Hardware News Archives

Another one of the new frameworks slated for the Linux 4.19 kernel cycle kicking off in August is for idle injection.

Purism has offered a status update on their software/hardware efforts around the Librem 5 smart-phone they have been working on that is security-minded, open-source, and that they plan to begin shipping in January of 2019.

With the current-generation Dell XPS 13 XPS9370-7002SLV currently being tested at Phoronix, one of the areas I was most anxious to benchmark was the power consumption... For years it has been a problem of Linux on laptops generally leading to less battery life than on Windows, but in the past ~2+ years there has been some nice improvements within the Linux kernel and a renewed effort by developers at Red Hat and elsewhere on improving the Linux laptop battery life. Here are some initial power consumption numbers for this Dell XPS 13 under Windows 10 and then various Linux distributions.

Announced back in March was the MintBox Mini 2 as a collaboration project by CompuLab and Linux Mint. That tiny Linux PC is now available for order given the imminent release of Linux Mint 19 "Tara".

Last year Allwinner began making OpenGL user-space binaries more readily available for Linux systems in cooperation with Free Electrons (now Bootlin), A new set of OpenGL binaries has now been released that includes Wayland support.

Equus Compute Solutions has announced the release of their new WHITEBOX OPEN server platform that is intended to be cost-optimized and an open hardware platform.

With not being able to deliver a 100% fully free software / libre system, the Librem 5 smartphone will rely upon a secondary processor for dealing with the necessary binary blobs for hardware initialization to keep them out of touch from the U-Boot boot-loader and Linux kernel.

Purism has published their latest progress report on the Librem 5 privacy-minded Linux-powered smartphone that they still hope to begin shipping next January.

The VFIO framework that allows exposing direct device access to user-space in a secure, IOMMU-protected fashion is gaining some new sample drivers in Linux 4.18.

The MIPS architecture updates have been submitted for the Linux 4.18 kernel merge window.

The ARM SoC/platform changes have been submitted and already pulled into the merge window for the Linux 4.18 kernel.

Oak Ridge National Laboratory has officially launched their "Summit" supercomputer today that also comes in as the world's fastest.

Last month we reported on Raptor Computing Systems announcing the Talos 2 Lite as their most affordable POWER9-based, open-source down to the firmware system and at least for now also happens to be the cheapest POWER9 configuration we have seen from any vendor.

Adding to the growing list of kernel changes for Linux 4.18 are a great deal of sound driver/subsystem updates.

Linux hardware manufacturer Purism is reaffirming their commitment this morning to shipping the Librem 5 smart-phone in January.

Another one of the hardware support additions for the now in-development Linux 4.18 kernel is finally the mainlining of the Chromebook Tablet Switch Driver.

As reported a few months ago, the new Chinese x86 CPU venture formed between the government of Shanghai and VIA has been working on Linux support for these new x86 CPUs and that onboarding has continued with Linux 4.18.

It's been a while since last having any Linux driver progress to report on for the DisplayLink hardware that is found in many of the USB-powered displays. Fortunately, Red Hat developer Mikulas Patocka has posted a set of improvements to the DisplayLink kernel drivers of the UDL-KMS DRM driver and the UDLFB frame-buffer driver.

While Kevin Brace of the OpenChrome project as the lead and only developer left working on this open-source VIA driver stack has restarted the discussion towards mainlining the OpenChrome DRM/KMS driver, he has decided to take a break from that for a few weeks and to focus on developing a "reusable DRM module" to help other vintage/obscure graphics hardware.

LG Electronics is rolling out a 3840 x 1600, 38-inch "UltraWide Thin Client Monitor" that is basically an all-in-one system and features support for Windows 10 and Ubuntu 16.04 LTS.

If the latest Dell XPS 13 developer edition laptop pre-loaded with Ubuntu Linux doesn't match your needs, Dell has now rolled out several Precision laptop developer editions that also come loaded with Ubuntu LTS.

Purism has published their nearly final specifications on their limited-run Librem 5 Dev Kit. The cutoff for ordering a developer kit is next week as they are placing their hardware order and planning on only this single, limited run of the developer kit prior to the phones becoming available next year.

With the recently minted Linux 4.17 kernel there was initial USB Audio Class 3.0 support for this audio-over-USB specification while with Linux 4.18 that UA3 support will be further enhanced.

The Linux 4.18 kernel will feature the initial Steam Controller kernel driver that works without having to use the Steam client or using third-party user-space applications like the SC-Controller application.

If Purism didn't have their hands full enough already working to further free Linux laptops and their very ambitious project to get their own Linux smartphone software/hardware shipping next year, they have now expanded their portfolio with the Purekey.

For those that have been interested in the Talos II POWER-based system that is fully open-source down to the firmware but have been put off by its cost, Raptor Computer Systems today announced the Talos II Lite that is a slightly cut-down version of the Talos II Workstation.

Purism has been working on reverse-engineering the Intel Firmware Support Package (FSP) module but it looks like that work may have taken a turn.

It's been a while since last seeing any interesting products out of VIA with having been focusing on digital signage solutions and fabricating some basic ARM boards. The company has been exploring deep learning and AI and today announced the VIA Edge AI Developer Kit.

With Ubuntu 18.04 LTS out as well as System76's Pop!_OS updated against the Bionic Beaver, System76 is in the process of rolling out some new/updated systems. Last week they began teasing the Oryx Pro as their new "thin machine learning laptop" while today we have a better look at it.

Earlier this week MIPS Technologies announced their new MIPS I7200 processor core built on the new nanoMIPS ISA. A day after they unveiled their new GCC port to this much-changed nanoMIPS instruction set and now today they sent out their initial Linux kernel patch for bringing up this new MIPS version that is coming with a new/updated kernel ABI.

MIPS Technologies has unveiled a new processor and one that is built on nanoMIPS, a significantly redesigned MIPS instruction set architecture and the first major product launch since Imagination Technologies sold off MIPS last year.

USB 3.2 was announced last summer as an incremental update to the USB standard to double the bandwidth for existing USB Type-C cables.

The past year we have been covering the development of the VC5 open-source Linux graphics driver stack for Broadcom's unreleased "VideoCore V" GPU, succeeding the VideoCore IV GPU most notably found on Raspberry Pi boards. Disappointing readers though has been the lack of availability for VC5 hardware, but that's beginning to change.

Purism has begun with their Librem 5 phone platform documentation as they still plan to get developer boards out this summer and ideally begin shipping the actual Linux security-minded smartphones next year.

Andy Shevchenko has submitted the platform-drivers-x86 updates for the Linux 4.17 kernel merge window that largely benefit modern x86 laptops running Linux.

There are old CPU architectures being dropped from the Linux 4.17 kernel while also some new CPU support added. The latest work added with the busy Linux 4.17 development cycle is support for the MIPS-based Microsemi Ocelot SoCs.

The "real-time clock" (RTC) changes usually aren't too notable to the Linux kernel merge windows, but for the in-development Linux 4.17 kernel to prolong their life for decades to come, at least as far as the clock is concerned.

Today's hardware monitoring subsystem updates sent into the Linux 4.17 kernel merge window were a bit peculiar with "new Centaur CPUs" now being supported for reading the CPU core temperatures.

In addition to Linux 4.17 dropping eight obsolete CPU architectures, this next kernel release is also doing away with POWER4 CPU support.

Greg Kroah-Hartman's char/misc pull this week included a fair amount of Thunderbolt support improvements for the forthcoming Linux 4.17 kernel.

From several of the pull requests covered on Phoronix this week for the in-progress Linux 4.17 kernel, there are many areas seeing improved hardware/device support with this next kernel upgrade, including the input drivers.

The HID subsystem updates have been submitted for the Linux 4.17 merge window and that set of driver updates includes a variety of new product support.

Longtime Linux sound system maintainer Takashi Iwai of SUSE has sent in his album of updates for the Linux 4.17 kernel.

The Linux 4.17 kernel is bringing further improvements to USB Type-C support.

The PowerBook 100 sub-notebook launched in 1991 with a 16MHz Motorola 68000 processor and up to 8MB of memory. In 2018, the Linux kernel is still receiving fixes/improvements for the PowerBook 100 series.

Rafael Wysocki of Intel has already submitted the power management and ACPI updates for the newly-opened Linux 4.17 kernel merge window.

LightNVM patches are called for pulling into the Linux kernel's block layer that would land for the Linux 4.17 kernel and provide Open-Channel 2.0 support.

As of yesterday, Raptor Computing Systems has begun shipping the Talos II Workstation in volume. This POWER9 system is open down to the firmware and schematics while delivering quite a practical performance punch compared to today's proprietary x86/ARM servers.

The VC5 open-source Linux graphics driver stack has been under heavy development now the past nearly year while not yet seeing any major ARM SBCs or other products making use of this Broadcom VideoCore V (VC5) 3D hardware, which now supports OpenCL and Vulkan. While many are holding out hopes for eventually seeing a next-gen Raspberry Pi with this beefed up VideoCore, it appears there is already a VC6 in the works too.

Continuing on to with some of what we can look forward to seeing with Linux 4.17 for end-users, the sound driver updates are fairly notable for this upcoming kernel cycle.