventually we're going to have to get to a point where we all use some sort of end-to-end encrypted communications because of all of the forced mandatory stuff about it's like, "Oh

if you have this I'm going to need you to install age of verification on your caliper because it's got a computer in it. Yeah, I'm not here for that. Gnome has shipped a stable release 50. 1 and 49. 6 both stable bug fix releases. There's some announcements about that on Gnome's page. So, it's nice to see just little equal coverage for Gnome. We're not Gnome haters here. It's fine. And France, uh France is making a big push for Linux adoption and I actually have a coherent plan. Uh we heard about this a couple of weeks ago, but I tried to reach out to people in France that are in our community that could maybe like help figure out what's happening and some more information has trickled out. It actually seems to be a pretty good plan from IT. They have uh change management stuff in place. They're going to be using I think NixOS and so like the like treating the desktop as a finite state machine. That should lower um IT costs and it should lower the complexity of managing a huge number of machines. So, it'll be interesting to see if this works out. If this does work out, I have a feeling that it is going to help propel Linux toward even more user-friendliness. So, we'll see if that turns out to be true. It didn't really turn out to be true on the German side of things, but uh SUSE did benefit in some ways for some of the packages that they have from the things that happened in Germany. Now, Germany was moving back and forth between uh we were pro-Microsoft. We're not pro-Microsoft. Uh I don't know. En- Engage below if you're in Germany or France and you have a unique perspective on that. But, there is also FTRFS. Uh this is a proposed new file system, fault-tolerant radiation robust file system because apparently we're going to put data centers in space. Jensen said it, right? It's going to be Reed-Solomon FEC and EDAC-style error tracking. EDAC-style error tracking is very nice. We need that everywhere. Phoronix had a really nice article about that. You should definitely check out Phoronix's article. I've also been following the LibreOffice. There's been a little bit of a kerfuffle uh around LibreOffice engagement challenge. How would you summarize the kerfuffle? You can't make the license You can't use the license to enforce less freedom. Like, that's uh — [sighs] — But, uh LibreOffice is in the news and uh it has pretty strong community health numbers. Their status updates said they have 295 developers that made a little over 11,000 commits in the last year with volunteers accounting for 75% of the contributions. So, that maybe that's what we'll be using in all our new Linux desktops. Oh, and Ubuntu 26. 04 has raised the default security baseline. What does that mean? TPM-backed full disk encryption and they've also added security center, which includes support for both AMD's secure encrypted virtualization as well as Intel's TDX. Now, this is going to create some interesting situations. I've been pushing AMD since forever to allow secure encrypted virtualization and secure encrypted memory up and down the Zen stack all the way down to AM5. And I Last time I checked, it was not working on AM5, but it you know, Epic of course is fine. It should also work on Threadripper. And AMD did add support for HSMP on Threadripper, which is nice because it gives you all the telemetry about the fabric and everything else that's going on inside your CPU. So, who knows? Maybe we'll see full platform encryption. When the user uses that, it is amazing. When Nero uses that, less good. Definitely less good. It's a question of who owns the machine in that case, hm? That's about it for updates for this week. Um early next week next week's Linux Weekly might be a little bit early because there's some big things happening that I can't yet talk about. Look for that around Tuesday or Wednesday. It's going to be fun. It's going to be interesting. And uh yeah, I don't know. Thanks for tuning in for Linux Weekly. Just little week this week. Sorry. I didn't see what I did there. Week this week. But, hey, uh they can't all be winners. Like me. — All right. I'm one of those Level One Linux. I'm signing out and I'll see you in the forums. Let's engage there and build our better Linux Utopia. Ah, that's the last of my tea. All right, I'm signing out and I'll see you there. —