John Conway (26 December 1937 - 11 April 2020)

Posted on Apr 13, 2020 by kingbeowulf

We regret to announce that John Conway, the John von Neumann Professor Emeritus of Applied and Computational Mathematics and Professor Emeritus of Mathematics, died April 11. He was 82 -- Princeton University

Disappearing Optical Drives

Posted on Mar 19, 2020 by kingbeowulf

One of my Slackware systems has two optical drives: Blu-Ray and DVD: /dev/sr0 and /dev/sr1. In 14.2 as well as current, if neither are used for awhile, some of the udev symlinks to /dev/sr0 disappear. This becomes maddening (as in WTF?) when I'm trying to run my qemu VMs and I get the error:

Slackware64-Current (15.0): mini-ITX Benchmarks Part 3

Posted on Feb 08, 2020 by kingbeowulf

I have finally had some time to compile the benchmarks for a series of GPUs on the new mini-ITX build. The purpose was to see if the amdgpu driver is ready to compete with Nvidia on a Linux powered game box. The GPUs choices are simply what I had available and fairly recent, except for the RX 5700 XT, which was a new purchase.

System Configuration

Slackware64-Current (15.0): mini-ITX it87 ITE 8688 sensor

Posted on Jan 20, 2020 by kingbeowulf

In the "what could go wrong category" for information found on the interwebs, there is a work around for the missing support for the 0x8688 sensor in the new Gigabyte GIGABYTE X570 I AORUS PRO motherboard. [EDIT: This seems to be applicable to any GIGABYTE AURUS X570 motherboard to at least kernel 5.4.x]

Out of the box, CPU temperatures/voltages are available (k10temp), as are GPU temperatures/fan and voltages (amdgpu). Motherboord and CPU fans however are missing. To the kernel boot parameters in '/boot/efi/EFI/Slackware/elilo.conf' add 'acpi_enforce_resources=lax':

Slackware64-Current (15.0): mini-ITX Benchmarks Part 2

Posted on Dec 31, 2019 by kingbeowulf

To close out the old and ring in the New Year, I've added my EVGA GTX 1060 6GB GPU to the benchmark comparison. Both the GTX 1060 and GTX 950 are short, single fan ITX form factor cards that will fit the mini-ITX case. We'll have to wait for CES 2020 to see what GPUs AMD announces, and what form factors manufacturers push out. Rumor has it the the second generation Navi will be twice as fast as the current Radeon 5700 XT series. I noticed that the XFX RX590 is a dual BIOS card with a switch - the "perf" run is with that switch set for a more aggressive fan curve (1660+ rpm at idle) vs. quite mode (880 rpm). It didn't provide a significant performance increase but did keep the GPU about 10C cooler. All runs were with VSYNC off but all other settings (driver and phoronix) at default values.

The RX590 ekes out a few more fps over the GTX1060, but generally the performance is nearly equivalent.