Hardware News Archives

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...

The ColorHug ALS is an ambient light sensor developed by Richard Hughes to dynamically control the brightness of laptop panels -- for laptops that don't have a built-in light sensor for said purpose.

The HSA Foundation yesterday announced the official v1.0 release of their Heterogeneous System Architecture specification.

A Phoronix reader pointed out this weekend the Nyuzi Processor, an GPL/LGPL-licensed design that's inspired by Intel's failed Larrabee graphics processor design. The Nyuzi Processor is fully open-source with its Verilog, documentation, tests, compiler/tools, etc.

Qualcomm's Innovation Center continues contributing to the open-source MDP DRM driver that started out as a reverse-engineered display driver for Qualcomm's ARM SoCs via Rob Clark as part of the Freedreno project.

Valve has started showing off the Steam Controller and the many different Steam Machines within the Steam Store.

Our friends at Ubuntu PC vendor System76 yesterday revealed their Meerkat Ubuntu desktop system.

It's been a week since Allwinner's most recent proof of violating of the (L)GPL license for FFmpeg and libVP6. In the week since, they haven't rectified the issue but today just slapped in a LICENSE file saying the non-existent code is LGPL.

A few days after receiving the revised specifications for the "MJ Tech" Ubuntu Tablet, I've received their pricing information for this tablet that will hopefully ship later in the year.

While hearing "PowerVR" tend to make Linux users cringe over memories of past Linux driver issues with Imagination's binary blobs, Imagination is among the vendors now experimenting with the new Vulkan graphics API and SPIR-V IR. Imagination too has already put out one of the first demos using this new graphics API.

Our new Linux benchmarking test farm that's much cleaner and more organized than the current implementation shown at LinuxBenchmarking.com is a step closer to reality. By the end of this week this new farm controlled by Phoromatic and powered by OpenBenchmarking.org and the Phoronix Test Suite should be powered up.

Valve teamed up with hardware manufacturer HTC to produce the HTC Revive, a.k.a. the SteamVR Headset.

Here's another quick update on the process of building out the new open-source benchmarking server farm... The construction of the room is going along nicely and I'm currently evaluating a few different server chassis and racks/cabinets.

It's been more than a half year since the last ALSA release for improving Linux sound while out today is v1.0.29 of the Advanced Linux Sound Architecture.

The original RISC OS open-source operating system now supports the new second-generation Raspberry Pi 2 development board with BCM2836 SoC.

Allwinner has been accused multiple times in the past of violating the GPL license by not providing Linux/Android kernel source code or U-Boot source, along with using LGPL-licensed code within their binary blobs, etc. Today there's new "definitive proof" of Allwinner's GPL violations.

Next week at the Game Developers' Conference (GDC) in San Francisco, Valve will be demoing their own VR headset hardware. This will make next week even more exciting beyond showing off the next-generation OpenGL API and this VR hardware will surely be supported under Linux/SteamOS.

The forthcoming UEFI 2.5 specification has an addition that will be exciting for many Linux enthusiasts... BIOS/UEFI updating from the Linux desktop will be a real and stable feature regardless of motherboard vendor and their general lack of Linux utilities.

Qualcomm announced yesterday the introduction of four new Snapdragon processors that the company says will "take 4G LTE and multimedia to new heights". These new processors are the Snapdragon 620, 618, 425, and 415.

The platform-drivers-x86 pull request has been filed for the Linux 3.20 kernel and it includes some prominent additions.

In getting Wayland's input support ready for prime-time usage and with Fedora 22 switching its X.Org input stack to libinput, Red Hat developers have been very busy getting libinput to reach feature parity with the conventional X.Org input code.

Last week we were first to relay the Coreboot discussion about how Intel Boot Guard in modern PCs is preventing alternative UEFI/BIOS from being used and others have since carried the story too. Matthew Garrett, a name well known to those following UEFI / Secure Boot Linux support, has blogged about his views on Boot Guard.

The PowerPC architecture updates for the Linux 3.20 kernel, including some improvements for the Sony PlayStation 3 game console.

The sound changes for the Linux 3.20 kernel aren't too incredibly exciting but there's some improvements for HP laptops, support for some new audio hardware, and a variety of other changes.

There's new input drivers for Linux 3.20 and improvements to the existing input drivers with this next kernel version.

Last month IBM announced the z13 micro-processor for their z13 mainframe computers. IBM claims the z13 is the "world's fastest microprocessor" and now with Linux 3.20 there's full support.

The BQ Aquaris E4.5 Ubuntu Edition smartphone announced today that will begin selling next week via "flash sales" is certainly interesting from the software side with being the first official Ubuntu Phone, but from a hardware side, it's less than exciting.

There's one company hammering for more Linux hardware test data even more than myself...

While the new Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon with Broadwell processor is playing fairly well under Linux, the new Dell XPS 13 laptop/ultrabook that's been of interest to many Phoronix readers still has a lot of work ahead although it's effectively usable right now.

Rob Clark has sent in his main pull request of the Freedreno's MSM DRM driver with changes intended for the Linux 3.20 kernel.

While new Linux laptop projects keep popping up and many of these open-source friendly hardware projects never materialize, the Librem 15 at least has managed to shoot past its original funding goal.

Open Lunchbox is the latest project attempting to do an open-source laptop design. Open Lunchbox is trying to do their laptop project in a modular, open hardware design.

While benchmarked the most this month on Phoronix was the new ThinkPad X1 Carbon with Broadwell CPU given its the latest-generation Intel microarchitecture, February on Phoronix will be much more interesting if you're at all interested in servers or workstation hardware... Or just seeing what's possible if you happen to have a ton of system memory and disks.

On Thursday my Broadwell-powered Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon laptop/ultrabook finally arrived for some Linux testing of Intel's exciting Haswell successor. While many tests are forthcoming of this third-generation X1 Carbon -- including Broadwell Windows vs. Linux benchmarks -- here's my initial experiences over the first ~10 minutes with this new hardware.

While Google's Chrome OS supports asynchronous device/driver probing, the mainline Linux kernel does not. However, patches are working toward this feat in order to speed up the kernel's boot process for hardware/drivers that are slow at probing.

Collabora has been making improvements to the Tegra-based Chromebooks for running the non-ChromeOS Linux desktop.

The Linux-friendly CompuLab PC hardware vendor has unveiled their newest fanless, tiny PC.

Rob Clark's work on the open-source Freedreno driver stack the past few years is turning out quite nicely and suitable for end-users wanting an open-source graphics stack for Qualcomm Adreno hardware.

Last week I wrote about a new Gallium3D driver under development for VIA Chrome hardware that was being done under the OpenChrome umbrella along with new work on the VIA DRM/KMS driver. I now have some answers from the developer about his plans for this open-source VIA graphics work under Linux.

As a follow-up to my post from this weekend about plans to get a Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Broadwell ultrabook for Linux testing, I've now finalized in my decision and have some more thoughts to share for any Linux users planning to soon get an Intel Broadwell laptop/ultrabook for your favorite open-source operating system.

In upgrading to the new ThinkPad X1 Carbon Broadwell ultrabook, I'm debating whether to switch back to Fedora after having used Ubuntu for a number of years on my main production system after some falling out with a few less then stellar Fedora Core releases back in the day (of course, on test systems, there's plenty of Fedora around here but this is just about deciding on my next main OS for business tasks). In waiting for the new Broadwell ultrabook, I've been running some fresh Ubuntu and Fedora Linux tests on some other laptops/ultrabooks in the office.

One of my big highlights of the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last week was Lenovo's launch of the Broadwell-based X1 Carbon ultrabook/laptop... It looks like the best ThinkPad in years! Many others seem to also think this new X1 Carbon is a winner, and with being one of the first Broadwell designs available in the US, is going to be benchmarked shortly on Phoronix.

While OpenChrome and the VIA DRM/KMS driver hasn't seen much public activity in quite some time and appears rather dead, apparently that's not the case. A new VIA OpenChrome Gallium3D driver was published this week in its initial rudimentary form.

There's a new way to pound your Linux/BSD systems very hard for burning them in, checking the system's reliability, and stressing them to the max.

There hasn't been much to report on in months for the OpenChrome DRM driver as there simply hasn't been any new public patches to comment on. While it sort of looked like this VIA DRM Linux driver was dead, it seems work is possibly getting resurrected on this open-source driver.

Samsung Electronics announced today, one week prior to the annual Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, that all of their Smart TVs this year will be powered by the Linux-based Tizen operating system.