In recent years we have seen prominent automobile manufacturer BMW engaging more with open-source and Linux. At this week's Open-Source Summit Europe / Embedded Linux Conference Europe they talked more about their increasing usage of Linux from their assembly line to within automobiles.
Hardware News Archives
2,112 Hardware open-source and Linux related news articles on Phoronix since 2006.
Dell has been offering the Dell XPS 7390 in "Developer Edition" form with Ubuntu 18.04 LTS for this newest XPS generation using 10th Gen Comet Lake CPUs while now they have added more hardware configuration options.
The "AST" DRM/KMS display driver that can be used with the many servers supporting ASpeed display hardware now has work pending for atomic mode-setting.
Huawei laptops will see some support improvements with the upcoming Linux 5.5 kernel cycle.
A number of recent laptops have begun appearing that offer support for built-in privacy screens with the press of a button. These privacy screens reduce much of the visible light when viewed at angles to try to block out the screen contents from anyone that may be sitting besides the user. Linux has finally begun seeing this support prepared.
Following the closure of Librem 5 initial "Aspen" batch shipping window and it coming out that the devices were just sent to employees/insiders, Purism has now provided more information on the shipping windows ahead and known issues.
With the early Librem 5 smartphones now shipping from their "Aspen" batch and recent Reddit discussions about the Librem 5 roping him in, former Purism CTO Zlatan Todoric has agreed to a brief interview on Phoronix.
While the MSM+Freedreno open-source graphics driver stack already supports the Adreno 500 and 600 series, one of the GPUs not seeing support until now was the basic Adreno 510. Kernel patches are pending for A510 enablement while the Mesa support was already merged.
While swapping around CPUs for the AMD EPYC vs. Intel Xeon Cascade Lake testing of Facebook's RocksDB enterprise workload testing, I also took the opportunity for running some other recently updated test profiles on these EPYC/Xeon parts under test.
While normally we don't cover hardware start-ups on Phoronix, Pensando Systems has just exited stealth and given their focus will be heavily involved with Linux and in fact already have their first kernel driver mainlined.
Now with more Librem 5 smartphones from their first batch now shipping, Purism has begun sharing more photos of the current hardware as well as the state of their Linux-based PureOS software stack.
The in-kernel staging Amlogic Meson video decode driver could soon handle H.264 support as soon as Linux 5.5.
WFX is a new WiFi driver being added to the staging area with the Linux 5.5 cycle coming up in a few months.
The Logitech G15 keyboards and related gaming keyboards from the company are seeing a new open-source driver queued ahead of the Linux 5.5 kernel cycle.
Following the Spectre mitigations coming to light last year, the late microcode update process for CPUs was serialized. However, this has led to complaints from cloud vendors and other customers with large core count servers where downtime/disruptions need to be minimal. So now the CPU microcode update process is being parallelized again.
While CPU speculative execution has caused a lot of frustrations over the past two years due to the likes of the Spectre vulnerabilities, it turns out CPU speculative execution can be exploited to be a viable source of random entropy for random number generators.
Now that the first (beta-ish) batch of Librem 5 smartphones is shipping, Purism has published the first video showing the phone in its current state in action.
If looking for a new WiFi router to go with the RYF-pending, 802.11n-based Purism Librem 5 or just want a wireless network as libre as possible, the Free Software Foundation has announced an 802.11n WiFi router now available that respects the user's freedoms.
In squeezing to shipping in Q3, Purism announced today their first batch of Librem 5 Linux smartphones are beginning to ship. In the process, we see the first actual photos of the Librem 5.
Jiri Kosina on Sunday sent out the HID subsystem updates for the in-development Linux 5.4 kernel. The HID pull once again features support for several new devices particularly on the Logitech side.
Back in August I noted that Wireless USB and Ultra Wideband would be deprecated within the Linux kernel and that is indeed happening for Linux 5.4.
The input driver updates for the Linux 5.4 kernel include the addition of an interesting, budget-friendly RC receiver that can be used for home-built drones and other use-cases while now the driver allows the receiver when paired with a supported RC controller to serve as a traditional Linux joystick input.
Little is publicly known about stealth networking startup Pensando Systems, which is founded by former Cisco executives. They've been ramping up efforts since early 2018 but to date their web-site hasn't launched nor formally introduced any products, but they now have a networking driver in the mainline Linux kernel.
The PowerPC/POWER architecture changes were sent in today for the ongoing Linux 5.4 merge window. This time around are some interesting POWER changes with work on their means of secure virtual machines.
The Linux 5.4 power management changes have been submitted for this next version of the Linux kernel.
Linux 5.4 will sound better. Well, at least provide audio support on more hardware with this next kernel release thanks to the latest batch of open-source sound improvements.
While Linux 5.4 is bringing a new driver to help SGI systems back to their Origin boxes, this kernel meanwhile dropping support for the SGI Altix that is newer than the some of the Origin systems. SGI Altix being removed from the Linux kernel is the latest in the path for winding down Itanium (IA64) support.
Newer high-end Lenovo ThinkPad laptops feature an option called "PrivacyGuard" for restricting the usable vertical and horizontal viewing angles of the LCD display, similar to what has been achievable previously using film covers and the like. With Linux 5.4 this feature will be supported by the kernel if concerned about others looking over your shoulders at your screen, etc.
SGI systems going back to the SGI Origin servers starting some two decades ago will see better mainline kernel support with the upcoming Linux 5.4.
The Turbostat utility that lives within the Linux kernel source tree for reporting various power/frequency metrics on x86_64 processors saw some late updates merged last weekend for the upcoming Linux 5.3 kernel.
For those excited by the prospects of running Linux on Arm-based laptops, with the upcoming Linux 5.4 kernel will be better mainline support for the Lenovo Yoga C630 laptop.
As we approach the end of Q3, Purism has been quiet whether they will make their revised target of shipping the Librem 5 Linux smartphone this quarter after passing their original plan to ship at the start of 2019. Well, Purism has just published an update and they will begin shipping the phones in batches beginning at the end of the month but the quality isn't yet up to scratch.
The open-source minded PinePhone is sitll on track for shipping in the months ahead and its software side is coming along nicely with the ability to run UBports Ubuntu Touch, Sailfish OS, postmarketOS, KDE Plasma Mobile, and other options.
Not included as part of our original EPYC 7742 / EPYC 7002 "Rome" Linux benchmarks was the NAS Parallel Benchmarks (NPB) developed by NASA. While an MPI testing favorite, there were build issues with the older version of NPB packaged by the Phoronix Test Suite. But with recently having updated that test profile against the latest NPB upstream, here are some results for the EPYC 7742 2P, EPYC 7601 2P, and dual Xeon Platinum 8280 benchmark results. Separately, there's also results now for NeatBench 5 with this video editing plug-in test case now part of the Phoronix Test Suite.
UPower is the abstraction layer around batteries and other power devices on Linux. Even with it being years since it was known as DeviceKit-power and seeing many 0.99 updates, the UPower 1.0 release isn't there yet but at least UPower 0.99.11 is now available as their first release since February.
The EOMA68 computer card design was novel when first talked about for interchangeable Arm-based computer cards that could also be installed within laptops and other devices. But even after being worked on for years and raising more than $234k USD, it's still not ready yet to see the light of day.
The Fairphone 3 made its formal announcement this week with pre-orders beginning and plans to begin shipping in mid-October. The Fairphone 3 is the latest iteration for this phone design that is focused on social values / ethical manufacturing, the longevity of the phone, and modular replacement parts.
The Librem 5 smartphone is still advertised as shipping in Q3'2019 though it looks next to impossible with just one month left in the quarter. Purism CTO Nicole Faerber presented at CCC's Camp 2019 and the phone wasn't demoed but pictures of the Librem 5 PCB were on display.
Earlier this summer we checked out the Logic Supply Karbon 300 as a well-built and very durable Linux-friendly PC for low-power environments. That Karbon 300 came equipped with a low-power Apollo Lake Atom processor while today the company announced the Karbon 700 with higher-wattage Core and Xeon CPU options for high performance IoT / edge computing.
Robert Foss of Collabora was back at the Linux Foundation's Open-Source Summit this week to present the latest state of open-source graphics drivers in the embedded space.
Hardware vendor Ampere Computing with their impressive ARM servers is doing a great job on closely following their hardware's Linux performance as part of a rigorous continuous testing regiment or ensuring quality, compatibility, and stability while being fully-automated.
Following Spectre/Meltdown, the Linux CPU microcode updating was made serial while now a new patch pending for the Linux kernel would restore the behavior to be parallelized in order to speed-up the process for large core count servers.
Purism has published their latest monthly update on the status of their Librem 5 Linux smartphone. They continue bringing up the software stack and tweaking the kernel support, but no word on their finalized hardware design nor if they still plan to ship in Q3'2019 as they continue advertising.
Going along with Intel this morning announcing their 10th Gen "Comet Lake" processors, Dell has just announced their new XPS line-up with these new processors and it does include a new Linux-loaded Developer Edition laptop.
In addition to the news out of the OpenPOWER Summit in San Diego that the POWER ISA is going open-source and the OpenPOWER Foundation becoming part of the Linux Foundation, Raptor Computing Systems shared they plan to launch a new standard ATX motherboard next year that will feature OpenCAPI connectivity.
The big POWER announcement appears to be that the POWER instruction set architecture is being contributed to the open-source community and the OpenPOWER Foundation is becoming part of the Linux Foundation.
For those interested in IBM's POWER architecture and/or open-source hardware prospects, an industry-shaking announcement is expected to happen Tuesday morning.
System76 continues doing much more work on software these days as well as expanding their own hardware manufacturing capabilities. This is much more than they did a decade or even several years ago when they were just selling PCs/laptops pre-loaded with Ubuntu. As summed up by System76 founder and CEO, Carl Richell, their end game is much more Apple-esque.
While most major hardware vendors have been adopting LVFS+Fwupd for firmware updating on Linux, Linux PC vendor System76 has notably been absent from the party for a variety of reasons. Today they announced their new Firmware Manager project that bridges the gap between their lack of LVFS support and their own hosted firmware service.
While Freedreno and Panfrost have been steaming ahead when it comes to open-source, reverse-engineered graphics for Arm SoCs, the Etnaviv project for targeting Vivante graphics hasn't had too much to report on recently. Fortunately, that's changing as coming up for the Linux 5.4 cycle they have a lot of new code to introduce.
2112 Hardware news articles published on Phoronix.