Hardware News Archives

The last update to UPower -- what was formerly known as DeviceKit-Power for serving as an abstraction library to battery/power devices -- was in February of 2016 but that finally changed today.

Purism, the company that started out with the Librem laptops that are Linux-friendly and now pre-loaded with Coreboot, has long had ambitions for expanding into tablets, smartphones, and other devices. It looks like the first Purism Phone might soon be announced.

Raptor Engineering who does Coreboot development work and is known for their previous Talos Secure Workstation system to provide a fast and fully libre workstation is going to be launching a new POWER-based workstation.

Earlier this month the VC5 open-source driver was announced as a new driver for Broadcom's next-generation graphics processor. This has already led to speculation this much more powerful GPU will be found in future Raspberry Pi hardware. Work on this driver has continued while not forgetting about the VC4 driver for current-gen Raspberry Pi devices.

This morning IBM announced the z14 mainframe that is much faster than its predecessors and offers full encryption capabilities.

There are many bug reports out there about issues with Dell's TB15 and TB16 Thunderbolt docks under Linux, but at least some of those remaining issues should be cleared up by a pending fix.

While the Raspberry Pi has offered HDMI CEC (Consumer Electronics Control) support via libCEC, now when using the VC4 DRM kernel driver it will be possible to make use of HDMI CEC.

Complementing last week's 2017 Linux Laptop Survey results, here are some complementary numbers you may be interested in that are collected by OpenBenchmarking.org based on Phoronix Test Suite activity.

The Human Interface Device (HID) subsystem changes for the Linux 4.13 kernel have now been submitted.

Bjorn Helgaas has submitted a big batch of PCI updates for the Linux 4.13 kernel merge window.

Needing to replace a failed hard drive in one of the older benchmarking systems, I decided to try out my first DREVO brand solid-state drive with frankly the I/O performance on this particular system not being too important and being curious how well this sub-$40 SSD performs.

A variety of POWER architecture updates have been submitted for the Linux 4.13 kernel merge window.

David Miller submitted the Linux 4.13 networking subsystem updates, which he describes as a reasonably busy cycle but it might not be as massive as all the changes queued for Linux 4.12.

Takashi Iwai's sound updates is the latest pull request worth mentioning on Phoronix as part of the two-week merge window for Linux 4.13.

This is your last chance to participate in the 2017 Linux Laptop Survey. There's nearly twenty-thousand submissions so far, but the survey is expiring at the end of day Thursday.

Rafael Wysocki has submitted the ACPI and power management updates for the Linux 4.13 merge window.

Among the sound changes coming for Linux 4.13 is supporting some new Realtek audio codecs.

An open-source contributor has begun working on a new open-source driver for the ARM Mali-400 GPU.

When buying the MSI X299 SLI PLUS for our initial X299 + Intel Core X Series Linux benchmarking from NewEgg it came with the MSI DS502 Gaming Headset as a free gift. Curiosity got the best of me today, and it actually works just fine under Linux.

If you haven't already done so, make sure to participate in our first annual 2017 Linux Laptop Survey.

A fair amount of new device support and other improvements are getting ready for the Linux 4.13 kernel via the HID and input trees.

Purism has announced their privacy-minded Coreboot-friendly Librem laptops have reached a general availability state.

Following countless rumors about PowerVR-maker Imagination Technologies, the company has formally announced today it's selling itself.

The Oculus Rift CV1 head mounted display should play nicer with the Linux 4.12 kernel.

The PCI-SIG has announced the finalized PCI Express 4.0 specifications and has laid out early details about PCI Express 5.0.

In case you missed the articles last year or are curious how they are holding up, here's an update on the custom L-shaped desks I built last year of galvanized pipes and sheets of butcherblock for being able to withstand the weight of plenty of monitors and other computer hardware.

Thanks to work done by Collabora, Etnaviv, and other open-source developers, NXP/Freescale iMX6 platforms can now boot Android with no proprietary blobs.

The Linux state for HDMI CEC (Consumer Electronics Control) continues to improve and several drivers are in the works.

Keith Packard's latest hacking in the open-source world has been around DRM leases support as part of his work under contract with Valve for better supporting VR HMDs on Linux.

Richard Hughes of Red Hat has managed to support firmware updating of Logitech devices under Linux with fwupd.

Taking place the past few days in Saint-Etienne, France has been the annual Linux Audio Conference.

This week NVIDIA released the GeForce GT 1030 as their newest low-end Pascal card. The GT 1030 cards retail for around $70 USD and you can find them in a low-profile version with some cards even being passively cooled.

It's been a few weeks since last trying out the latest BIOS updates on my two AMD Ryzen Linux systems, but the latest releases on these MSI motherboards are indeed an improvement.

If you happen to have an ASRock G41C-GS still in use or tucked away in your closet, this older motherboard for Intel Core 2 CPUs now has support for Coreboot to free the proprietary BIOS of the motherboard. Or if you don't but still have other parts available, this motherboard is still available from a few online shops.

Dmitry Torokhov has sent in some last-minute updates for the Linux 4.12 kernel around its input support.

The Broadcom BCM2835 SoC, most notably used by various Raspberry Pi boards and other SBCs, will have a thermal driver in the Linux 4.12 kernel.

Last week was the main ACPI / power management updates for Linux 4.12 while Intel's Rafael Wysocki has now submitted a second set of feature updates for this next version of the Linux kernel.

While there are still a few days left until the Linux 4.12 merge window closes and the 4.12 release candidates for the next two months, the Qualcomm-backed CodeAurora already has lined up some new code for the reverse-engineered, community-driven Freedreno MSM DRM driver for Adreno hardware.

There are a number of IOMMU optimizations queued for Linux 4.12.

While Intel is working on 5-level paging support to allow a virtual address space up to 128 PiB and physical address space of 4 PiB, the PowerPC guys are working on upping their address space capabilities too.

The media subsystem updates were submitted earlier today for the Linux 4.12 development cycle.

The platform-drivers-x86 updates were submitted this afternoon for the Linux 4.12 kernel and it's on the heavier side with a lot of new material for benefiting Intel-powered laptops/ultrabooks.

Another pull request worth mentioning for Linux 4.12 are the MD (Multiple Device) Software RAID changes.

Intel's P-State CPU frequency scaling driver continues getting in shape with the latest mainline Linux Git code and the CPUFreq Schedutil governor also received some tuning, among other power management and ACPI changes vetted for Linux 4.12.

The upcoming Linux 4.12 kernel cycle plans to introduce support for CryptoCell hardware within ARM's TrustZone.

It's looking less and less likely like Heterogeneous Memory Management (HMM) will be mainlined for the Linux 4.12 kernel. This is the long-in-development effort by Jerome Glisse that would benefit CUDA, OpenCL, and more by allow device memory to be transparently used by any device process and for mirroring process address space on a device.

In looking to make their Linux-powered systems more appealing and original to the masses, System76 will begin their own product design and manufacturing.

Mediatek developers have been working to mainline their MT2701 SoC support in the Linux kernel the past number of months and with Linux 4.12 will come support to their DRM/KMS driver.

Unigine's first public Unigine 2 tech demo, Superposition, was due to be released yesterday (6 April) but was delayed at the last minute. But next week Linux (and Windows) users -- including RadeonSI drivers -- should be able to have fun torturing your hardware with this demanding OpenGL benchmark.

While Razer is exploring better Linux support for its products and not just limited to laptops, for now they don't have any official Linux configuration software for their products. Fortunately, community solutions exist, including Polychromatic that's been one of the more popular Razer open-source configuration tools in recent times.