Hardware News Archives

With the PCI subsystem updates for the in-development Linux 5.11 kernel is the ability to report whether a device is making use of the 64 GT/s link speed allowed by PCI Express 6.0.

HWMON maintainer Guenter Roeck has sent in all of the hardware monitoring changes destined for the Linux 5.11 kernel.

Adding to the Linux 5.11 changes and set of new drivers is "lcd2s" as a driver for supporting a 20x4 LCD character display connected via SPI/I2C and with this support can serve as a kernel console output device.

Following the original, first-generation PowerPC CPU support being removed in the Linux 5.10 kernel, the original PowerPC 400 series is also looking like it will now be removed as well from the kernel.

Back in October RISC-V minded startup SiFive announced the HiFive Unmatched development board as the best RISC-V development board we've seen to date. But only having 8GB of RAM was one of the few critiques which the company is now addressing.

HP today announced a new Ubuntu Linux offering for select mobile workstations and notebooks in the form of the "Z by HP Data Science Software" package. This isn't just pre-loading the Ubuntu 20.04 LTS OEM version on the notebook but calling it a day, rather it's been pre-loaded as well with a variety of data science software packages.

While most hardware vendors don't support Linux to the extent that any products with configurable RGB lighting controls will officially be supported, OpenRGB has been one of the successful community projects for allowing many different devices to enjoy configurable, cross-vendor. and open-source RGB lighting controls.

Dell's Linux engineers continue working on improving the Linux kernel's handling around S0ix ACPI sub-states for greater energy savings.

Better support for Microsoft Surface laptops on Linux is slowly coming to the mainline kernel.

After a long run and being one of the early boutique Linux PC vendors, California-based laptop/desktop/server vendor ZaReason is the latest casualty of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Coming to the Linux 5.11 is the Auxiliary Bus infrastructure that allows creating an auxiliary device and binding an auxiliary driver to it. This is for a new core driver feature around increasingly complex devices that rely upon several drivers for support/operation.

While the Linux kernel has supported Kernel Address Space Layout Randomization (KASLR) for a decade and a half in varying forms, it hasn't been supported for all hardware targets. Only in 2021 is the mainline Linux kernel seeing KASLR working for the MIPS-based Loongson64 platform.

The Linux kernel's input subsystem is gaining a new "inhibited" property feature as a policy to temporarily block input from given devices, including not using any event from them as a possible wake-up source.

Ever since AMD has been on a stellar trajectory with their hardware, users have been begging System76 to release an AMD Linux laptop... That's now finally coming with their upcoming Pangolin launch.

Earlier this month we covered the news of Xilinx is looking to upstream their open-source "AI Engine" driver to the Linux kernel. This comes as Xilinx and AMD are working on Radeon Open eCosystem (ROCm) support for their FPGAs with AMD being in the process of acquiring the FPGA giant. Now more open-source code is looking to be included in the Linux kernel tree.

The latest bit of obscure hardware support set to arrive with Linux 5.11 are the PlayStation 3 and Nintendo Wii U dongles for the Guitar Hero Live.

For aspiring DJs wanting to mix beats under Linux, the Pioneer DJ DDJ-RR controller should be working come Linux 5.11 early next year.

As part of Lenovo offering Linux pre-loaded on more laptops and desktops, they have been working on upstream improvements themselves along with their partners at Red Hat and others. One of the latest Lenovo-contributed improvements to the kernel is palm sensor support for newer ThinkPad notebooks.

CVE-2020-4788 is now public and it's not good for IBM and their POWER9 processors... This new vulnerability means these IBM processors need to be flushing their L1 data cache between privilege boundaries, similar to other recent CPU nightmares.

In addition to AMD and Xilinx bringing ROCm to FPGAs, another interesting open-source/Linux milestone for the company being acquired by AMD is their publishing of the AI Engine open-source kernel driver with ambitions for upstreaming it.

Version 2.9 of OpenRazer is now available as the independently-developed solution for configuring and monitoring various Razer peripherals on Linux like not only their keyboards and mice but also headsets and other hardware.

For those fond of the Sega Saturn video game console controllers from the mid-90s, the Linux 5.11 kernel has a fix so a common USB adapter for them will behave nicely.

Beginning in Dell's 2021 laptop models they are providing hardware-based "privacy buttons" to disable microphone and camera support. In preparations for more Dell laptops coming to market with these buttons, a Dell privacy driver is being prepared for the Linux kernel.

The Linux 5.11 kernel will bring support for the ASUS "N-Key" keyboard that is used by nearly all of the current ASUS gaming laptops.

While Linux 5.10-rc1 was just released two days ago, the first pull request to DRM-Next of various changes was submitted today in beginning to stage material for inclusion with next year's Linux 5.11 kernel release.

Select high-end Corsair power supplies such as their RMi / HXi / AXi series are able to expose various sensor metrics via USB interface to the system. To date this sensor functionality has only worked under Windows with their proprietary software but now an open-source driver is seeking mainline inclusion for supporting these sensors under Linux.

The Linux 5.10 merge window is closing this weekend but there still is new code landing for this last complete kernel series of 2020.

The PCI changes were submitted on Wednesday for the Linux 5.10 kernel.

The System76 Thelio Major with AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3900 series is already a beast, but now this Linux PC vendor has managed to outdo themselves once again with the Thelio Mega.

The RISC-V architecture code with Linux 5.10 adds the ability for booting via (U)EFI.

The Matias Wireless Aluminum Keyboard is an Apple-esque keyboard that will be working nicely on Linux 5.10 when it comes to its extra functionality.

The Linux 5.10 kernel is bringing support for new MIPS-based Ingenic SoCs.

The POWER architecture changes have been submitted for the Linux 5.10 kernel. As expected, the PowerPC 601 support is retired as that original 32-bit PowerPC processor from the early 90's.

The sound subsystem updates were submitted today for the Linux 5.10 kernel with some interesting changes and new hardware support.

The kernel power management changes have been sent in for Linux 5.10 with a few items worth pointing out from faster hibernation to fixing power management handling for AMD laptops with both integrated and discrete graphics.

The hardware monitoring "hwmon" subsystem maintainer Guenter Roeck sent in the feature updates on Monday to Linux 5.10.

New Intel and AMD hardware support headline the performance events work for Linux 5.10 as part of the "perf" subsystem.

The PowerPC 601 as the first-generation processor supporting the 32-bit PowerPC RISC instruction set in the early 90's is being retired with the upcoming Linux 5.10 kernel.

Some HP Spectre laptops and possibly other HP models as well should be performing better when running on AC power starting with the Linux 5.10 kernel.

Linaro is working on the DTPF framework for the Linux kernel for meeting legal requirements around the maximum allowed case/contact temperature of devices.

Synaptics has contributed RMI4 F3A support for Linux 5.10 to better the support for newer laptop touchpads.

With upstream work Red Hat is engaged in for supporting HP and Lenovo laptops on Linux, a new standardized sysfs interface is being discussed for exposing the performance-profile option on newer laptops so users can more easily select their desired laptop power/performance characteristics.

It's been eight years already since the launch of the OUYA game console built atop Android and initially driven up by hype as a new low-cost gaming platform only to turn out to be a commercial failure. Razer bought out OUYA's software assets in 2015 and last year finally shutdown all of the console services. But if you still have the OUYA hardware it soon may start running off the mainline Linux kernel.

If you frequently put your system(s) through hibernation cycles, the performance should be much better beginning with the soon-to-start Linux 5.10 cycle.

Qualcomm's Snapdragon 660 is approaching four years old and the Snapdragon 630 a bit younger than that, but these mobile phone SoCs may soon find renewed life on the upstream Linux kernel thanks to the work of community developers.

Recent hardware enablement work on the Linux kernel is HPE bringing up UV5 support.

There is some new feature code in the IBM POWER CPU architecture's "-next" Git tree for the Linux 5.10 kernel.

The project that started off as Libre-RISC-V with aims to be a Vulkan accelerator but then decided on the OpenPOWER ISA rather than RISC-V is still moving ahead under the "Libre-SOC" branding.

IBM announced today at the OpenPOWER Summit 2020 that they are contributing the A2O POWER processor core and Open Cognitive Environment to the OpenPOWER community.

With Lenovo working to expand their Linux line-up and already Fedora being offered on the ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 8, more Linux support improvements are on the way.