Hardware News Archives

Within hours of the Linux 4.3 release, Neil Brown sent in the MD updates for the Linux 4.4 kernel.

One month after the release of PulseAudio 7.0, PulseAudio 7.1 is now available.

Following the 4K AMD/NVIDIA High-End GPU Comparison On SteamOS Linux and 22-Way Comparison Of NVIDIA/AMD Graphics Cards On SteamOS For Steam Linux Gaming articles, a few Phoronix readers were inquiring about the CPU and GPU utilization metrics during testing.

While there's just one week left to the month, there are a lot of exciting Linux hardware/software benchmarks coming up on Phoronix over the next week. Here's a preview.

Rob Clark with Freedreno's MSM DRM driver is the latest to be updated in DRM-Next ahead of the Linux 4.4 merge window.

Back in July I wrote about how Imagination Technologies was looking for a Linux graphics driver developer that would include working on portions of their yet-to-be-public open-source driver. Well, with developers having experience with Linux graphics drivers being in short supply, Imagination has yet to fill this position.

Our friends at System76 today announced the release of their first Skylake system. This first computer using Intel's latest-generation processors is a desktop that's part of the Wild Dog Pro family.

Imagination Technologies has just lifted the embargo on their new Creator CI40 development board as the successor to the MIPS Creator CI20.

The two firmware binary blobs for the mwlwifi driver (88W8864 and 88W8897) have been added to the linux-firmware Git tree. The mwlwifi driver is used by the WRT1900AC router, the device inspired by the WRT54G.

Adding to the feature list for Linux 4.4 is more complete TPM 2.0 support.

A pull request has just been sent in that in turn will target Linux 4.4 for offering on-demand device probing for helping platforms using Device Tree / OpenFirmware.

Thanks to the weather getting cooler, our power use from the constant open-source Linux benchmarking at Phoronix has dropped slightly over the past month, while it's still well above 2,000 kWh and about four times as high as last year.

Open-source support is still being worked on for GPU switching with pre-Retina Apple MacBook computers.

While it's 2015, a serial port benchmark was just added to the Phoronix Test Suite and OpenBenchmarking.org.

While most Phoronix readers are familiar with Linux system providers System76 and ZaReason, less of you probably are familiar with eRacks even though they've been building open-source systems since the late 90's.

While last quarter was exciting for Linux users as was all of the open-source activity last month, this final quarter of 2015 is looking to be even more exciting for Linux enthusiasts.

Back in 2012 was a call for deprecating Linux FBDEV drivers in a move to try to kill off the FBDEV subsystem in favor of modern DRM drivers. As I've brought up several times since, FBDEV drivers are still kicking in the Linux kernel. Sent out today thought was another call to try to encourage developers to stop developing FBDEV drivers.

Jolla has begun fulfilling their orders on the crowd-funded Jolla Tablet.

At last week's XDC2015 conference in Toronto, Jamey Sharp talked about hardware graphics acceleration support on microkernels.

Over the past few months on Phoronix there's been many stories about fwupd, ESRT, and other components related to running UEFI system firmware updates from the Linux desktop. But what's the current status?

With Libinput 1.0 having been released, Peter Hutterer has found himself working on another open-source Linux input project: libratbag. This new library is for interacting with configurable mice on Linux, as is common to gaming systems.

Qualcomm's Innovation Center (QuIC) sent out patches this morning for providing open-source hardware enablement for their new Snapdragon 820 (MSM8996) via the free software MSM DRM/KMS driver.

Besides getting a number of stitches to my foot this weekend in the hospital, equally as painful was receiving the latest electric bill for our mass open-source / Linux benchmarking efforts. The power use over the past month was the second highest electrical use of the year.

The Librem 13 has been an effort to be a 13-inch crowd-funded laptop that "respects your rights" and follows in the foot-steps of the previously-funded Librem 15.

Just over three years ago was a call by an open-source developer to deprecate the Linux kernel's FBDEV drivers. While more companies these days are investing more into DRM drivers, FBDEV drivers are still maintained by the latest Linux kernel releases.

The latest pull request to talk about for the Linux 4.3 kernel are the input driver updates.

Linux audio driver developers are still working on Skylake-related support, but all of that initial code is now present for Linux 4.3 in conjunction with the latest Intel processors.

If you've found yourself in need of fully analyzing the performance and power of modern Linux systems, there's a great new resource, assuming you have some time on your hands for some reading.

The MIPS architecture updates have landed in the kernel Git code for Linux 4.3.

Rafael Wysocki mailed in the power management and ACPI updates this evening for the Linux 4.3 kernel merge window.

Samsung's Inki Dae has sent in a second pull request for the Exynos DRM driver for work he hopes to land with the DRM pull into the Linux 4.3 kernel.

It's not often that there's improvements in the Matrox "mgag200" DRM/KMS driver to talk about, but there is this morning.

Recently within our forums there was a request to do performance-per-dollar benchmarks and reporting. Today I came up with a way to make this process very easy and trivial, that you can do too when carrying out your own open-source Linux tests.

The Dattobd driver was open-sourced earlier this month by Datto Inc. The Datto Block Driver is for taking block-level snapshots and incremental backups.

Earlier this year I wrote about protecting our Linux test farm with the Nest Protect. While I own ten of these "high tech smoke detectors" and initially recommended, I no longer trust them after a long night.

Are the ARM SoC vendors deciding to become more open? Besides NVIDIA contributing to the open-source Nouveau driver for Tegra K1+ hardware and making improvements in that area, Qualcomm started contributing to the Freedreno / MSM driver project last year, which is the reverse-engineered, community-based driver for Adreno graphics hardware. Qualcomm has now taken a significant step forward and actually released some register documentation!

Marek Olšák of AMD this morning announced libdrm 2.4.63 as the newest version of this DRM Library that interfaces between the Linux kernel DRM drivers and the user-space DDX and Mesa components, among other user-space graphics code.

VIA Embedded has rolled out a new ruggedized PC for in-vehicle computing and other applications. This rugged PC is powered by a long forgot about VIA Eden quad-core processor.

After writing last month about The Insane Power Use Of Benchmarking Linux Every Day as part of looking at the electrical use of our Linux benchmarking farm powering Phoronix, LinuxBenchmarking.com, etc. Here's this month's numbers.

The maintainer of AMD's HSA Linux kernel driver (AMDKFD) and Pixman is now focusing his work on enabling and optimizing the Linux graphics stack for PowerPC 64-bit LE.

For benchmarkers, or distributions that ship the closed source drivers, it might be a pain to constantly be swapping between the two closed source drivers. It would appear that one developer was annoyed by this enough to try and create a solution. Meet: gpu-driver-swap by mikeanthonywild.

If you're still relying upon a vintage XGI Volari graphics card or have a XGI integrated GPU on a server motherboard, thanks to the NetBSD folks there are 19 patches for the xf86-video-xgi open-source driver.

A few days after writing about a Linux driver coming for DisplayLink's USB 3.0-based hardware, they've released a binary driver for Ubuntu.

Yesterday when writing about libinput 0.21 being released and libinput 1.0 appearing around the corner, the forum discussion quickly turned into a matter of libinput's pointer acceleration support.

DisplayLink's line of USB display adapters is known to be Linux-friendly and backed by open-source support, but this is only for their USB 2.0 devices. Fortunately, it appears that DisplayLink is finally working on USB 3.0 device support for Linux.

It's been a while since last hearing anything major out of VIA Technologies, but they made an announcement today...

This week I posted the results of a 15-way graphics card comparison on Ubuntu Linux with AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards while running the very latest proprietary drivers. Those tests were focused on 4K resolution testing in order to stress the latest-generation AMD/NVIDIA GPUs. However, if you want to see 1080p numbers, here are some benchmark-friendly results.

One of the latest Direct Rendering Manager drivers in development for the mainline Linux kernel is the Freescale DCU driver.

While it's been several months since the Purism Librem crowd-funding campaing got underway for producing "the first high-end laptop in the world that ships without mystery software in the kernel, operating system, or any software applications," the Librem 15 still relies upon a proprietary BIOS and there's still no easy fix.

Matias Bjørling continues tackling support for "open-channel SSDs" within Linux. His fourth revision to his Open-Channel SSD patch-set has been published and re-based against code in development for the Linux 4.3 kernel.