A Look At The Windows vs. Linux Scaling Performance Up To 64 Threads With The AMD 2990WX

This past week we looked at the Windows 10 vs. Linux performance for AMD's just-launched Ryzen Threadripper 2990WX and given the interest from that then ran some Windows Server benchmarks to see if the performance of this 64-thread CPU would be more competitive to Linux. From those Windows vs. Linux tests there has been much speculation that the performance disparity is due to Windows scheduler being less optimized for high core/thread count processors and its NUMA awareness being less vetted than the Linux kernel. For getting a better idea, here are benchmarks of Windows Server 2019 preview versus Ubuntu Linux when testing varying thread/core counts for the AMD Threadripper 2990WX. Toggled via the BIOS was SMT as well as various CCX configurations and each step of the way comparing the Windows Server 2019 Build 17733 performance to that of Ubuntu 18.04 LTS with the Linux 4.18 kernel in various multi-threaded benchmarks supported under both operating systems.

Kernel: RISC-V and Virtual Machine

• RISC-V's Linux Kernel Support Is Getting Into Good Shape, Userspace Starting To Work

  The RISC-V open-source processor ISA support within the mainline kernel is getting into good shape, just a few releases after this new architecture port was originally added to the Linux Git tree. The RISC-V code for Linux 4.19 includes the ISA-mandated timers and first-level interrupt controllers, which are needed to actually get user-space up and running. Besides the RISC-V first-level interrupt controller, Linux 4.19 also adds support for SiFive's platform-level interrupt controller that interfaces with the actual devices.

• A Hearty Batch Of KVM Updates Land In Linux 4.19

  There is a lot of new feature work for the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) within the Linux 4.19 kernel.

Kate/KTextEditor Picks Up Many Improvements To Enhance KDE Text Editing

Even with KDE's annual Akademy conference happening this past week in Vienna, KDE development has been going strong especially on the usability front. The Kate text editor and the KTextEditor component within KDE Frameworks 5 have been the largest benefactors of recent improvements. This KDE text editing code now has support for disabling syntax highlighting entirely if preferred. When using syntax highlighting, there have been many KTextEditor enhancements to improve the experience as well as improvements to the highlighting for a variety of languages from JavaScript to YAML to AppArmor files.

KStars v2.9.8 released

KStars 2.9.8 is released for Windows, MacOS, and Linux. It is a hotfix release that contains bug fixes and stability improvements over the last release. Also: KDE Itinerary - How did we get here?