2020-11-10 Tags: unix linux software shell
The basic unix style command line tools, such as cat, cut and ls, have been around since the 1970s. Various additional features have been added to them over the years, such as BSD extensions and GNU style --long-options, but the basic tools still function the same way they did in the early 1970s. Evolution and improvement in this area is generally slow compared to many other fields of computing, but there have been some useful new tools created in the last 10-20 years. Read more...
2020-10-31 Tags: linux gpu nvidia ubuntu debian redhat
As of late 2020, Nvidia have the highest performing consumer GPUs and the best support for GPU compute development. GPU compute development includes both direct GPU programming with Nvidia’s CUDA tools and machine learning applications that use ML frameworks such as Tensorflow and PyTorch. However, Nvidia release their Linux drivers under a proprietary license, rather than open sourcing the drivers and having them included directly in the Linux kernel. There are open source drivers for Nvidia hardware from the Nouveau project, but these don’t support computing use of the GPU. Read more...
2020-10-26 Tags: linux nvme ssd hardware
NVMe solid state drives (SSDs) have become much more common in the last few years. NVMe offers the potential for much better performance than older SATA SSDs, due to the faster PCI Express hardware connection to the system, and from the system using the NVMe protocol to communicate with the storage. The coming-soon generation of game consoles Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5 both have NVMe SSDs included. The faster storage has been promoted as a major feature of this game console generation, with it said to provide 100-1000x faster IO compared to mechanical hard disks in current generation Xbox One and PlayStation 4 game consoles. Read more...