Hardware News Archives

David Miller submitted the networking subsystem updates last week for the Linux 4.8 kernel.

For a variety of factors, I've long used an Apple iPhone but two weeks ago switched to using a Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge; finally running Android on my main mobile device!

IBM continues prepping the Linux kernel for supporting the upcoming POWER9 processors.

A few years ago was the Kickstarter-backed effort to open-source a real GPU hardware design albeit from a late 90's design. That effort ultimately failed just raising $12k of a $200k USD goal, but the GPU design was released under the GPLv3 anyways.

At the beginning of the month I wrote about That Open, Upgradeable ARM Dev Board Is Trying To Make A Comeback, the EOMA68-spec'ed project formerly known as the Improv Dev Board. It's still using the same (rather slow) Allwinner SoC but has since seen some improvements and there's also a laptop compatible route too. The project has now raised more than $50k USD, but their goal is still three times that at $150k they are trying to raise over the next month.

The input updates for Linux 4.8 bring support for the Microsoft Surface 3 touchscreen controller, among other improvements.

Rafael Wysocki on Tuesday submitted his power management and ACPI pull request feature updates for the Linux 4.8 kernel.

Thunderbolt networking support is still being worked on for the mainline Linux kernel.

Peter Hutterer has announced the first release candidate of the upcoming libinput 1.4 release for this input handling library used by X.Org, Wayland, and Mir systems.

Qualcomm announced the Snapdragon 821 SoC this morning as its fastest processor to date and comes out slightly ahead of the Snapdragon 820.

Linux input expert Peter Hutterer at Red Hat has shared an upcoming feature of libinput 1.4: mode switching support for graphics tablet (e.g. Wacom tablets) for switching through different behavior depending upon button presses.

Veteran X.Org/X developer Keith Packard along with well known open-source advocate Bdale Garbee have been working on an "inexpensive yet robust" USB-based hardware random number generator.

For those still leveraging VIA x86 hardware on Linux, the DRM/KMS driver hasn't been restored yet but there is a new xf86-video-openchrome DDX feature release now available.

The folks at CompuLab have announced their latest Linux-friendly PC, the fitlet-RM. The Fitlet-RM is described as "the smallest PC for extreme conditions" and is fanless.

If you have been in the market for a dual LCD monitor mount but the price has set you off, there's a great deal right now on such a monitor mount.

For your viewing pleasure this afternoon are some fresh NVIDIA GeForce GTX 900/1000 benchmarks with the 367.27 display driver compared to various Radeon GCN GPUs using a patched Linux 4.7 kernel and Mesa 12.1-dev Git as of this past weekend.

If you missed the article earlier this month about Building A Massive L-Shaped Desk For A Better Workflow, More Monitors and Space, the second desk is now completed.

Following the recent Windows vs. Linux AMDGPU-PRO / RadeonSI testing, GTX 1080 Windows vs. Linux results, and yesterday's Intel Windows vs. Linux benchmarks, here is a look at all three sets of numbers when using some OpenBenchmarking.org magic to merge the data-sets and normalize the results.

With the Linux 4.7 kernel there is an initial Mediatek DRM display driver while further improvements to this open-source code are coming for Linux 4.8.

Version 9.0 of the once-controversial PulseAudio sound server is now available for your open-source audio needs.

With Phoronix.com having turned 12 years old earlier this month (and Phoronix Test Suite turning 8) plus finishing up my custom build of a butcher-block and steel pipe computer desk, I figured it'd be fun to take a look at my Phoronix office layouts over the years.

If you happen to be in the market for a 4K 28-inch display, here's the latest one I have purchased for our Linux hardware testing here at Phoronix. Right now it also appears to be for a very competitive deal at one particular e-tailer.

Reports are once again circulating that Samsung is looking at easing its reliance on Google's Android by switching more of their devices over to running on their Linux-based Tizen project.

Initial patches were published this week for adding initial NVMe-over-Fabrics support for the Linux kernel as set out by the NVMe 1.2b specification. This target implementation is the basics of making this new specification a reality and one of the first public implementations.

Hans de Goede at Red Hat has been working on a DRM KMS kernel driver for the Grain Media GM12U320 hardware.

Here is the continuation of yesterday's article that was a 10-way NVIDIA GPU Linux comparison with now having more NVIDIA results in plus also testing various AMD GCN GPUs using Linux 4.6.0 and Mesa Git.

Last week Takashi Iwai of SUSE sent in the main audio/sound changes for the Linux 4.7 kernel but with the 4.7 merge window not being quite over yet, he's sent in a second helping of sound driver updates.

Following the DRM feature pull for Linux 4.7 sent at the beginning of the week, David Airlie has now sent in a batch of "DRM fixes" for Linux 4.7 that does include some new functionality too.

The OpenChrome project has long aspired to having a mainline DRM/KMS driver but that original developer since left. These days OpenChrome is down to basically one developer left working on this open-source driver for VIA x86 graphics hardware.

The Linux Kernel's PWM (Pulse Width Modulation) interface now has an atomic API for those writing drivers for fans, LEDs, vibrators, and other supported devices.

Coming up in a short while I have some fresh AMDGPU-PRO BETA 2 (the fresh -PRO "hybrid" driver release) for OpenGL graphics performance while here are some quick OpenCL compute metrics.

It's been a year since the last LM-Sensors release and the project isn't as vibrant or active as it once was while the project site has been down for a while now and it doesn't appear to be coming back.

Adding to the list of Linux 4.7 features/changes so far are device driver improvements in the audio realm.

The x86 platform changes for the Linux 4.7 kernel are dominated by changes for bringing up support for SGI's next-generation Ultraviolet, UV4.

There are new binary-only firmware updates out today for both Intel and AMD Linux users.

Ingo Molnar sent in the EFI changes for Linux 4.7 and they contain a number of exciting improvements for modern x86 and ARM systems.

The hwmon subsystem updates were mailed in this morning for the Linux 4.7 kernel merge window and contains a notable addition to the fam15h_power driver.

For those that may be in the market for DDR4-2133 EUDIMM memory, here's the particular memory I've been buying the most of these days and haven't run into any problems on using it with several different motherboards for Xeon E3 v5 Skylake systems.

For those curious about the performance out of the sub-$100 USD "Chinese netbooks" using the low-priced Wondermedia SoCs, here are some benchmarks.

If you are a newcomer to Linux you may not even have an idea what Ndiswrapper is even though it was very much used a number of years ago, but nevertheless, Ndiswrapper 1.60 has been released.

Raptor Engineering has published new information around their proposed high-performance Talos Secure Workstation that for around $3k is a high-end POWER8 motherboard.

Matt Fleming at Intel sent out the set of patches he intends to submit as the queue of EFI changes for what will become the Linux 4.7 kernel. He noted of this queue, "this is probably the biggest EFI pull ever sent, and there quite a few different topics covered."

Linux kernel developer Matthew Garrett has revised his work around improving power management for modern Intel systems via SATA.

Many Phoronix readers have been inquiring about any Linux hardware review and benchmarks of the Dell XPS 15 (9550) Skylake laptop. Here are some Linux benchmark resources.

A Phoronix reader wrote in excitingly that there have been a few Lima commits this week. Lima, of course, being the open-source, reverse-engineered graphics driver for ARM Mali hardware.

The xf86-video-openchrome 0.4 release has finally happened! It's been more than two years since this VIA x86 X.Org driver was last updated.

ALSA 1.1.1 is out today as the newest version of this Linux audio library, utilities, plugins, and tinycompress for the Advanced Linux Sound Architecture.

With now having a new maintainer, the OpenChrome DDX driver is preparing for its first release in more than two years.

Here's the first Skylake motherboard to have failed on me after just four months of daily benchmarking.

Recently when writing about the tiling work and other changes being done in the "basement server room", a Phoronix reader asked how I do so without being concerned of the basement flooding and destroying the 60+ computers.