Linus Torvalds Likes His New AMD Threadripper System

This week Linus Torvalds and Dirk Hohndel re-created their keynote conversation for a special all-virtual edition of the Open Source Summit and Embedded Linux Conference North America. ZDNet reports:
While COVID-19 has slowed down many technologies, while speeding up other tech developments, it hasn’t affected Linux development much at all. “None of my co-developers have been hugely impacted either. I was worried for a while because one of our developers was offline for a month or two…. [But,] it turned out that it was just RSI [repetitive strain injury], and RSI is kind of an occupational hazard to deal with.” He added. “One of the things that is so interesting about the Linux community is how much it has always been email-based and remote, how rarely we get together in person….” Torvalds trusts this new build. Indeed, he ran his end of the videoconference from his new developer machine running the first release candidate of 5.8. Thinking of his new AMD Threadripper 3970x-based processor-powered developer desktop, Torvalds later added that, although he had been concerned about its fan noise it actually works well for him. Torvalds moved to this new homebrew computer because he needed the speed. “My ‘allmodconfig’ test builds are now three times faster than they used to be.” That’s important because Torvalds “strives to do about 20 to 30 [pull requests] a day, which is above my limit, … [but] in order to do that, [he needs] a lot of computing power.