Hardware News Archives

How would you like a powerful PC that is all passively cooled -- thanks to a special design, able to naturally dissipate 200 Watts -- that can drive four 4K displays, four hard disks, multiple Ethernet ports, can handle a discrete graphics card, and is made of aluminum? Oh yeah, and is from a Linux-friendly company.

Intel's Rafael Wysocki has sent in the refreshed ACPI and power management code that's targeting the Linux 4.5 kernel merge window.

If you still are relying upon a PS/2 mouse, it really is time to think about upgrading to a USB mouse, but keep reading as there are some changes with Linux 4.5.

Ittiam has announced an OpenCL-based VP9 encoder for high performance, power efficient HD video encoding.

Linksys has gone ahead and is finally providing open-source DD-WRT support for their latest WRT routers.

Imagination has announced the PowerVR Series7XT Plus graphics processor from the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

Oculus Rift pre-orders opened up this morning for $599 USD and an anticipated ship date of April. However, the Facebook-owned company isn't yet back to providing Linux support.

When running the tests recently for the NVIDIA Linux Driver 2015 Year-in-Review and How AMD's Proprietary Linux Driver Evolved In 2015, I also ran some extra tests comparing the AMD Radeon Software 15.12 and NVIDIA 358.16 proprietary drivers when looking at their CPU usage, memory consumption, and other system sensors.

Released a few days back was a modified Linux kernel that can run on the PlayStation 4. With a Sony PlayStation 4 hack by "fail0verflow", it's possible to run a Linux desktop on this latest-generation game console. Now these device hackers have managed to get the PlayStation 4 working with the Radeon Gallium3D driver.

The WiFi Alliance has announced the new HaLow technology in preparation for this week's Consumer Electronics Show (CES).

While Jolla was saved last month by a fresh round of financing, even now not everyone who backed the Jolla Tablet project on IndieGoGo will be receiving a tablet.

While there will be many Android-powered devices, various appliances powered by Linux from drones to kitchen appliances, and other products internally relying upon Linux and open-source software, don't expect to find much with regard to the Linux desktop and even Steam Machines will seem to be rather low-key.

Matthew Garrett presented this week at the Chaos Computer Club's 32C3 conference about the state of boot security.

If you happened to receive some new computer hardware this Christmas or are weighing a possible upgrade with Skylake PCs becoming more common and AMD Zen coming out next year, you might as well benchmark your system against our vast collection of other systems to see how the performance stacks up.

As part of our end-of-year testing, a Phoronix reader had inquired about whether Linux made any strides in 2015 for improving power efficiency or extending battery life for any broad number of mobile Linux systems.

The Rockchip DRM driver for supporting the display component of the company's ARM SoCs is now ready with its support for atomic mode-setting.

Within the basement server room there have now been over 500,000 benchmarks completed for Phoronix and LinuxBenchmarking.com.

Many Phoronix readers have been intrigued by the Pine A64, a Kickstarter project for manufacturing the first $15 ARM 64-bit single-board computer. That cheap ARM64 SBC is powered by the Allwinner A64 SoC and the good news is that there's work underway on allowing for mainline Linux kernel support.

With the year quickly coming to an end, I've already started work on my usual year-end open-source/Linux comparisons to show how the performance has evolved over the past year.

Canonical's David Henningsson wrote a blog post today explaining why it's taken until this year for Linux to properly support 2.1 speaker systems (two speakers and a subwoofer) with ALSA and PulseAudio.

As a lot of people were interested in my basement server room remodel earlier this year for Linux benchmarking (and the sixth month redux) as well as subsequent updates about a very high performance fan for air cooling the systems during the cooler seasons, here's another quick update.

This past week my main router I've been using for the past three years failed on me (the ASUS RT-AC66U) so I quickly set out to replace this router with a superior model that can better suit my needs today. The router I ended up going for was the expensive ASUS RT-AC88U, but so far it's working out very well.

Richard Hughes has shared that Dell is the first major PC vendor they can now talk about as joining the the Linux Vendor Firmware Service for making it easy to update the UEFI firmware on new systems from the Linux desktop.

I was very excited this morning when hearing from a Phoronix reader about a new solution for potentially saving huge amounts of money on my electricity bill. No, it wasn't spam. Rather, an interesting Kickstarter project for a solution to my numerous Linux systems that have faulty WoL support.

A popular European cable modem has seen its software open-sourced by Technicolor in order to comply with the GPL.

It's been a while since hearing anything new on Etnaviv, the open-source reverse-engineered DRM driver for supporting the ARM-based Vivante GPUs. That changed this morning with revised patches being sent out for this driver as it looks to be pulled into the mainline Linux kernel.

With having returned the Toshiba Carrizo-powered laptop due to its faulty heatsink fan, I decided on a different laptop to pickup for some extra budget laptop benchmarks this holiday season.

First up, I'm currently in the process of running benchmarks on the Raspberry Pi Zero and expect to have those initial results later today or tomorrow for this $5 USD ARM development board.

Since writing a few days ago about buying an AMD Carrizo-powered laptop for Linux benchmarking, many Phoronix readers have been asking how it's going in testing out this Toshiba Satellite L55D-C5269 laptop. Well, very unpleasant so far.

It was one year ago today that the first systems were commissioned and producing results for our daily performance tracking efforts for showcasing different possibilities with Phoromatic and the Phoronix Test Suite.

In the next few days I will be buying at least two sub-$500 (USD) AMD/Intel laptops for Linux testing... what should I choose?

Since July we have been talking about Imagination Tech looking for an open-source developer to improve their open-source PowerVR graphics support. Even after relaying the request last month, they're still having a hard time finding qualified open-source graphics driver developers.

Earlier today I wrote about how reusing the heat from the 60+ system Linux benchmarking server room can heat a home in the winter. The free heat is nice, but it came with a bit of noise; however, thanks to purchasing one product for less than $100 USD the noise level has been significantly reduced.

For the past month Imagination has been sharing details on their Creator CI40 development board. Today this "IoT-In-A-Box" has officially launched in the form of a Kickstarter campaign.

One of the most interesting presentations from this year's Embedded Linux Conference Europe was how-to boot Linux in under one second!

Months after Jolla announced its split and intent to focus on Sailfish OS licensing, its financial situation has not improved. Jolla's latest financing round has been delayed and so they've had to file for debt restructuring in Finland. As part of that, they are temporarily laying off "a big part" of its personnel.

After months of continually trying out different methods of cheap yet effective cooling for the 60+ systems running daily Linux benchmarks, I'm finally happy with now having been one week of the room maintaining an ambient temperature of 68~72F (20~22C).

Last month Qualcomm announced they made big advancements with its server ecosystem by showing off a Server Development Platform with a 24-core ARMv8 SoC. This work is now being followed close behind with open-source enablement patches.

With Sunday's DRM graphics subsystem pull request for the Linux 4.4 kernel was an interesting extra comment by DRM maintainer David Airlie at Red Hat.

It's been the better part of the year since the last ALSA update while out today is version 1.1 of the Advanced Linux Sound Architecture.

David Airlie sent in the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) subsystem update today for the Linux 4.4 merge window.

The networking subsystem update landed earlier this week in the Linux 4.4 Git code and it comes with several new features.

Takashi Iwai has lined up the sound driver updates for the Linux 4.4 kernel merge window.

Dmitry Torokhov sent in the input driver updates today for the Linux 4.4 merge window.

Intel's Darren Hart has sent in the x86 platform driver updates for the Linux 4.4 kernel merge window.

Besides landing the LightNVM / Open-Channel SSD supprot, another pull request by Jens Axboe is adding another new feature for Linux 4.4.

Jens Axboe sent in the patches today for landing support for LightNVM and Open-Channel SSDs within the mainline Linux kernel!

Rafael Wysocki notes that with the power management and ACPI updates for Linux 4.4 there are "quite a [few] features are included this time" for improving Linux power use.

Trusted Platform Module 2.0 support has been around for a few kernel cycles now and with the forthcoming Linux 4.4 kernel it will be in much better shape.

One of the many pull requests sent in today by Ingo Molnar for the Linux 4.4 merge window was the EFI subsystem update.