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It’s out! 📚

First Steps With Linux is finally available in paperback.

And I have to admit…

Turns out I accidentally wrote a bible.

Holding the finished book in my hands for the first time was a surreal feeling.

If you’ve been waiting for a physical copy, it’s here:

firststepswithlinux.com/paperback

Switch to linux🐧

i fucking love linux

Linux 7.5 is set to make ChaCha encryption up to twice as fast on modern AMD chips 🚀

ChaCha20 is the stream cipher behind WireGuard VPN tunnels and the kernel's own random number generator. Until now, its AVX-512 code deliberately stuck to 256-bit registers, because older Intel Skylake-X chips slowed down hard when running full 512-bit instructions.

strongSwan developer Martin Willi has now added a 16-block AVX-512 function. In his words: "That penalty is gone on more recent AVX-512 parts, where full 512-bit registers can encrypt 16 blocks per invocation and roughly double the data-level parallelism for bulk traffic."

His KUnit benchmarks show up to 99.1% faster on a Zen 5 Strix Halo (3,579 to 7,125 MB/s) and up to 39% faster on Zen 4 Genoa. Eric Biggers has queued it in libcrypto-next for the Linux 7.5 merge window.

The Nvidia CEO just told his whole company he cheated on his wife.

In an email to staff on Sunday, Jensen Huang wrote: "I was unfaithful to my wife. My actions hurt her and our children. There is no excuse for what I did. I am deeply sorry."

The woman is Alice Huang, an executive at Megaspeed, a Singapore company and Nvidia customer accused of helping restricted Chinese firms get Nvidia chips. The New York Times reports that US intelligence believes China's Ministry of State Security recruited her to gather information on him.

Back in October, Nvidia called their contact ordinary customer meetings. Now the board has opened an independent investigation into whether he was "the target of a foreign intelligence effort." It says it has "no reason to believe" any national security information or company secrets were compromised.

Three House Republican chairs want him at a closed-door briefing on Nov 18, the day after Nvidia's Q3 earnings. Nvidia says he stays CEO "without interruption."