After covering the Linux/open-source POWER10 bring-up for a number of months already, IBM has finally announced firm information on their forthcoming POWER10 processors. POWER10 looks promising but these 7nm CPUs will not begin shipping until the second half of next year.
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2,111 Hardware open-source and Linux related news articles on Phoronix since 2006.
System76 has been on a spree of interesting hardware launches this year and their next one is a new Bonobo WS ultra high-end laptop.
While RISC-V is flourishing when it comes to this open-source CPU architecture, the related OpenRISC architecture is still advancing but not seeing as much hardware efforts around it. In any case, the Linux kernel support continues improving for OpenRISC and with Linux 5.9 are more improvements.
Since leaving stealth last year and hiring some prominent Linux/open-source veterans to complement their ARM processor design experts, we have been quite eager to hear more about this latest start-up aiming to deliver compelling ARM server products. Today they shared some early details on their initial "Phoenix" processor that is coming within their "Orion" SoC.
The open-source Fwupd firmware updating utility paired with LVFS as the Linux Vendor Firmware Service has seen explosive growth for vastly improving the BIOS/firmware updating experience on Linux. Many major hardware vendors distribute their firmware updates on LVFS for consumption by Fwupd and more than 17 million firmware files have been served. Now though there is a new "large hardware vendor" willing to distribute their firmware updates this way but they want a end-user license agreement (EULA) added.
The HID changes for Linux 5.9 aren't too many but there are a few worth mentioning for improving input device support on Linux.
With Linux 5.8 there is initial support for booting POWER10 CPUs while with Linux 5.9 there is more POWER10 work underway. Additionally, Linux 5.9 is bringing support for the newer and faster system call ABI for POWER9 and newer with the SCV instruction.
The Linux kernel continues supporting a lot more audio devices and much more punctual than a decade or two ago.
There are a number of notable power management changes to find with the Linux 5.9 kernel.
The USB and Thunderbolt subsystem changes have already been merged into the in-development Linux 5.9 kernel.
The Linux perf events changes for the performance monitoring subsystem were already sent in and pulled for the in-development Linux 5.9 kernel.
Longtime Linux kernel developer Pavel Machek has taken over as sole maintainer of the LED subsystem. For this first pull request going into Linux 5.9 is a big addition... The multi-color LED framework code has finally been merged.
The hardware monitoring (HWMON) subsystem has a new driver that is likely to excite some enthusiasts wanting greater control over thermal monitoring and fan control for their systems.
It's arguably long overdue but with the just-opened Linux 5.9 kernel cycle the Unicore32 CPU architecture is being removed.
Following in the steps of their hand-crafted Thelio desktops manufactured in-house in Colorado, Linux PC vendor System76 is also working to not only manufacture their own laptops but also other components like their own keyboard.
The open-source MSM DRM driver developed by Google, Qualcomm's Code Aurora, and other parties as what started out as part of the "Freedreno" driver initiative is continuing to see better support for the newer Adreno 640 and 650 series.
Purism has revealed more details about their improved "Dogwood" batch that will be soon shipping for their Librem 5 GNU/Linux smartphone. The battery life is longer but still short of what is provided by modern day flagship smartphones.
MikroBUS is the open add-on board standard aiming for "maximum expandability with the smallest number of pins". MikroBUS already has fairly robust industry support particularly in the embedded space while finally a mikroBUS mainline kernel driver may be near for Linux to improve the status quo of driver support.
Announced earlier this year was the SD Express specification offering around 4x the speed of existing SD cards thanks to leveraging PCI Express 4.0 (or otherwise PCI Express 3.0 fallback) and the NVMe 1.4 protocol. The Linux kernel has begun preparing for SD Express compatibility.
Out this evening is OpenRGB v0.3 as the newest feature release of this open-source RGB lighting control solution that works on both Windows and Linux. ASUS, ASRock, Corsair, GSKILL, Gigabyte, Kingston, MSI, Razer, and Thermaltake are among the brands of devices supported by this growing software package.
The Matrox G200 series desktop graphics cards released in the late 90's are now seeing open-source DRM kernel driver support emerge in 2020.
JEDEC today published their long-awaited JESD79-5 DDR5 SDRAM standard.
While Lenovo recently committed to certifying more systems for Linux use and upstreaming drivers / hardware support for Linux moving forward, there remains a backlog of existing Lenovo devices that still have less than desire Linux support. But thanks to Red Hat and others, the hardware support does continue advancing.
Stemming from the recent GNU glibc work on better handling modern CPU optimizations with newer instruction set extensions across Intel and AMD product families, the concept of x86-64 micro-architecture feature levels is being talked about by open-source/Linux developers.
Landing in the block subsystem's "-next" tree today is ZNS support for NVMe drives.
For those looking for an RGB lighting and fan speed controller system that works under Linux, the Corsair Commander PRO is slated to see support with the upcoming Linux 5.9 kernel cycle.
Complementing this morning's AMD Ryzen 5 3600XT / Ryzen 7 3800XT / Ryzen 9 3900XT Linux benchmarks, here is a side-by-side look at the Ryzen 9 3900XT up against the Core i9 10900K and the Ryzen 5 3600XT up against the Core i5 10600K for these competing processors. This is a quick look at how these competing models stack up in the 130+ benchmarks utilized so far.
Linux 5.6 brought initial USB4 support that primarily was starting things off by basing things off the existing Thunderbolt 3 support in the kernel for which this latest USB standard is based. For the Linux 5.9 kernel later this summer it's looking like there will be further work on getting Linux's USB4 support into good shape ahead of hardware appearing in the months ahead.
The Linux kernel is seeing some modern work done to its driver for supporting the Apple Desktop Bus on Macintosh II era systems.
The newest TOP500 supercomputer list was published today. The newest TOP500 list includes more positions for AMD EPYC supercomputers but to some surprise the Arm-based Fujitsu A64FX-powered supercomputer has topped the list.
Amazon's AWS has today introduced the smallest member of the "Snow" family for migrating data into/out-of the cloud.
The Corsair Commander Pro is a controller that offers six 4-pin fan ports with PWM control, two RGB LED channels for RGB LED light strips and fans, and four thermistor inputs. This thermal/cooling/lighting controller is seeing Linux support via a third-party driver.
Martin Peres who is known for his decade plus in the X.Org community for his longstanding work on the open-source Nouveau driver and in recent years working on Intel's open-source graphics driver team has been brewing a new hobby project around generic open-source Linux drivers for FPGAs.
The ACPI-defined Collaborative Processor Performance Control (CPPC) CPUFreq driver will support "boosting" to the optimal performance level with the Linux 5.8 kernel.
The char/misc pull request for Linux 5.8 is big at nearly one hundred thousand lines of new code.
Last week saw the main Direct Rendering Manager driver updates for Linux 5.8 with a lot on the open-source graphics front while a secondary pull request was submitted today with the Freedreno "MSM" DRM driver changes for this open-source Qualcomm Adreno driver implementation.
Linux 5.8 has merged all of the PCI/PCIe subsystem updates and there are a number of notable changes.
There is new hardware support as part of the sound subsystem updates for the in-development Linux 5.8 kernel.
While there have been out-of-tree Linux patches offering this support already, with the in-development Linux 5.8 kernel comes a mainline solution for allowing the Fn and left Control keys to be swapped on Apple keyboards.
Back in April was the announcement that Lenovo would begin shipping some devices with Fedora Linux while now the story gets much juicier today.
The hardware monitoring "HWMON" subsystem updates were sent in today for the newly-opened Linux 5.8 merge window.
One of the interesting new happenings in the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) driver space is a Generic USB Display stack including a USB gadget driver that together allow for some interesting generic USB display setups. This work was motivated by being able to turn a $5 Raspberry Pi Zero into a USB to HDMI display adapter.
In addition to the AMD Zen "amd_energy" driver coming for Linux 5.8, another late change now queued into hwmon staging is introducing notification support for the hardware monitoring subsystem.
For input devices on some laptops that are a combination of a pointing stick and touchpad, the Linux kernel's multi-touch driver will finally begin handling them correctly.
The crew working on the MSM DRM driver from Freedreno / Google / Code Aurora (Qualcomm) have an interesting batch of changes for this open-source GPU driver for Qualcomm Adreno hardware come Linux 5.8.
With the upcoming Linux 5.8 cycle a quirk is being added to be able to reboot the 2009 era Apple MacBook without needing to boot with any special flags.
While MIPS Release 6 is the latest version of the MIPS ISA, the MIPS Release 5 support is finally set to be mainlined with the upcoming Linux 5.8 kernel cycle.
Beyond the usual excitement of numerous x86 and Arm hardware advancements each cycle, Linux 5.8 is bringing new IBM POWER enablement work.
A patch slated to be merged for the Linux 5.8 kernel cycle next month that simply deletes ten lines of code (well, six lines of code and four lines of comments) will for some systems yield "significant power savings" due to an oversight in the kernel code that has lasted for about twelve years.
AI startup Habana Labs, which was recently acquired by Intel, will see its Gaudi accelerator supported by the upcoming Linux 5.8 kernel.
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