Hardware News Archives

If you are looking out for a SATA 2.5-inch HDD/SSD to USB3 adapter, the Sabrent EC-SS31 is quite simple, works with Linux, supports USB 3.1, and retails for about $10 USD.

More ARM platform upstreaming has taken place for the Linux 4.15 kernel development cycle among other ARM hardware improvements.

The HID and input pull requests have been submitted for the Linux 4.15 kernel merge window.

Canonical has announced that Dell is rolling out five new systems pre-installed with Ubuntu Linux. These systems are catering towards developers and come from all-in-one computers to new laptop models.

In the x86 realm for linux 4.15 are many exciting feature improvements for newer/future Intel and AMD CPUs.

German Phoronix reader Thomas Frech is back with another guest post on the topic of ETH/XMR mining under Linux. This time around he's sharing some power efficiency numbers using a new G-Homa WiFi smart meter. See his past articles in this series here.

Forthcoming POWER9 processors could be a game changer for cryptocurrency mining based upon some preliminary performance data we have received.

Following reports the past few days of Broadcom and Qualcomm potentially hooking up, Broadcom just filed their offer today to try to buy up Qualcomm for $103 billion USD.

The Linux-friendly folks at CompuLab have just announced their newest industrial-grade, fanless PC: the fitlet2.

Details are very scarce on the new Qualcomm "Saphira" processor, but initial support for it was added this week to the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC).

Two developers from the Pengutronix embedded Linux company out of Germany presented at this week's Embedded Linux Conference in Europe. There they talked about zero-copy video streaming on embedded systems, and as part of that, the Etnaviv open-source graphics driver.

Tomorrow marks the end of the crowdfunding campaign for Purism's Librem 5 smartphone campaign.

Following his recent article about Mining Ethereum With AMD Threadrippers Paired With Four RX Vega 64 GPUs, Phoronix German reader Thomas Frech is back with another guest post. This time he's talking about his adventures about mining the Monero crypto-currency on the CPU while using the GPUs for Ethereum mining.

Purism has announced today all laptops to be shipping from their company will now have the Intel Management Engine (ME) disabled.

While Samsung Galaxy smartphones may not be as open or free spirited as the proposed Librem 5 smartphone, there is a new alternative for those wanting to run a traditional Linux distribution on their Samsung Galaxy smartphone.

With two weeks left in the crowdfunding campaign, Purism's Librem 5 smartphone initiative crossed its $1,500,000 USD funding goal.

Linaro developers have restored work on the SLIMbus patches for the Linux kernel, which have long been dormant.

Last week I published the Radeon RX Vega Performance With Mesa 17.3-dev + LLVM 6 + drm-next-4.15-dc article offering a fresh look at the RX Vega 56/64 Linux performance using the new AMDGPU DC code that's likely to be merged in Linux 4.15. As well, the latest Mesa 17.3-dev Git code built against LLVM 6.0 SVN while all compared to the latest NVIDIA driver. Out of that article came some premium requests to see a larger comparison, so here that is.

Todd Weaver of Purism has provided an update on the planned Librem 5 smartphone hardware components and that with a development board they do have Debian booting.

For those wanting to see some fresh Linux CPU benchmarks with various AMD Ryzen and Intel Core processors, here are some benchmarks with Ubuntu 17.10 paired with its Linux 4.13 kernel build.

It's been known another USB spec update was being worked on as "USB 3.2" while a few days ago this specification update was made official.

Dell is now the latest company joining The Khronos Group as a contributing member.

Kevin Brace, the sole active developer left working on the OpenChrome driver stack for VIA x86 graphics, presented yesterday at XDC2017 about his work on this driver and how in the years to come he still hopes to work on other vintage GPU support.

Eric Anholt of Broadcom just finished presenting at XDC2017 Mountain View on the state of the VC4 driver stack most notably used by the Raspberry Pi devices. Additionally, he also shared about his early work on the VC5 driver for next-generation Broadcom graphics.

Since announcing earlier this week that KDE is working on Plasma Mobile support for the Librem 5, Purism has managed to raise over $100k more towards their goal of building a free software GNU/Linux smartphone, but remain around 1.1 million dollars short of their goal.

With summer quickly coming to an end next week in the northern hemisphere, here's a look back at the most popular Linux/open-source articles and reviews for summer 2017.

There are many MIPS updates to find with the in-development Linux 4.14 kernel.

There's a big shift in course for Purism's proposed Librem 5 smartphone, what was originally proposed as a GNU/Linux smartphone running GNOME and HTML5 Web Apps will now be working on KDE Plasma Mobile support.

The Piper mouse configuration interface to libratbag is one of the success stories from this year's Google Summer of Code and fortunately the involved student developer has continued contributing to the project.

In two weeks now Purism has managed to raise over $200,000 USD towards their dream of building a privacy/free-software-minded smartphone running their own custom Linux-based software stack. But they remain a long ways to go from their $1.5 MM goal.

Takashi Iwai of SUSE has mailed in his sound driver updates for the Linux 4.14 kernel. This time around there isn't too many speaker-shattering changes, but a wide range of fixes and a few notable changes.

There are a few notable EFI fixes to find for the in-development Linux 4.14 kernel.

Rafael Wysocki of Intel submitted the power management updates on Monday for continuing to improve this area of the Linux kernel. This time around there was a lot of focus as usual on bettering the Intel P-State driver as well as improving system suspend for some hardware.

For those with a system containing the new Realtek RTL8822BE wireless chipset, initial support for it will be found with the upcoming Linux 4.14 LTS kernel.

If you missed out on one of the past Valve hardware sales, the Steam Controller and Steam Link are back to their reduced prices.

Taking a brief break from their Librem 5 smartphone campaign, there's a new Purism blog post today that explains at length why this summer's Librem laptop shipments were delayed due to a pesky Coreboot bug lasting weeks and what it took to come to a workaround.

Eric Anholt of Broadcom has been working on a new VC5 Gallium3D driver for supporting a new generation of Broadcom 3D graphics hardware that goes beyond the "VC4" 3D notably used by the current Raspberry Pi boards. So far he's been working on this new VC5 Gallium3D driver but now he's beginning work on the related Direct Rendering Manager kernel driver for this next-gen hardware.

This week Purism announced their plans for the Librem 5 smart-phone as a GNU/Linux smartphone that is privacy-respecting, as open as possible, and costs $599 USD. The company believes they can have the phone ready for release by early 2019 if they raise $1.5 million USD over the next two months. In just about three days they have raised nearly $100,000, but it's not clear if the pacing will continue to reach the milestone in time.

As some more Linux phone news this week besides Android Oreo and Purism's Librem 5 smartphone effort, Jolla has just announced their plans for shipping Sailfish X.

Self-appointed OpenChrome project maintainer Kevin Brace who for the past year or so has been single-handedly managing the open-source VIA "OpenChrome" graphics driver code-base, is still working towards getting the work-in-progress Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) driver working on newer builds of the Linux kernel.

Adding to the DRM changes for Linux 4.14 is a late pull request for adding the Freedreno MSM DRM driver changes for Qualcomm hardware.

For your Linux hardware interest this evening is a reader-contributed guest review of the Atlast Solutions Ultimate Fanless Core i7 7700T under Linux. Thanks to Luuk van der Duim for testing this fanless computer and sharing his results with us at Phoronix. Reader opinion pieces, Linux hardware reviews, and other article are happily accepted by contacting us.

With this weekend marking the 4.13-rc6 kernel release, David Airlie will be cutting off new material accepted into DRM-Next for then merging during the Linux 4.14 kernel merge window. As such, DRM maintainers this weekend are busy submitting the last of their new feature material they hope to see in Linux 4.14.

The Tyan Thunder CX GT24EB7106 paired with Intel's new Xeon Scalable processors can offer pretty thunderous performance. This server has just arrived at Phoronix for testing and so far is certainly showing off its potential when loading it with dual 20c/40t CPUs (80 threads combined) and 96GB of DDR4-2666 memory.

Here are my latest Ethereum Ethminer benchmarks for those interested in mining this cryptocurrency using OpenCL on AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce GPUs.

Last month we reported that Raptor was planning to launch a new POWER workstation and now they have revealed their system specifications and pre-order details.

While this year's Google Summer of Code isn't done for a few more weeks, the Piper mouse control user-interface for libratbag has now seen all of its major features completed.

It's been a while since last having anything to report on the OpenChrome project for providing open-source Linux graphics support for vintage VIA x86 graphics hardware. But it's still going and what is one of the only contributors left on the project has issued an update.

A new subsystem is being proposed for the Linux kernel for the MIPI I3C sensor specification.

Independent commentator Artem S. Tashkinov is back at it again with his latest thoughts on GNU/Linux and its problems in a post entitled "Why Linux/GNU might never succeed on a large scale".