Hardware News Archives

Broadcom's North Star 2 is a yet-to-be-announced SoC design based on 64-bit ARMv8 and marketed under their iProc family.

Times don't appear good at Finnish phone maker Jolla that hoped to rise from the fall of Nokia's MeeGo attempts. Jolla went public today with a focus shift at the company and they'll now be spinning off their device business.

A few more input driver updates were mailed in this morning for the Linux 4.2 kernel. This second input update for this next kernel version has better Xbox Wireless Controller support thanks to a patch from Valve.

Last month for the Phoronix 11th birthday we ran Benchmarks Of 45 Linux Systems From Atoms, Athlons and Phenoms To Xeons. This week in celebrating 200,000 benchmark results in our LinuxBenchmarking.com test lab, I ran another large comparison against the latest spectrum of hardware/software in the automated performance test lab.

The ARC architecture updates for the Linux 4.2 kernel have landed.

The libata updates for the Linux 4.2 kernel may be of interest this time around for solid-state drive owners thanks to some NCQ TRIM improvements.

Linux 4.2 has many audio/sound related improvements, including support for newer hardware.

It's been a while since last hearing anything out of the LM-Sensor camp, but this morning they have to announced their latest release (v3.4.0).

For the past few months we've been reporting on Allwinner's apparent violations of (L)GPL code primarily around CedarX/media-related bits. While it looked like things were taking a turn for the better last month when they published some new open-source code and joined the Linux Foundation, there's some fresh criticism this week.

In trying to reduce the amount of dust, pet dander, etc, in the basement server room, here's the air purifier and ionizers I've been using for reducing the elements to clean in the big home Linux server room.

Another test system has been deployed for adding to more daily testing and performance benchmarking of the open-source AMD RadeonSI Linux graphics stack.

To very little surprise, Ouya -- the company that started out on Kickstarter as an Android game console -- has been acquired. The reported suitor for the company is high-end gaming company Razer.

The latest talk is that Imagination Technologies may be developing an open-source Linux graphics driver for their PowerVR hardware.

While there's already 50+ systems dedicated to daily upstream Linux/open-source benchmarking at LinuxBenchmarking.com, yet another system was commissioned last night.

The power use of our open-source, Linux benchmarking test farm is on the rise, especially over the summer months.

Rob Clark has sent in his feature updates for Freedreno's MSM DRM driver that will target the Linux 4.2 kernel.

Earlier this week I was pondering the state of HP's "The Machine" and Linux++ with the Linux++ software platform supposed to come in June of 2015. Not much information has been heard on these experimental projects, but now there's some new information coming out.

Intel has announced that they will be abandoning their traditional Thunderbolt connector with the upcoming Thunderbolt 3 specification. Instead, this high transfer speed technology will use a USB Type-C connector.

Back in 2014 HP made waves over announcing work on "The Machine" that will be a much more efficient computer design than the status quo and that there'd be a new Linux++ / Carbon operating system. Last year they said in "June 2015" they expected to have out Linux++ for emulating the new hardware design.

This month on Phoronix there were 227 original news stories and 13 featured length articles / Linux hardware reviews. Here's a look at what was exciting Phoronix readers the most this month.

Ealier this year the HiSense Chromebook was released at Walmart in the US, a 11.6-inch quad-core ARM notebook priced at just $149 USD and running ChromeOS. But how well does it run Ubuntu Linux?

Developers working on the open-source Exynos DRM driver for supporting the display block found on Samsung's Exynos ARM SoCs are up to their 9th version of patches for providing atomic mode-setting support.

Dell's latest forray with Ubuntu Linux is recommending users on Twitter try out the open-source operating system.

Last year was news about Russia wanting to design its own processors to be less reliant upon Intel and AMD. The initial "Baikal" processor was expected to be based on ARMv8 but it turns out now that it's a MIPS design.

Yesterday data access to LinuxBenchmarking.com was opened, the public results viewer to the immense amount of test data -- primarily the Linux kernel, LLVM Clang, and GCC -- collected on a daily basis within the new server room. Here's some numbers behind it.

Earlier this year CompuLab announced the Fitlet PC as a tiny, fanless, Linux-friendly PC. The Fitlets are finally starting to ship at scale and recently I received one of the AMD-powered Fitlets that's preloaded with Linux Mint. Here's a quick look at the Fitlet.

For months now Allwinner has been violating the GPL and have attempted to cover it up by obfuscating their code and playing around with their licenses while jerking around the open-source community. At least today they've made a positive change in open-sourcing more of their "CedarX" code.

The Linux kernel continues advancing on many hardware fronts, among which is support for ACPI 6.0 and the kernel is making the new LIBND subsystem for non-volatile memory device support.

While Oculus Rift has seen Linux support up to now, the Facebook-owned VR company has now suspended Linux and OS X development to better focus on Windows.

Since writing about turning a basement into a large Linux server room, The New Linux Performance Test Lab Is Already Being Expanded, and the most recent follow-up that detailed adding extra ventilation to the basement server room that has 50~60 systems running benchmarks constantly, many have been asking about dehumidification for this server room.

One month ago I detailed the construction process of building a new server room in my basement where Linux performance tests are constantly being done and it's up to about 50 systems running down there. While initially there weren't any thermal concerns, now that it's getting warmer here in the midwest of the United States, temperatures are quickly rising... Here's the steps I did to add some power venting to the basement and already it's sharply dropped the temperatures in this server farm.

With Btrfs recently landing RAID 5/6 improvements and other enhancements, I've been working on some fresh Btrfs RAID benchmarks using the Linux 4.0 kernel.

For those curious about the many hardware components powering "the basement server room" with continuous open-source and Linux benchmarking, here's a list of the key components that have made it thus far.

It was just last month that our new, large-scale test farm was completed while already it's being expanded... Another 42U rack is being added to allow for more systems to go through rigorous benchmarking via the Phoronix Test Suite's Phoromatic.

My favorite computer desk of the past decade, and arguably my favorite ever, is back on sale and costing less than $100. In the past few years I've bought at least eight of them according to my transaction history and I continue to be very pleased by their quality and price.

For those running Linux on Apple MacBook Pro laptops that have both Intel HD Graphics and a discrete NVIDIA GPU, there's new patches underway for proper GPU switching support.

With the recent big update to ZFS On Linux I've begun running some new ZFS Linux file-system tests. Today are just some preliminary numbers from running ZOL 0.6.4 with various RAID levels across six 300GB H106030SDSUN300G 10K RPM SAS drives.

Launched this week on Kickstarters was Endless Computers, a $169 Linux PC for the developing world. Quite quickly the project has already surpassed its $100k USD goal.

Takashi Iwai sent in his sound driver updates for Linux 4.1, which includes major modernization with the standard bus for ALSA in the sequencer core and HD-audio code.

It's going on one month now that our massive new server/benchmarking Linux and open-source benchmarking farm has been operational. So far things are going great and continuing to churn out a lot of performance data for the very latest Git code of the Linux kernel, Mesa, LLVM/Clang, and other projects on a daily basis.

While usually not presenting any major features each release cycle, the libata feature pull request for Linux 4.1 is a bit more interesting this time around.

As part of the work towards allowing easy UEFI/BIOS updates from the Linux desktop in a standardized manner, Richard Hughes has been developing the new fwupd component.

Allwinner has been taking a lot of heat lately for violating open-source licenses with their Linux binary blob components. They then got caught obfuscating their code to try to hide their usage of open-source code, shifted around their licenses, and has continued jerking around the open-source community.

In continuation of this morning's article about Turning A Basement Into A Big Linux Server Room that detailed my month-long process of building out the new Linux automated benchmark server room, here's details on the software deployment side.

When constantly benchmarking dozens of systems daily in a fully-automated manner there's one issue particularly on Ubuntu that's proved over the past few months to be most annoying...

While Allwinner has been caught violating the (L)GPL and resulted in obfuscating their code and playing around with their advertised licenses, now this ARM vendor is taking things a step further.

Libinput 0.13 was released today as one of the final steps before Libinput 1.0.

A new Apple Mac Mini happened to arrive at Phoronix that sports Intel Iris Graphics. It's now time to start benchmarking this Apple system with Intel Core i5 processor and run some comparative tests against Linux.

Allwinner has yet to clarify their license position on their media codec code or fully open up their encode/decode library for that matter when it's fairly clear they're violating the GPL and recently they've been trying to cover it up by obfuscating their binaries.

Allwinner is pushing their way to the top of the list of companies hated by the open-source community...