Hardware News Archives

Without a doubt, the Radeon RX 480 is a great ~$200 USD graphics card for someone caring a lot about open-source driver support. But with the Pascal-based NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 also costing about the same, what's the better decision for a Linux gamer who may not be religious about his driver choices? Here is some food for thought.

Earlier this summer Cypress semiconductor acquired Broadcom's wireless "Internet of Things" business. With that associated IP, Cypress has begun making public NDA-free data-sheets on associated chipsets.

The sun4i DRM driver changes have been submitted for inclusion in DRM-Next to in turn land in Linux 4.10.

With the SuperComputing '16 event taking place in Salt Lake City, the latest TOP500 list of super-computers has been published.

Back during the summer we last wrote about Thunderbolt networking support for Linux being worked on. Back then the patches were up to its v3 revision while coming out today is the ninth version of these patches, but at least the end might finally be in sight.

After writing a few days ago about Fujitsu SP scanners getting Linux support but being only provided by binary blobs, a Phoronix reader pointed out that the Plustek scanner manufacturer is looking at providing open-source Linux driver support.

Fujitsu subsidiary PFU has announced Linux support for their SP Series scanners (SP-1120, SP-1125, SP-1130). Sadly, even in 2016, binary-only drivers are still a thing for printers/scanners.

For those interested in embedded Linux or Internet of Things (IoT) topics, all of the videos from this year's Embedded Linux Conference 2016 and OpenIOT Summit are now online.

Just in case anyone is thinking about the new (late-2016) MacBook Pro recently announced by Apple, I found out this morning we'll be receiving one for Phoronix Test Suite Linux benchmarking in the next week or two and should be interesting to see how this (expensive/over-priced) modern laptop runs with Linux.

Not directly Linux related, but if you haven't heard about the Tesla Solar Roof since Elon Musk announced it on Friday night, I'd recommend you check it out.

While in 2016 one wouldn't think that a USB disk enclosure would be much of an issue under Linux when they have generally worked well going back more than one decade, but this week I encountered a popular 2.5-inch SSD enclosure from Amazon that doesn't seem to work well.

Last month was the controversy over some Lenovo Yoga laptops not working with Linux that was first alleged to be due to a Microsoft "Signature PC" requirement that later turned out to be incorrect. Well, the good news now is that Lenovo has issued a BIOS update and should allow for better Linux compatibility.

An Intel developer has published testing patches for providing a SoundWire bus driver within the Linux kernel, which implements the MIPI SoundWire 1.1 specification.

The Talos Secure Workstation that we previously have covered on Phoronix has now launched on crowd-funding where they hope to raise close to four million dollars to make this POWER8 system that's free down to the firmware a reality.

Rafael Wysocki sent in a secondary pull request today of more power management updates for the Linux 4.9 kernel.

The OpenWrt Summit took place today in Berlin. For those that weren't able to make the event or unaware of it but interested in Linux networking, the slides and videos are now available.

David Airlie a short time ago submitted the Linux 4.9 DRM subsystem update, including the much sought after open-source Direct Rendering Manager driver improvements. There's a lot of good stuff in here, but sadly the Nouveau changes look like they're going to have to wait until Linux 4.10.

The non-volatile DIMM (NVDIMM) support has been updated for the Linux 4.9 kernel merge window.

While running the fresh NVIDIA vs. AMD Vulkan Linux benchmarks (that also included some OpenGL numbers too), I had also taken the opportunity to run some fresh OpenCL compute benchmarks of the latest NVIDIA 370 proprietary Linux driver against AMDGPU-PRO on different graphics cards.

Linux's power management and ACPI subsystems maintainer Rafael Wysocki presented at this week's LinuxCon Europe event in Berlin about the state and future of power management in the Linux kernel.

With the Linux 4.9 staging pull request comes the addition of the Greybus subsystem. A major user of the Greybus subsystem was to be Google's Project Ara modular smartphone, but with that initiative recently being canned, it may seem like Greybus is dead but that's not actually the case.

The input subsystem is the latest pull request to talk about for the forthcoming Linux 4.9 kernel development cycle.

Takashi Iwai sent in the sound subsystem updates for the Linux 4.9 kernel. This cycle there continues to be changes all over the place.

The x86/platform updates for the Linux 4.9 kernel that entered development on Sunday is bringing initial support for the Mellanox systems platform.

The past few kernel releases there's been a redesign of CPUFreq and P-State code for being able to make use of the kernel's scheduler utilization data by these CPU frequency scaling drivers. That work also led to the introduction of the Schedutil governor. Work along this line has continued for Linux 4.9.

Purism, the startup behind the Librem laptops with a focus on free software and user privacy/freedom, still has their minds set on coming up with a GNU/Linux smartphone.

Here are some fresh benchmarks of various solid-state drives (SATA 3.0 SSDs plus two NVMe M.2 SSDs) as well as two HDDs for getting a fresh look at how they are performing using the Linux 4.8 Git kernel.

Independent developer Kevin Brace took over maintaining the OpenChrome DDX driver earlier this year to improve the open-source VIA Linux graphics support while over the summer he's slowly been getting up to speed on development of the OpenChrome DRM driver.

Lately I've heard a few reports of some newer PCs being less than friendly with Linux, namely a number of Lenovo devices who have issues with installing Linux. Based upon new information that's come to light from a Phoronix reader, it appears that PCs receiving Microsoft's "Signature Edition" tag are being locked-out from running non-Windows platforms.

Linux input developer Peter Hutterer of Red Hat has provided a look at the evdev protocol for those wondering about its design.

Similar to last year, unfortunately there is no Phoronix Oktoberfest meet-up in 2016 unlike in a number of years prior, as unfortunately I am missing the yearly pilgrimage/holiday.

Besides the Greybus subsystem being right around the corner for the mainline Linux kernel, it might not be too much longer before the TEE subsystem is ready. TEE is now up to its 12th patch revision and is about trusted computing.

An Intel developer continues working on the "Kernel NET Policy" as a step towards better and simplified network configuration for better performance.

Maxime Ripard of Free Electrons has sent in the Allwinner DRM driver pull request that will ultimately land for the Linux 4.9 kernel merge window.

Linux power management and ACPI maintainer Rafael Wysocki has published a set of new "iowait boost" patches for P-State and Schedutil that he's looking to see benchmarked by interested parties.

While it doesn't get talked about as much as Nouveau or Freedreno, the Etnaviv project has been another effort leading great progress on a full-functioning open-source graphics driver through reverse-engineering. Etnaviv is the reverse-engineered driver for Vivante graphics.

Linaro has announced the first development board that supports their 96Boards' Enterprise Edition TV Platform specification.

It's looking like the Raspberry Pi Zero might be playing fine out-of-the-box with the upcoming Linux 4.9 kernel cycle.

Two or so years back or so it was looking hopeful that the mainline Linux kernel would finally have a proper VIA DRM/KMS driver for the unfortunate ones still have VIA x86 hardware and using the integrated graphics. However, that work was ultimately abandoned but there is talk of it being restored.

It looks like some newer Intel laptops will be much happier when S3 suspended with the upcoming Linux 4.8 kernel.

Razer keyboards, mice, and other peripherals are very popular with gamers. However, the company has never provided an official control UI / driver for managing their devices under Linux while various open-source projects have filled the void.

Eric Anholt of Broadcom has written a blog post detailing his past week of work on the open-source VC4 driver stack that benefits the Raspberry Pi.

It's been a number of months since providing any glimpse at my power bill for the electrical cost of so much Linux benchmarking that happens constantly here for Phoronix, OpenBenchmarking.org, LinuxBenchmarking.com, etc. From reader requests, here's a look at how the power use is looking this summer after trying to make some optimizations a few months back.

Richard Jones at Red Hat has been working on bringing up RISC-V processor architecture support for Fedora.

HP Enterprise has announced it's acquiring SGI, formerly known as Silicon Graphics.

The open-source VIA/Chrome Linux graphics driver stack may not have an up-to-date DRM/KMS driver or working Mesa/Gallium3D driver, but the lone community developer left working on this code has continued to improve the DDX driver over the past few months.

As I mentioned in this morning's Early Open-Source Linux Benchmarks Of The AMD Radeon RX 470, coming up tomorrow I will be publishing the first benchmarks of the Radeon RX 460 under Linux in a AMD/NVIDIA graphics card comparison. However, for those impatient, here are some standalone Linux OpenGL benchmarks of the RX 460 on the AMDGPU+RadeonSI driver stack so you can see how your own system compares.

The sole new driver in the kernel's staging area for Linux 4.8 is for some SDIO WiFi cards.

The power supply updates for Linux 4.8 adds a "reboot mode" driver to the kernel.

A number of months after the ALSA 1.1.1 release, a new version of the Advanced Linux Sound Architecture is now available.