Hardware News Archives

Wacom's second-generation Intuos Pro Small digital drawing tablet will be supported by the upcoming Linux 5.3 kernel.

Rob Clark, the longtime leader of the Freedreno driver initiative providing open-source 3D graphics for Qualcomm Adreno hardware and who just recently jumped to Google to continue driver work, is using his new Chromium.org email address for flipping on UBWC in this driver.

Purism is still promoting their Librem 5 Linux smartphone as coming next quarter despite not seeing any production design yet and the software stack being incomplete. While the software is still under development, they are at least promoting it as booting faster than Android.

ClearFog was the name for that 16-core mini-ITX workstation development board/platform that we've been eager to learn more about with its $500~750 USD price point, extensive networking connections, M.2, SATA, socketed DDR4 memory support, and other features we've been long desiring to see out of an affordable yet powerful ARM workstation. It turns out that dream board is being renamed to the HoneyComb LX2K and its performance is increasingly competitive with AMD/Intel x86 enthusiast offerings.

If you have an external keyboard that features a backlight, particularly on some gaming keyboards, some issues can come up with the current Linux stack if you unplug the keyboard.

The Linux kernel will likely soon see a lot of old ISDN (Integrated Services Digital Network) subsystem/driver code deprecated and ultimately removed considering there aren't even many (or any in some places) ISDN public data networks.

With hardware these days from Intel Optane DC Persistent Memory to HBM being stacked on chips for specialized use-cases, the Linux kernel has been preparing support for the new EFI Special/Specific Purpose Memory specification for knowing about such specialized memory use-cases it shouldn't be treating as normal RAM.

Support for Qualcomm's Adreno 540 series display/graphics could potentially be on the table for the Linux 5.3 kernel series. Patches are at least being reviewed for this A540 open-source support.

At the start of May Dell announced an Ubuntu Linux option for their entry-level ~$700 Precision laptop while now they are closing out May by offering up Ubuntu 18.04 LTS on their higher-tier Precision laptop models.

While right now PCI Express 4.0 is only really found in Raptor's Blackbird and Talos II systems or coming up with AMD X570 systems, the PCI SIG today announced PCI Express 5.0.

For those with DisplayLink adapters for USB-driven display docks or devices like the ZenScreen, the support for Wayland should be in better standing with GNOME 3.32.1 (or newer) including if using the DisplayLink proprietary drivers.

Purism just published a monthly summary of their activities pertaining to the Librem 5 smartphone this month. They continue working on their software stack with the Librem 5 developer kit but there still is no sign of their production hardware design yet or if they'll be able to ship next quarter as planned.

For years there have been open-source developers working on plumbing support for High Dynamic Range (HDR) displays into the Linux desktop stack and it looks like the Direct Rendering Manager driver support is slowly but surely getting there.

While Microsoft is severing its relationship with Huawei, those with Huawei laptops may find a better experience on Linux.

Following the recent desktop CPU benchmarks and server CPU benchmarks following the MDS/ZombieLoad mitigations coming to light and looking at the overall performance cost to mitigating these current CPU vulnerabilities, there was some speculation by some in the community that the older dual-core CPUs with Hyper Threading would be particularly hard hit. Here are some benchmarks of a Lenovo ThinkPad with Core i7 Broadwell CPU looking at those mitigation costs.

Of the many new features in Linux 5.2 there are various Logitech mouse and keyboard support improvements particularly for the wireless devices.

The much anticipated Raptor Blackbird is set to begin shipping over the days ahead. Blackbird is the lower-cost (compared to the Talos II Secure Workstation) micro-ATX motherboard for IBM POWER9 systems and offers open-source firmware as currently one of the most open, high-performance systems available.

Olof Johansson sent in the SoC updates on Thursday for the Linux 5.2 kernel merge window that is nearing the end. There is new SoC support for this new kernel and a number of new boards also being supported.

The Free Software Foundation has certified a new batch of hardware for being libre and meeting their "Respect Your Freedom" requirements. This newly-approved hardware for free software enthusiasts includes certifying an USB-to-parallel printer cable in 2019.

While it's just the DeviceTree additions needed to the kernel for enabling the Librem 5 Developer Kit to boot with the mainline kernel, the DT files are up to their twelfth patch revision.

Right now the low-end Allwinner ARM SBC boards featuring a SATA port have been running at a measly 36~45MB/s but with changing around a single line of kernel code, that can jump to 120MB/s.

Not only has the Linux 5.2 kernel been exciting on the x86_64 and ARM front, but there is also a fair amount of new IBM POWER architecture updates that landed for this summer 2019 kernel update.

Input subsystem maintainer Dmitry Torokhov sent in his pull request on Monday with various touch controller additions as well as the new GPIO vibrator driver.

Both Intel and AMD laptop hardware are seeing various improvements coming with the in-development Linux 5.2 kernel.

The Linux kernel's legacy IDE driver has been officially deprecated as of Linux 5.2 and is expected to be removed entirely in 2021.

The IBM System Z kernel code with the now in-development Linux 5.2 kernel is finally supporting kernel address space layout randomization (KASLR).

Aspeed BMCs have seen a lot of mainline Linux kernel driver activity from a recent Aspeed video engine driver to an AST2500 SoC DRM driver queued for Linux 5.2 and now also joining that is the Aspeed P2A CTRL driver.

Should you be looking to control a vibrator over GPIO (general-purpose input/output), that capability is coming to the Linux 5.2 kernel thanks to a new driver.

In addition to Dell releasing "budget-friendly" laptops with Ubuntu Linux on Wednesday, the company released new Thunderbolt and USB-C docks that should be working fine out-of-the-box on Linux.

Newer Realtek WiFi chipsets are about to see better hardware support under Linux thanks to Realtek contributing the new "RTW88" driver to the mainline Linux 5.2 kernel.

While the new Dell XPS 9380 Developer Edition is a beauty and offers very capable performance, if the price is too much, Dell has launched their "budget" Mobile Precision laptops now with Ubuntu Linux options.

Purism is now in the service business of selling privacy-minded software services to compete with the likes of Google's G-Suite, Twitter, and other platforms. Today the company rolled out Librem One as this new software effort.

Announced earlier this year was Purism PureBoot for the company's bundle of safeguards for protecting a user's boot process by having Intel ME disabled, Coreboot in place of a proprietary system BIOS, a USB Librem Key as their security token, and other mechanisms for securing the boot process and preventing theft/rootkits/security risks.

With next month's Linux 5.2 kernel merge window there are a number of notable improvements queued up for improving the Logitech hardware support.

Purism has shared their latest update on the efforts around their Librem 5 GNU/Linux smartphone they hope to begin shipping in Q3.

The folks at CompuLab have achieved another engineering masterpiece with a passively-cooled PC with an Intel Core i9 9900K processor and up to NVIDIA Quadro RTX 4000 graphics. Coming out of CompuLab, the PC is also Linux-friendly.

When drivers get dropped from the Linux kernel it's generally due to hardware being no one cares about anymore that hasn't been produced in many years and the code often falls into disrepair to the point that the only logical way forward is dropping the driver. That happened last year to the "FDOMAIN" driver but as does happen every so often (albeit rare) thanks to the code being still obtainable through Git and the nature of open-source, interested parties can step up and revive the code.

Adding to the excitement of the Linux 5.2 kernel changes are a lot of Thunderbolt improvements expected to be introduced in this next kernel cycle.

Should you have any Daktronics scoreboards, video displays, or digital billboards, mainline Linux kernel support appears to be in the works.

While on one side of the table is the Purism Librem 5 Linux smartphone on the high-price/high-end side, the Pine64 folks continue working on the PinePhone as a lower-end Linux smartphone. A new video now shows the PinePhone running on Linux 5.0 with Wayland's Weston.

Coming as a late addition to the Linux 5.1 kernel are some long overdue keyboard key mappings for different functionality.

While the U2F Zero has already been superseded by the "Solo" FIDO2 security key, this USB-based U2F token for two-factor authentication is finally seeing mainline support come Linux 5.2.

For those currently using a Raptor Talos II or awaiting the Raptor Blackbird or are running another IBM POWER system like the recently covered cheap POWER servers, there is a CPU Idle patch-set on the way that helps improve the power/performance.

In the AI races for dedicated hardware accelerators, Habana Labs is off to an early lead when it comes to having a mainline, open-source kernel driver and now is also the first AI processor having a back-end implemented within Facebook's Glow AI open-source compiler.

Purism announced today they are partnering up with Private Internet Access (PIA) for offering out-of-the-box VPN services to Librem 5 smartphone users as well as offering the VPN integration inside their Debian-based PureOS for Librem 13/15 laptop users.

Edge computing solutions vendor SolidRun is working on "ClearFog" as an ITX-based ARM64 workstation platform. They hope for an early bird launch price later this year of around $500~500 USD for this board that has 16 ARMv8 cores, multiple 10 GbE SFP+ connections, Gigabit Ethernet, multiple USB 3.0 and 2.0 ports, 2 x mPCIe, four SATA ports, and can handle up to 64GB of laptop DDR4 memory.

Ampere Computing and Packet announced on Thursday that eMAG servers will now be available through this public cloud/server provider. The initial configuration allows for 32 Arm cores at 3.3GHz and 128GB of RAM and 480GB of SSD storage for just $1 USD per hour on-demand access. I have run some initial benchmarks from this new compute instance for those interested.

Logic Supply, a manufacturer of several industrial-grade Linux-supported PCs in the past, has introduced the Karbon 300 has their latest compact and rugged PC intended for IoT/edge computing use-cases.

The MOTU 8Pre is a Firewire-connected device for digital audio workstations to be able to connect eight microphone inputs. The hardware itself is more than one decade old and in fact the manufacturer already discontinued the product, but with Linux 5.2 the kernel will be supporting this device.

A few weeks back I wrote about Xilinx looking at contributing their Alveo FPGA accelerator drivers to the mainline Linux kernel. They are continuing to work on that goal and pushed out their latest kernel driver patches this week for these Alveo PCIe accelerator cards.