Hardware News Archives

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.

LPGPU is a new research initiative funded by the European Union to explore low-power GPU technologies.

For Linux GPU driver junkies, here are some fresh NVIDIA vs. RadeonSI test results using Linux 4.11 and Mesa 17.1-dev as of this week.

The Sapphire Pure Platinum H61 is the latest motherboard to be supported by mainline Coreboot for replacing the board's proprietary BIOS.

For those curious what's been happening with Jolla/Sailfish, the company put out a recap of their announcements and activities at the recent Mobile World Congress event.

Eric Anholt has written a status update concerning his latest work at Broadcom on the VC4 Gallium3D graphics driver that's mostly focused on providing a free software graphics driver stack for the Raspberry Pi.

Imagination Technologies has announced their new PowerVR "Furian" GPU architecture for next-gen graphics and compute performance.

Recently I ran out of spare SSDs and needed one for one of my test systems where the I/O storage capacity or performance wasn't important, so I decided to try out the Patriot Torch 60GB SSD that can be had for about $33 USD.

Submitted earlier in the Linux 4.11 merge window were the big ARM SoC and platform changes for this next kernel version while some last-minute ARM changes have just arrived.

Razer co-founder and CEO Min-Liang Tan has shared plans to improve their Linux support, at least when it comes to their Blade laptops.

It's going on five years since there was the call for deprecating FBDEV within the mainline Linux kernel and various ongoing efforts to get more drivers to making use of the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) rather than FBDEV. But with Linux 4.11, FBDEV still remains in place.

David Airlie sent in another pull request of DRM material for Linux 4.11, which follows last week's main DRM feature update for Linux 4.11.

The Allwinner DRM driver added in Linux 4.7 continues to be worked on and one of the latest efforts by the open-source community is on enabling Allwinner Display Engine 2.0 "DE2" support.

OpenRISC continues advancing with its sights on being a free and open processor for embedded systems using the RISC instruction set architecture.

Takashi Iwai has submitted the sound subsystem updates for the Linux 4.11 kernel with most of that work happening in the audio driver space.

Dmitry Torokhov has submitted the input feature updates for the Linux 4.11 kernel merge window.

Rafael Wysocki has submitted the ACPI and power management feature updates for the Linux 4.11 kernel.

With Debian and Ubuntu dropping 32-bit PowerPC support in their future releases, you may be curious how the older PowerPC hardware compares to Intel's modern x86 processors if you are wishing to switchover. Here are some benchmarks.

Longtime GNOME developer Richard Hughes has announced a new release of fwupd, the open-source utility for updating firmware on Linux in a safe, automatic, and reliable manner.

System76 today announced their new Ibex Pro GPU Server, designed for engineering and science workloads, among other possible business applications.

Our friends and Linux-friendly PC vendor, CompuLab, have announced a new "IPC" line-up of their small form factor computers now with Intel Kabylake processors.

For those curious how much power is consumed with our constant flow of benchmarks and working 365 days per year, 2016 rang in at 25,943 kWh.

For those using Laptop-Mode-Tools to conserve power consumption when running on battery or using it to be more power efficient on your desktop or server, a new version is now available.

The MIPI Alliance this week announced the release of the I3C Sensor Interface specification, the Improved Inter-Integrated Circuit, and successor to the long-standing I2C.

Just in case any of you now are thinking about building a Xeon E3 v5 "Skylake" workstation-ish system now that the prices are getting lower, I just wanted to pass along that the MSI C236A WORKSTATION motherboard is still serving me very reliably and ended up picking up another one of these boards when a Supermicro Skylake board stopped working.

The work to run Linux on the PlayStation 4 continues to advance and previously we reported on those behind it managing to exploit the Radeon graphics found on the AMD APU powering the PS4. The latest milestone is they now have Vulkan running on the PS4.

With Microsoft having begun to mandate TPM2 (Trusted Platform Module 2) support be present in all platforms for newer versions of Windows, these chips are going to become a lot more common to laptops and desktops. Thus veteran kernel developer James Bottomley is looking closely at the current and future support for TPM2 on Linux.

Continuing with our various year-end recaps, here's a comparison of the top NVIDIA and AMD/Radeon Linux enthusiast/oriented gamer news for 2016 on Phoronix.

While I have owned many Western Digital hard drives over the years, last week was my first time trying out one of the company's new solid-state drives (SSDs) under Linux. Some Linux benchmark results to share for reference today are of the WD Blue 250GB (WDS250G1B0A) SATA 3.0 SSD.

An Intel developer has sent out the latest version of his patches for implementing the Self-Encrypting Drive (SED) protocol support for the Linux kernel.

I now have my first dead NVM Express SSD and it only lasted one week... It's already time to RMA the Samsung 960 EVO and unfortunately lost a number of benchmarks that I was working on this weekend.

A few days ago I wrote about HID improvements for Microsoft's Surface 3/4 tablets coming with Linux 4.10 while now there is additional driver work landing to benefit the Microsoft Surface 3 2-in-1 computer.

The input driver updates for Linux 4.10 are most exciting for those with laptops having newer Synaptics technology.

If you have been interested in the Talos Secure Workstation as a fully open system down to the firmware and based upon the POWER8 architecture but have been put off by the $3,700+ USD price simply to obtain the motherboard, they have extended their crowdfunding campaign by another thirty days with only having hit 12% of their goal.

We are just half way through December yet it's been a very exciting month already due to the Linux 4.9 release, the never-ending work on open-source graphics drivers, the Linux 4.10 merge window, and much more. So far this month I've already written 152 original news articles as well as a dozen Linux hardware reviews / featured multi-page articles.

OpenRISC continues progressing as an open-source ISA derived from RISC. While still waiting for more hardware to appear, the OpenRISC continues moving along for the Linux kernel.

This week was my first time trying a VisionTek branded solid-state drive. Here are some benchmark results of the VisionTek 240GB TLC 7mm SATA III SSD.

A Phoronix reader pointed out an AMD AIB partner selling "mystery box" refurbished graphics cards from $5 to $15 USD, so I decided to give it a go and see what cards I would receive.

Rafael Wysocki of Intel on Monday submitted the new ACPI and power management material for the Linux 4.10 merge window. Like most kernel cycles, there is a lot of ACPI/PM improvements on the horizon for Linux.

For the past number of years there's been good Linux support for Roccat devices, mostly various mice/keyboard gaming peripherals. This has done by developer Stefan Achatz working with Roccat and he's done a great job supporting their hardware but now he's stepping back from the project.

This week Qualcomm announced they are now sampling the first 10nm 48-core ARMv8 SoC based upon their in-house "Falkor" design. With these SoCs branded as the Centriq 2400 series soon to reach partners and potential customers, Qualcomm has published some Falkor V1 patches for the Linux kernel.

The Bluetooth SIG today announced the core specification release for Bluetooth 5.

Qualcomm announced this morning they have begun sampling the world’s first 10nm server processor.

The rumor is back that Intel and AMD have reached a deal for future Intel CPUs to be paired with integrated AMD Radeon graphics.

Last week I shared some 2016 Holiday Gift Ideas For Linux Enthusiasts, Gamers. Since then more ideas came to mind with other interesting tech gift ideas, particularly for Linux/open-source enthusiasts, as well as other favorite gadgets and interesting devices I've come across in the past year. So here are some more ideas of stocking stuffers and other fun purchases for the holidays.

A few days ago I wrote about how Apple's 2016 MacBook Pro and Linux Don't Mix, but prior to returning it to the sponsor, I did run a few more benchmarks under macOS beyond what was found in the original article.

Jolla engineers have spent the past few weeks porting Sailfish OS to an Android smartwatch as they feel their Linux-based OS is particularly suited for small screens.

There's now patches for bringing up open-source graphics driver support in the Freedreno stack for Qualcomm's latest-generation Adreno graphics hardware.

If you are looking for any gift ideas this 2016 holiday season for a Linux gamer/enthusiast or just a casual user looking for some friendly PC hardware, here are my favorites for this holiday season.

Last month the Talos Secure Workstation launched on crowd-funding as a fully-open libre, modern system powered by a POWER8 processor priced at $4k for the motherboard or $18k for the complete system. They have only raised less than 10% of their funding goal so far but have now cut costs a bit.