Hardware News Archives

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.

The thermal updates were submitted today for the Linux 4.6 kernel merge window and there's a very important fix for at least some newer Lenovo laptops. The fix should end up getting backported to current stable series, but if you have a Lenovo laptop and have been seeing slower performance on recent Linux kernel versions, you'll want to upgrade.

There are already many new features for the Linux 4.6 kernel but with the two week merge window not being over yet, new pull requests are still trickling in. The latest pull is the x86 platform driver updates that offer improvements to various Intel-powered laptops.

AMD's HuskyBoard still isn't shipping even though it was originally supposed to launch last year as a developer board powered by their ARMv8-based Opteron SoC. While the LeMaker Cello is moving forward as an ARM developer board using the Opteron A1100, 96Boards recently updated their web-site with new Enterprise Edition (EE) board details.

New wireless hardware support and other networking improvements will be present in the Linux 4.6 kernel.

There are a number of input driver improvements en route for the Linux 4.6 kernel.

For the majority of you reading this relying upon Serial ATA (SATA) drives, the upcoming Linux 4.6 kernel will support runtime power management of the AHCI host controller for saving more power on your system when idling.

The IBM POWER architecture updates were sent in today for Linux 4.6 and includes the first early bit of work on supporting the next-generation POWER9 processors.

Paolo Bonzini has sent in the KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine) changes for the Linux 4.6 kernel merge window, which he describes as "one of the largest releases for KVM."

While waiting on the new tile in the server room to dry, I figured I would share a brief update on the state of the air cleaning systems being used.

With the Linux 4.5 kernel comes the net Etnaviv DRM kernel driver while some improvements have already been baking for Linux 4.6.

If you are using an ASUS motherboard with Linux and run into a issue like a UEFI/BIOS bug or another Linux compatibility problem with the board, hopefully your motherboard and distribution/version are part of this list.

Transmission 2.90 was released today as the newest version of this popular open-source Bit Torrent client.

Back in January we covered the launch of the CompuLab Airtop as one of the coolest Linux-friendly PCs ever for entusiasts. This radically designed PC is arriving next week at Phoronix for testing so we'll be able to share more about its design and performance.

Yesterday I published the interesting and extensive tests around a 9-way Intel Xeon E3 v5 Skylake processor comparison plus a few extra AMD/Intel CPUs for reference. For some Friday benchmarking fun, that comparison has been extended to a total of a 39 system Linux CPU comparison of AMD/Intel hardware!

While poking around OpenBenchmarking.org this afternoon I noticed an interesting collection of benchmark results for anyone interested in high-end Linux disk setups.

As I've written about a few times now, I've been working towards eliminating the all-in-one water cooling setups from our Linux benchmarking lab since the performance of these aging water cooling loops hasn't been too incredible and they've been blocking me from migrating the last of my systems in ATX cases over to 4U enclosures. This weekend I finally phased out the last two water cooling systems in favor of well-performing ~$20 USD heatsinks.

There's two bits of interesting Vulkan news from the guys at Imagination Technologies.

With a new developer stepping up to the plate, it's looking like the OpenChrome DDX driver will see its first release in more than two and a half years.

As a lot of people have been interested in the routine, casual weekend updates to the evolution of the turning a basement into a Linux benchmarking server room, here's the latest.

For those interested in the Talos Workstation libre system, the preliminary specifications have been revised.

Dell is moving forward with offering natively UEFI firmware flashing from the Linux desktop.

It has been a while since hearing much anything about HP's "The Machine" computing architecture and its associated Linux++ project, but that changed this past week.

You have more than likely read about the atomic push by DRM/KMS drivers over the past few years. If you still are craving to learn more about it, here's the perfect opportunity.

One of the most frequent topics I'm emailed about is any brand recommendations among NVIDIA and AMD AIB partners for graphics cards. For Linux users, is there a particular brand preference for graphics cards?

While Next Thing Co is still working to fulfill orders on the C.H.I.P. $9 computer over the next several months, I noticed that some benchmarks of this cheap Raspberry Pi competitor have begun appearing on OpenBenchmarking.org via the Phoronix Test Suite. Here are some of those benchmark results for this ARB single-board computer.

Raptor Engineering is working on the Talos Secure Workstation, which is being advertised as a high-performance, open-to-the-firmware system that is much better than the commonly antiquated "freed" x86 systems. However, getting a high-performance, free software friendly workstation doesn't come cheap.

A Google Chromium engineer has interestingly provided patches for Qualcomm Adreno 430 display support within Freedreno's MSM DRM driver.

The OpenChrome driver for open-source VIA graphics on Linux isn't quite dead yet... There's a new developer wanting to step up and take over maintainership of the X.Org driver.

Running rm -rf / on any UEFI Linux distribution can potentially perma-brick your system.

Two weeks back I wrote about Brainstorming Further Cooling Improvements To The Linux Benchmarking Room with the idea of replacing the vinyl floor tiles and underlayment and using porcelain tiles directly on the concrete slab for helping to absorb some of the heat during the coming summer months. That project is moving forward.

Here are some thermal test results when switching from some Intel and AMD water coolers over to $20 Arctic Cooling heatsinks in the test lab.

Jolla published a blog post today entitled "Jolla Tablet: Aiming for Closure" and it doesn't deliver much in the way of good news.

A Zsun WiFi SD Card Reader that sells for $13~19 USD has been hacked to run OpenWRT for turning it into a wireless access point or using it for other fun tasks.

If you are looking for a low-cost 2.5-inch disk enclosure that plays fine under Linux, here's one I recently picked up and has been working fine.

Peter Hutterer this weekend announced the release of libinput 1.1.5 as the newest version of this input handling library used by Wayland, X.Org Server (if using xf86-input-libinput), and Mir systems.

A new Intel driver for the Linux 4.5 kernel is for the Volume Management Device.

Beyond always thinking about cooling improvements and energy efficiency enhancements for the room where the 60+ systems are carrying out daily Linux benchmarks, I also tend to toy around with ways to minimize dust and ensure clean air. Here's the latest air cleaner I deployed.

A second feature pull has been submitted of ACPI and power management material for the Linux 4.5 kernel merge window.

A popular graphics benchmark particularly for iOS and Android users has been GFXBench to measure the performance of the graphics processor. GFXBench supports OpenGL and OpenGL ES, but while it has long supported Android, only today is the company now supporting non-Android Linux platforms.

A request recently came in (yes, from a premium user) for doing some fresh benchmarks atop the brand new Linux 4.4 kernel while comparing the P-State and CPUFreq CPU scaling drivers and their different scaling governor options.

Takashi Iwai sent in this weekend the sound/ALSA code updates targeting the Linux 4.5 kernel.

While the modifications I did to the big basement Linux server room back in December have been yielding excessive "free heat" and the heating bills this winter have been at a minimum, I've already begun thinking of ways to improve the cooling of our benchmarking basement by the time summer rolls around.

Back on Halloween there were patches published to provide Allwinner A10 display engine support via a new DRM driver called sun4i-drm. We hadn't heard much more about that driver until this week.

There's a rather hefty pull request of PowerPC architecture updates pending for the Linux 4.5 kernel.

SUSE's Jiri Kosina sent in his pull requests today for the subsystems he maintains within the mainline Linux kernel.