Weekly Roundup – 4 February, 2022

VMware fixes vSphere release it pulled, sorts out Log4j while it’s at it
Source: The Register

VMware has restored availability of vSphere 7 Update, a release that it withdrew in late 2021 after driver dramas derailed deployments.

KDE Plasma 5.24 Will Be the Next LTS Release Receiving Support Until KDE Plasma 6
Source: 9to5Linux

KDE Plasma 5.24 (currently in public beta testing) is set to be the next LTS release of the acclaimed and widely used desktop environment for GNU/Linux distributions, replacing the KDE Plasma 5.18 LTS series, which reached end of life in October 2021.

Latest Raspberry Pi OS Release Adds New Options to Its Configuration Tool, Many Bug Fixes
Source: 9to5Linux

The Raspberry Pi Foundation released today a new version of their official Raspberry Pi OS Debian-based distribution for the tiny Raspberry Pi single-board computers, a release that comes with various improvements and bug fixes.

HPC-as-a-Service Comes Full Circle and will Help Take HPC Mainstream
Source: The Next Platform

The IT industry is at the doorstep of the long-awaited exascale era, which promises massive systems that can run at least one exaflops, or a quintillion (a billion billion) calculations per second, at 64-bit precision and a lot more than that at lower precision and even more using low-precision integer data pumped through their vector and matrix engines.

Wine Announcement: Release 7.1 is now available
Source: WineHQ

What’s new in this release (see below for details):
– Vulkan 1.3 support.
– A number of theming fixes.
– WebSocket improvements.
– Improved cursor clipping on macOS.
– IDL compiler fixes for C++.
– Various bug fixes.

Zstd-Compressed Linux Firmware Back To Being Eyed
Source: Phoronix

Back in summer 2020 was a proposal for Zstd-compressed Linux firmware so that the growing number of firmware binaries shipped by the linux-firmware tree could be Zstd-compressed to save disk space while being able to more quickly decompressed the data compared to other firmware compression options.

Netlist PCIe Gen4 NVMe N1563 Series 2.5-Inch U.2 and HHHL AIC Up to 7.68TB SSDs
Source: StorageNewsletter

Netlist, Inc. announced its PCIe Gen4 NVMe N1563 Series of SSDs, expanding the company‘s Gen4 NVMe portfolio.

Pure Storage Selected by Meta
Source: StorageNewsletter

Pure Storage, Inc. has been selected by Meta Platforms, Inc., doing business as Meta and formerly known as Facebook, Inc., to play a role in Meta’s new AI Research SuperCluster (RSC).

Infortrend U.2 NVMe SSD EonStor DS 4000U AFA SAN
Source: StorageNewsletter

Infortrend Technology, Inc. has launched U.2 NVMe SSD EonStor DS 4000U all-flash SAN storage solution to boost IO/s and throughput in such applications as virtualization, database, video editing, and HPC.

Cray’s Slingshot Interconnect is at the Heart of HPE’s HPC and AI Ambitions
Source: The Next Platform

Whenever one company buys another, every product line, every research project, and every employee is ultimately in play. But when Hewlett Packard Enterprise bought supercomputer maker Cray in May 2019 for $1.3 billion, it really did want all of Cray. And HPE absolutely intends to make investments in the key technologies underpinning the Cray product lines for many generations – including the Slingshot interconnect that got Cray back into high-end networking after a hiatus of several years as sold off its prior interconnects to Intel.

MinIO looking at GPUDirect support possibility
Source: Blocks & File

Nvidia has devised GPUDirect as a way of getting data from storage arrays sent quickly to its GPU servers. Should MinIO support GPUDirect so that its object storage can feed data fast to Nvidia GPU servers as well?

MinIO says no to GPUDirect, goes for Apache Arrow
Source: Blocks & File

Object storage powerhouse MinIO has decided to use Apache Arrow to gets its stored data into GPUs rather than Nvidia’s GPUDirect scheme.

Linux Lite 5.8 Released. Release Highlights and Review.
Source: Debugpoint.com

Linux Lite 5.8 is now available for download and upgrade. Here’s a summary of the new changes and quick review of this release.
Linux Lite is termed as a perfect bridging Linux Distribution from Windows to Linux. It is one of the distro that gives the new Windows users a perfect starting point to their Linux journey.

NVIDIA 510.47.03 Graphics Driver Released with Linux Kernel 5.17 and Vulkan 1.3 Support
Source: 9to5Linux

NVIDIA released today the 510.47.03 proprietary graphics driver for Linux, BSD, and Solaris platform, a major release that brings support for the latest and greatest GNU/Linux technologies and many improvements.

ReRAM race ramps up – UK’s Intrinsic Semiconductor demos CMOS wafer success
Source: Blocks & File

UK university research spin-out Intrinsic Semiconductor Technology’s ReRAM can be made on the same CMOS wafers as microcontrollers, enabling them to have embedded SRAM-speed non-volatile memory with no need for external NAND chips.

Penta-level cell flash and VAST Data
Source: Blocks & File

VAST Data is looking at using penta-level cell (PLC) flash in its all-flash storage systems, with a 25 per cent increase in NAND die capacity over its existing QLC flash, so its cost per GB of capacity can go down.