As work picks up on the forthcoming Linux 6.17, many joystick-wigglers are shocked by its millionaire dev's positively ancient AMD graphics card.
As we reported a few days ago, version 6.16 of the Linux kernel is out with new and improved Rust module support. But that means that work is now picking up on the next version, kernel 6.17.
Some of Linux Founder Linus Torvalds's messages on the Linux Kernel Mailing list have revealed the GPU in his desktop machine. The first refers to his "Radeon desktop", and a second mentions the "same old boring Radeon RX 580" and says that "lspci calls it 'Ellesmere'." This GPU came out in – pause to adopt hushed tones, as appropriate for an ancient and respected elder – April 2017. Why, that's more than eight years ago!
To the less-than-keen eyes of the Reg FOSS desk, this looks to be a reasonably capable device from its tech specs: it's a chunky dual-slot PCI-Express 3.0 x16 beast with two fans and 8GB of VRAM. Allegedly, it's driving an ASUS ProArt 5K display. At least one Reg commenter this year, "David 132," runs the same thing, and the responses he got were less than complimentary, suggesting that a modern card could be as much as – gasp! – twice as fast.
Linus could certainly afford something much beefier if he wanted: Pro Publica reckons he makes about $1.5M per year from the Linux Foundation, and he's managed to save a bit from that.
For non-gamers, though, this isn't too shabby. It's able to fling enough pixels to deliver decent refresh rates, which is all that really matters. His screen is about the same size and resolution as the one that this vulture uses in his home office, driven by a rather lower-spec GPU. Our main Linux testbeds run ancient NVIDIA GPUs, nearly twice as old, which has caused us significant driver-related grief this year. Old NVIDIA cards fall out of driver support while they're still perfectly useful for mainly 2D operation.
Back in ancient pre-COVID times, this vulture's office had multiple spare LCD displays lying around, and we ran a triple-head Linux box. Trying to find a matching pair of NVIDIA cards with the same generation of GPU – and which therefore could use the same NVIDIA driver – was a major trial. You can't run two different versions of the NVIDIA drivers at once, on either Linux or Windows. In the end, we managed to get an elderly but once-high-end AMD card with four outputs, and it worked perfectly from the first boot, with both Linux and Windows 10.
AMD kit wins here: the drivers are FOSS, and they can cover a much wider range of GPUs than NVIDIA ones. Once we got this decrepit fan heater of a graphics card, we were perfectly happy with it, and all three displays worked seamlessly. We suspect much the same applies for the kernel supremo: if you just want one big sharp screen, never mind a 2017 graphics card being too old; we suspect even a top-tier one twice that old might suffice.
Source: The register