Published back in January were initial open-source kernel driver patches for Habana Labs' Goya processor intended for accelerating deep learning workloads. This new Habana Labs kernel driver will debut with the mainline Linux 5.1 kernel.
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2,112 Hardware open-source and Linux related news articles on Phoronix since 2006.
The Librem 5 Linux-powered smartphone originally planned to ship in January 2019 but last year was delayed to April to allow for more time to finish up work on the hardware and software. Today Purism is announcing that the Librem 5 is being delayed to "Q3" but they have been making progress particularly on the hardware side.
Adding to the list of third-party GPU overclocking utilities for Linux is TuxClocker, a Qt5-based user-interface currently with support for NVIDIA graphics cards and experimental support for AMD GPUs.
Version 6.3 of the Advanced Configuration and Power Interface (ACPI) was just recently published by the UEFI Forum and support for this latest ACPI revision is on the way with the Linux 5.1 kernel.
The Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS), which serves up system BIOS/firmware files from many different vendors as well as various devices so that hardware can see firmware updates under Linux and be updated via Fwupd, has served up more than five million firmware images.
There's no shortage of quirky HID hardware out there. With the upcoming Linux 5.1 kernel cycle will be more fixes/workarounds for such consumer devices.
Right now on most Linux distributions when using higher-end Bluetooth headphones, the low-end SBC audio codec ends up being utilized by default which is subpar for the potential audio quality of the more expensive headphones. Fortunately, there are PulseAudio modules that allow for the higher-end codecs to be used.
The Free Software Foundation (FSF) has certified the Vikings D8 motherboard and D8 workstation as they "Respect Your Freedom" as the newest endorsed hardware.
The mainline Linux kernel support continues to improve for various ARM SoCs and different Android smartphone features. The latest driver on its way to the mainline Linux kernel is an adaptation of Android's Qualcomm MSM vibrator.
Last week System76 announced the new Darter Pro laptop with Intel 8th Gen CPUs while today the ordering process has opened up on this latest 15-inch laptop from the Linux-focused vendor. They hadn't revealed pricing information last week but we now know that information.
Dell recently announced the XPS 9380 Developer Edition laptop as a minor refinement over the 9370: there's now Intel Whiskey Lake processors with minor performance boosts and the web camera is better positioned, while for the "Developer Edition" Sputnik models it means Ubuntu 18.04 LTS rather than Ubuntu 16.04 on the former model or Microsoft Windows 10. The testing so far of the Dell XPS 9380 Developer Edition has been going well and I will have my full benchmark review out soon, but for this weekend are some preliminary data points.
If the folks at Purism weren't busy enough working on their Librem 5 Linux smartphone initiative and adjoining projects like creating a new software app store, they also are eyeing an entrance into offering "ethical" subscription services and ultimately expand into other areas.
A set of 28 patches posted today by Intel Linux developer Mika Westerberg would improve the kernel's Thunderbolt software connection manager and particularly help older Apple hardware.
Should you not be into the new Dell XPS 13 9380 with Ubuntu pre-loaded nor the new Librem laptops that rely on older Intel CPUs, another option is coming with System76 that is releasing a new version of their Darter Pro laptop. The new System76 Darter Pro is built around Intel's 8th Gen mobile processors.
Just before Christmas, Purism began shipping the Librem 5 developer kits and with that increasing questions about the Librem 5 Linux smartphone, the company has published some new FAQs about the security-minded smartphone as well as publishing a concise list of the currently planned specifications.
Given the increasing rise of hardware accelerators for compute offloading of particular tasks especially now around deep/machine learning with more chips coming to market, the Linux kernel will likely soon see the introduction of a formal subsystem for these different accelerator drivers.
Dell is now shipping their new XPS 13 8th gen (9380) laptop in a developer edition that comes preloaded with Ubuntu 18.04 LTS.
Habana Labs is one of the companies working on an "AI" processor for speeding up deep learning inference and training workloads. Their initial product is the Goya processor that is already production-qualified. Today they published initial open-source Linux kernel driver patches for review to potentially include in the mainline kernel moving forward.
Should you be assembling a recording studio or have another purpose for some high-end audio kit, the RME Fireface UCX is the latest sound device seeing support in the upstream Linux kernel.
Z-Wave is the incredibly common wireless communication protocol at the backbone of many home automation systems. To date there hasn't been any in-kernel Z-Wave Linux kernel drivers for this low-energy mesh network standard, but a SUSE developer has prototyped an initial driver and currently exploring the in-kernel possibilities, including what could end up being a Z-Wave subsystem.
XGI Tech, the nearly two decade old spin off from SiS that was short-lived and once aimed to be a competitor to ATI and NVIDIA, still has a Linux driver within the mainline kernel. But this frame-buffer driver is slated to soon be removed.
Yesterday I posted a number of Lczero chess engine benchmarks on NVIDIA GPUs using its OpenCL back-end as well as its CUDA+cuDNN back-end, which offered massive performance gains compared to CL on the many tested NVIDIA GPUs. With the CUDA+cuDNN code performing so much better than OpenCL, some wondered whether NVIDIA was intentionally gimping their OpenCL performance. Well, here are results side-by-side now with Radeon GPUs on OpenCL.
While Purism remains very busy with their Librem 5 smartphone efforts, today they have announced their fourth version of the Librem 13/15 laptops.
The folks at Purism have shared their latest status update on the Librem 5 Linux-powered, security-minded smartphone they plan to begin shipping in the months ahead.
2019 is looking to be the year where we will finally see Multi-Gig Ethernet controllers appearing on desktop/enthusiast motherboards rather than Gigabit Ethernet controllers. Aquantia is using CES to show off its new Multi-Gig controllers and has already courted ASUS to use their chips on forthcoming motherboards.
With the ever increasing usage of RGB LEDs on modern computer systems, Linux kernel developers have begun discussing a formal RGB LED user-space interface.
There is an experimental Rockchip open-source video codec driver for accelerated video encode/decode posted for the Linux kernel but in its current form isn't suited for mainline inclusion.
SUSE's Jiri Kosina sent in the HID subsystem pull request today with some interesting additions that we've been monitoring in recent weeks.
Back in November was the surprising announcement of the Necunos Mobile as an open-source Linux phone making use of KDE Plasma Mobile. That phone is now preparing to ship and pre-orders are open, but I wouldn't get too excited at this stage.
Back during the Linux 4.20 kernel cycle, support for the C-SKY CPU architecture was introduced while now for Linux 4.21 it has seen its first round of improvements.
Early in the year with Linux 4.17 the kernel saw a port to the Andes NDS32 CPU architecture. With Linux 4.21, that CPU architecture is seeing a number of improvements.
On a niche hardware note for Linux 4.21, should you be using a ZynqMP DDR controller, there will now be Error Detection And Correction (EDAC) ECC support.
The platform-drivers-x86 was one of the first pull requests that landed into the now-open Linux 4.21 kernel tree. This area is primarily about various Intel laptop drivers and other x86 (x86_64) hardware bits.
The "hwmon" hardware monitoring changes for the Linux 4.21 kernel were sent in this past weekend. There isn't any major changes for the vast majority of users, but there is a lot of smaller happenings.
The MIPS CPU architecture has suddenly become a bit more interesting now that the processor ISA will be open-sourced in 2019. With the in-development Linux 4.21 kernel there are a number of MIPS support changes inbound.
In this guest post by Phoronix reader Max E, he has shared with us his experience and Linux benchmarking results when overclocking ECC RAM on an AMD Threadripper box. The process ended up being surprisingly easy and his results are quite compelling. Thanks to Max for this guest post, which we happily accept on Phoronix that cover interesting technical topics.
In preparing for the Linux 4.21 merge window that is expected to open up over the holidays, the sound subsystem updates have already been submitted. There isn't much in the way of core infrastructure work this cycle, but a lot of sound driver activity.
The I3C subsystem had sought to be included in Linux 4.20, but ultimately it was rejected for being too late in the cycle for introducing a brand new subsystem. But now it's requested to be pulled into the upcoming Linux 4.21 merge window.
After originally hoping to ship this past summer, Purism is announcing tonight that the Librem 5 Developer Kits are beginning to ship for those who pre-ordered these i.MX8 developer boards designed for bringing up their inaugural GNU/Linux smartphone.
Months after MIPS Technologies was acquired by Wave Computing, the company announced it's working on open-sourcing the MIPS processor instruction set architecture.
Initially during the Linux 4.20 kernel merge window with the STIBP addition for cross-hyperthread Spectre V2 mitigation it was turned on by default for all processes. But that turned out to have a sizable performance hit so the behavior was changed to only turn it on for processes under SECCOMP or when requested via the PRCTL interface. However, AMD is landing a patch that for select CPUs will have an always-on mode as evidently that's preferred for some AMD processors.
A new framework queued for introduction with the Linux 4.21 kernel is the ARM-developed Energy Model Management Framework.
Linux 4.21 is set to further improve the system security around potentially malicious Thunderbolt devices.
While the i.MX8 series was announced almost two years ago and the open-source developers working on the enablement for these new NXP SoCs hoped for initial support in Linux 4.17, the Linux 4.21 kernel that will be released in the early months of 2019 is slated to possibly have the first i.MX8 support in the form of the i.MX8MQ and also supporting its development/evaluation board.
After a short-lived experience on Linux 4.20 when it was added and then reverted due to fallout, the reworked high-resolution scroll-wheel support will re-premiere with Linux 4.21.
The Linux Vendor Firmware Service has scored a major win in the trek of easily updating of BIOS/firmware images from Linux... BIOS/firmware vendor AMI has joined the LVFS!
With time winding down before the release of Linux 4.20 and the opening of the Linux 4.21 merge window, a final drm-misc-next pull request was submitted this week for staging in DRM-Next ahead of the 4.21 kernel cycle.
Originally slated for the current Linux 4.20 kernel cycle was high-resolution scroll wheel support for Logitech mice. Just a short time after merging, the support was reverted as it ended up breaking support for some existing devices. Fortunately, the revised implementation is progressing and perhaps will be ready for Linux 4.21.
Eric Anholt of Broadcom's graphics driver team has provided another status update about their open-source Linux driver work in recent weeks on the VC4 driver stack mostly known for being the open-source 3D driver for the Raspberry Pi as well as the V3D driver for next-gen Broadcom VideoCore hardware.
The ARM Linux developers continue working on Energy Aware Scheduling (EAS) for the mainline Linux kernel to better handle systems with asymmetric CPU topologies, namely SoCs like those with ARM big.LITTLE cores.
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