Hardware News Archives

Longtime Ubuntu/Linux PC vendor System76 has been teasing their efforts around an "open-source computer" and other open-source hardware efforts now that they are in the home stretch of setting up their own US-based manufacturing facility. Some new details on their initial aspirations are now out there.

Adding to the long list of new features for what will be Linux 4.20 or likely renamed to Linux 5.0 per Linus Torvalds' numbering preferences is a new wireless networking subsystem within the kernel's networking code... Meet LoRa.

Purism has shared the latest details on their efforts to deliver the open-source Linux Librem 5 smartphone to market in 2019.

DDR4 memory has been around for several years already yet the mainline Linux kernel doesn't have a driver for reading the SPD EEPROMs abiding by the JEDEC EE1004 standard as used by DDR4 SDRAM memory modules.

This week at the OpenPOWER Summit Amsterdam, Texas-based libre computer vendor Raptor Computing Systems announced Blackbird as a low-cost, micro-ATX POWER9 motherboard to be available in the coming months. The company has now revealed some additional details.

Since August we've been excited to hear about Raptor Computing Systems' new POWER9 open-source system in development and today at the OpenPOWER Summit in Amsterdam they announced Blackbird.

Linux hibernation and suspend/resume works much better in recent years than a decade ago, certainly, but that isn't without some bugs still persisting either due to quirky hardware or the occasional kernel/software issues as well. Fedora developers are interested in hearing about your current system hibernation experience.

After getting the Linux support squared away for Creative's Sound BlasterX AE-5 and Sound Blaster Recon3D, Connor McAdams latest challenge was getting the Sound Blaster ZxR support working on Linux. Overnight a set of 11 patches were sent out to get this ZxR sound card working on the mainline Linux kernel.

Support for the Hygon Dhyana, a Chinese x86 server CPU based on AMD Zen/EPYC, will find its way into the next Linux kernel cycle.

The Linux mult-queue block I/O layer (blk-mq) has been working out well for delivering very fast performance particularly for modern NVMe solid-state storage and SCSI drives. But it turns out run-time power management hasn't been in use when blk-mq is active.

Longtime Linux PC vendor System76 has begun teasing a "new open-source computer" they will release in the coming weeks.

While last week Purism entered into the hardware security space with the Librem Key as a USB-based smart card, industry veteran Yubico today announced their YubiKey 5 Series.

Remember back in May when Purism partnered up with Nitrokey as they wanted to work on a USB-based PGP SmartCard? They have now announced the Librem Key as a result of that work.

Last year Creative Labs introduced the Sound BlasterX AE-5 PCI Express gaming sound card while finally there are some patches pending for supporting this high-end sound card in Linux.

Given all the new hardware enablement work going into the Linux kernel recently, I was curious how the code contributions were stacking up by some of the leading hardware vendors... Here are those interesting numbers.

This weekend I decided to fire up the current Linux 4.19 development kernel on the dual Intel Xeon Gold 6138 test platform based on the wonderful Tyan GT24E-B7106. At least for this system, it's really benefiting from the new kernel that will be released as stable in October.

Covered on Phoronix back during the Linux 4.19 kernel merge window was the new option for distribution vendors or those compiling their own Linux kernel to decide whether you trust the CPU's random number generator. That compile-time functionality has now been re-worked to allow for a boot-time option so users can more easily indicate whether they trust their own processor's RNG.

The latest improvements published by Red Hat's Benjamin Tissoires for bettering the Linux input stack is expanded Logitech support within its HID++ (logitech-hidpp) driver.

Purism announced earlier this week that the Librem 5 smartphone has been delayed to April 2019. In trying to make that date not slip further, which they attributed this three-month delay on NXP hardware errata, they continue working quickly on the software side of this privacy-minded GNU/Linux smartphone puzzle.

While yesterday we looked at the Renegade ROK-RK3328-CC Libre Computer Board, they already have the successor well in the works. The Renegade was interesting as for just dollars more than the Raspberry Pi it offers better performance, Gigabit Ethernet makes the networking potential a lot more than the slow Ethernet on the Pi, there is USB 3.0 connectivity, and its using DDR4 memory, among other technical advantages. But the new Renegade Elite even puts that to shame.

The folks at the Linux-friendly CompuLab hardware vendor have introduced WILD, the first WiFi RTT access point to allow for WiFi indoor location detection/tracking with supported Android 9 smartphones. CompuLab WILD is able to deliver under 0.5 meter accuracy.

We knew it was pretty much inevitable, but Purism's embargo has just expired confirming the news that the Librem 5 smartphone will not be released in January as originally planned.

The latest work being sought by Google's Chrome OS team for inclusion into the upstream Linux kernel is high-resolution scrolling for Logitech mice.

Raptor Computer Systems began their open-source hardware expedition with the POWER8-based Talos Secure Workstation that was quite expensive but last year launched the Talos II platform with IBM POWER9 processors and earlier this year launched the Raptor Talos II Lite systems at a cheaper price-point but still quite a significant investment compared to x86_64 AMD/Intel products. They've been pushing ahead on making their platform more viable for Linux users as well as more affordable and it looks like they will soon be launching a new product.

For those looking at affordable metal server racks / open rack cabinets, I continue to be quite impressed by the StarTech.com four-post server racks. Recently I commissioned two more of their 12U racks in order to accommodate the latest Threadripper 2 systems in our Linux benchmarking farm.

As a P.S.A. for those tending to quickly upgrade to new major kernel releases but are doing so on older hardware, there appears to be a show-stopping bug that made it into the stable Linux 4.18 series.

It has been a while since last delivering some OpenCL GPU compute benchmarks across several different graphics cards on the latest Linux drivers, so here is a fresh look.

Longtime Red Hat developer Jerome Glisse has published his latest patches concerning the Heterogeneous Memory Management support, a.k.a. HMM.

While OpenRISC has been around longer than RISC-V as an open-source processor ISA, with not having as many commercial stakeholders involved, it hasn't been off to the races as quickly, but it's still marching to the beat of its own drum.

AKiTiO is the latest hardware vendor beginning to allow for firmware upgrades in an easy and reliable manner under Linux.

Going back to 2011 there's been a Nintendo Wii remote "Wiimote" driver in the Linux kernel but this unofficial hardware driver hasn't worked with some of the devices that can interface with the Wiimote like devices for Rock Band and Guitar Hero. In 2018, that's now changed with the in-development Linux 4.19 kernel.

Following our POWER9 Linux benchmarks earlier this year, IBM POWER engineers have continued exploring various areas for optimization within the interesting open-source workloads tested. Another batch of optimizations are pending for various projects.

The Linux 4.19 kernel will finally be introducing a GPS subsystem to hopefully better standardize a lot of the Linux GPS drivers that have been out there for years out-of-tree.

Following the main DRM features update for Linux 4.19, a secondary pull request has now been submitted that offers up the nine thousand lines of code for bringing up the Adreno 600 series support for supporting the very latest Qualcomm Snapdragon SoCs.

The POWER architecture changes have been submitted for the in-development Linux 4.19 kernel.

It has been a while since ASUS last offered any Linux options for laptops, but they appear to have a new effort underway with Endless OS.

Details are still light but a new vulnerability is coming out called the L1 Terminal Fault. It's been described as a "train-wreck" and is another big deal in the security space as the latest speculative side-channel attack vector.

Patches have been revised for the Linux kernel to support the initial Hygon Dhyana server CPUs that are the licensed AMD Family 17h "Zen" technology, basically the EPYC server CPUs for the Chinese market.

Shortly after writing about the Sound Blaster Recon3D finally getting Linux support yesterday, a Phoronix reader pointed out another frustrating Linux sound problem with a resolution on its way to the mainline Linux kernel.

Creative Labs launched the Recon3D sound card the better part of a decade ago and finally patches have emerged providing for better Linux driver support.

Purism has shared another routine status update on their software and hardware efforts around the Librem 5 smartphone efforts.

Adding to the list of notable changes for the Linux 4.19 kernel is run-time power management for Thunderbolt controllers.

The lazy TLB mode as a way to delay translation look-aside buffer updates will be improved upon with the upcoming Linux 4.19 kernel.

Following the success of their work on open-source video decode for MPEG/H.264 following their crowd-funding campaign, Bootlin has now taken to working on H.265 video decode for the Sunxi-Cedrus open-source effort.

Right now if using the Cougar 500k gaming keyboard on Linux, when pressing any of the special function keys the keyboard will stop responding. With Linux 4.19 that will be fixed thanks to a new "HID_COUGAR" driver.

While early in the year was talk of introducing NXP i.MX8 SoC support in the Linux 4.17 kernel, that didn't happen. Support for that latest-generation i.MX SoC also didn't make it for Linux 4.18 and it also looks like it will not make it for Linux 4.19.

Back in May we covered the big rewrite of the Linux kernel's HID multi-touch code and in the process supporting the Microsoft Surface Dial and Dell Canvas 27's Totem input device. That work will be landing in the Linux 4.19 kernel.

In last month's round of IBM POWER9 benchmarking on the Talos II systems compared to various Intel/AMD x86_64 CPUs, one of the areas where POWER was struggling especially was with multimedia encoding performance. Fortunately, since those POWER9 Phoronix benchmarks this year, various developers have been working on optimizations.

A rather late self-contained feature proposal for the in-development Fedora 29 is to better support FPGAs.

Back in April 2017 was the announcement that System76 would begin designing and manufacturing their own systems beginning with desktops and to be followed at a later date by their own laptops, rather than relying upon whitebox designs that they currently retail with their Ubuntu/Pop!_OS-loaded PCs. The Colorado-based company is inching closer to fully realizing their goal.