Hardware News Archives

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.

At $39 to $66 USD depending upon model, the ROCK Pi 4 is evolving to offer nice open-source support down to the Arm Mali graphics thanks to the Panfrost Mesa driver and also works nicely with Wayland.

The Linux 5.4 kernel will deprecate and mark as obsolete the Wireless USB (WUSB) and Ultra-wideband (UWB) subsystems within the kernel.

Monado as an open-source implementation of the Khronos OpenXR standard for AR/VR devices continues taking form though isn't quite ready yet for end-users.

System76 will be announcing the Adder WS laptop next week as their new high-end Linux laptop offering that features a 4K OLED display.

A Phoronix reader has talked about the efficiency of using Raptor Computing Systems' open-source Blackbird POWER9 desktop system for Monero cryptocurrency mining in 2019.

Linux laptop/PC vendor System76 has become a Thunderbolt licensee so that they can officially offer support for it in the Coreboot-based open-source system firmware initiative they are pursuing.

It still remains to be seen if Purism will be able to ship the Librem 5 Linux smartphone this quarter as is their current revised target, but at least today they are publishing the finalized specifications for the phone's hardware.

TurboSched is a new Linux kernel scheduler that's been in development by IBM for maximizing use of turbo frequencies for the longest possible periods of time. Rather than this scheduler trying to balance the load across all available CPU cores, it tries to keep the priority tasks on a select group of cores while aiming to keep the other cores idle in order to allow for the power allowance to be used by those few turbo-capable cores with the high priority work.

Coming for the Linux 5.4 cycle later this year will be support for the buttons on newer Microsoft Surface devices.

Remember back in 2017 when Razer CEO Min-Liang Tan talked about plans for better Linux support for their high-end gaming laptops on Linux? More than two years later, they have yet to ship a Linux laptop nor make any other measurable improvements to their Linux support.

As a last minute surprise for the Linux 5.3 kernel merge window is support for the keyboard and trackpads on newer Apple MacBooks and MacBook Pro laptops.

At the start of the month we reported on out-of-tree kernel work to support Linux on the newer Macs. Those patches were focused on supporting Apple's NVMe drive behavior by the Linux kernel driver. That work has been evolving nicely and is now under review on the kernel mailing list.

The input and HID subsystem updates were sent in this week with various hardware support additions and improvements.

Nearly three years after OpenHMD 0.2, the OpenHMD 0.3 release is now available for the open-source SDK and support for various AR/VR headsets.

Purism has shared their July update on their Librem 5 Linux smartphone progress, which is mostly focused around inching along their software support but without any update on their hardware or final design. While their latest public information has continued to report a "Q3" ship date, that's looking increasingly unlikely.

Linux sound subsystem maintainer Takashi Iwai sent in the big set of audio driver changes for Linux 5.3.

The power management changes for Linux 5.3 merge window don't offer any P-State changes or other prominent Intel changes this cycle but there is some other improvements as well as new CPUFreq drivers for CPU frequency scaling.

Bolt, the Red Hat led project for managing Thunderbolt devices on Linux and their security, is out with their version 0.8 update to introduce better security for the growing number of Thunderbolt devices.

While we had been looking forward to Intel FSGSBASE support for yielding some performance benefits especially in areas impacted by Spectre / Meltdown / Foreshadow / Zombieload, after the support was queued for merging into Linux 5.3, the code has now been reverted over "serious bugs" with the implementation.

Issued today was the second release candidate for OpenHMD 0.3.0, the open-source project providing a common API and different drivers for VR/AR hardware.

Now being into Q3, we're waiting to see if Purism will be able to deliver the Librem 5 GNU/Linux smartphone this quarter after being pushed back twice from their original January ship date. They haven't released any finished design yet or the finalized specifications (they still haven't finalized on the RAM, battery, cameras, and speaker(s)), but their latest series of blog posts are showing that GNOME/Linux applications can run on their Librem 5 developer kit.

While Apple computers once ran well with Linux, that's not been the case in recent years particularly for MacBook Pros but now really all newer Apple computers have become a mess on Linux. There's been really messy issues in trying to run Macs on Linux. With MacBook Pros from recent revisions, it's now only finally possible for Linux to read/write to the solid-state drive if using an out-of-tree patch.

There have been Linux reports of problems pertaining to "8254 Clock Gating" going back a while but more so recently. This problem is some newer Intel Skylake~Apollolake derived systems particularly with Intel SoCs where certain systems ship with the 8254 PIT to be gated via a special register and up until now that has caused Linux to fail to boot.

In addition to the latest Wacom Intuos Pro Small drawing tablet to be supported by the Linux 5.3 kernel, the high-end (circa $1,500 USD) Wacom MobileStudio Pro tablet is also set to now be supported by this next kernel cycle.

We've known that Linux PC vendor System76 has been investing engineering resources into Coreboot support and while not yet ready for end-users, they are making progress. For once it's ready for their customers, they have also begun crafting a graphical user-interface for these firmware upgrades to Coreboot.

If you happen to have a Saitek R440 Force Wheel or looking to purchase a cheap and used racing wheel for enjoying the various Linux racing game ports or even the number of games working under Steam Play like F1 2018 and DiRT Rally 2.0, Linux support is on the way.

Freedreno founder Rob Clark, who is now employed by Google to work on open-source graphics, has sent in the batch of MSM Direct Rendering Manager driver changes to DRM-Next ahead of the Linux 5.3 kernel cycle.

Managing to make it out today as a surprise is the Raspberry Pi 4. The Raspberry Pi 4 is a major overhaul and their most radical update yet while base pricing still starts out at $35 USD.

Zhaoxin is the company producing Chinese x86 CPUs created by a joint venture between VIA and the Shanghai government. The current Zhaoxin ZX CPUs are based on VIA's Isaiah design and making use of VIA's x86 license. With the Linux 5.3 kernel will be better support for these Chinese desktop x86 CPUs.

Digital camera startup Octopus Cinema has been designing the "OCTOPUSCAMERA" as a digital cinema camera that's professional grade yet is an open platform with removable/upgradeable parts and this camera platform itself is running Linux.

Purism today issued their June software status update on how things are going with bringing up their privacy-minded Linux software stack for their Librem 5 smartphone. On the software side things are still moving along though still rather primitive with a goal of shipping in Q3. Similarly, this status update lacks any talk of the hardware progress for seeing how that is moving if there is any chance of shipping their planned phone next month after already having been setback twice.

After Dell Canvas Totem support wasn't merged for libinput 1.13, the code for this nifty input device was merged last week and will be part of the upcoming Libinput 1.14.

While PCI Express 4.0 up to this point has only been found in a few systems like Talos' POWER9 platforms and coming soon with the new AMD graphics cards and chipsets, the PCI SIG today announced PCI Express 6.0.