Hardware News Archives

On Christmas Eve, Marvell announced the release of a new open-source driver for one of its 802.11ac chips in cooperation with Linksys.

James Bottomley has updated the open-source UEFI Secure Boot Tools for Linux distributions to build against the UEFI 2.4 specification.

Last month I wrote about the Librem 15 as an open-source Linux laptop to the firmware, albeit it showed a number of shortcomings. Since then there's been a number of updates and other news sites are reporting on this "open-source friendly laptop", while here's my latest thoughts on this high-end Linux laptop.

Richard Hughes is looking to develop an open-source USB ambient light sensor as an OpenHardware initiative.

Earlier this year we wrote about lowRISC as an open-source SoC design using the RISC-V ISA. LowRISC hopes to ultimately get into volume silicon production and now they've released some documentation describing two planned features.

Merged already for Linux 3.19 were significant power management and ACPI changes while a second serving of ACPI+PM updates have been requested for pulling just prior to the end of the 3.19 merge window.

In 2015 we might see an open hardware random number generator that would connect to the system via an SD card slot.

For a number of months David Airlie at Red Hat has been working on DisplayPort Multi-Stream Transport (DP MST) handling for Linux. Keith Packard over at Intel is now playing with DP MST too for bettering modern 4K display support on Linux within X.Org Server based environments.

For anyone that may be in need of some USB wired network adapters, Plugable offers a few different options that are low-cost and work well with Linux -- in fact, Linux is mentioned on the product packaging.

The MIPS architecture improvements and new features for the Linux 3.19 kernel are aplenty due to many MIPS patches not being merged for Linux 3.18 and then aside from that a lot of developers sending in lots of new work.

Jiri Kosina has lined up his HID subsystem changes for the Linux 3.19 kernel that include more multi-touch device work and other input improvements.

Hardkernel has announced the latest ODROID ARM development board. The ODROID-C1 is a $35 single-board computer that is similar in size to the Raspberry Pi but with much greater hardware specifications.

While many Linux users still cringe over hearing Imagination Technologies due to their shoddy Linux graphics driver history with the PowerVR series and lack of open-source friendship, their MIPS Creator CI20 development board just became available for sale and in the months ahead we'll see how their Linux support evolves.

One month ago was the surprising contribution by Qualcomm's Innovation Center that they were adding new hardware support to Freedrenon, the open-source and reverse-engineered Gallium3D driver for Adreno graphics hardware. Qualcomm's contributions haven't ended and they're looking to add more patches -- including for HDCP support.

Coreboot has been ported to work on another Intel motherboard. This new support target is for older Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge processors but the motherboard can still be purchased via retail channels and sells for only about $70 USD.

ARM's security extensions are in the process of being bettered on Linux.

Last week Jolla launched the Jolla Tablet with Sailfish OS 2.0 that's set to take the waters next year. The Jolla Tablet launched via crowd-funding and thus far it's been wildly successful. Given the success, Jolla has added some stretch goals to the campaign that ends in December.

"Open-source computers" seem to be the latest promoted concept up for funding on popular crowd-funding sites.

While there's been an ongoing discussion this week about delivering a $500 "open to the core" laptop that runs Ubuntu Linux and would be comprised of open-source software down to the firmware and Coreboot, announced last week was a high-end laptop that also aims to promote free/libre software. Though don't get out your wallets quite yet.

Bq held a media event today where many were hoping the first Ubuntu Phone would be officially unveiled, but that was not the case with Ubuntu receiving no mentions during the event.

Last week Amazon started shipping their new Fire TV Stick device to compete with the likes of Google's Chromecast. I've been trying out the Fire TV Stick since its launch date last week and have been happy with the device, especially considering its low cost.

Given the recent crowdfunding success around the Jolla Tablet, there's talk again about crowdfunding a truly open-source laptop that's running Ubuntu and would be priced around $500 USD.

Luc Verhaegen has out a new blog post about Imagination's PowerVR SGX user-space driver source code and the microcode source also getting leaked. However, don't get too excited.

Jolla has delivered on their teased new device as the "Jolla Tablet" as an exciting tablet running Sailfish OS 2.0.

Our friends at Numascale have assembled the world's largest shared memory system to date: 5184 CPU cores with 20.7 terabytes of shared memory.

What's left of Nokia after selling off their phone/device divison to Microsoft, the Finnish company has unveiled their first new piece of hardware: the N1 Android tablet.

It looks like next week there will be a new Sailfish device announcement from Jolla.

The Gizmo Explorer Kit has been available for a while now as an open-source, mini x86 development board to compete with the many ARM development boards available to consumers and developers. The Gizmo 2 has now been announced as the second-generation development board. Like the original Gizmo, the Gizmo 2 is powered by an AMD SoC with Radeon graphics.

It's been a while since last having any major news to report on the multi-queue block layer for the Linux kernel, but that blk-mq and more recent scsi-mq work is progressing well.

Published on Friday was a massive set of 72 patches to improve the Freescale iMX DRM driver that's currently within the Linux kernel's staging area.

In an interesting change of events, Code Aurora on the behalf of the Qualcomm Innovation Center has added Adreno A4xx product support to the Freedreno-spawned DRM/KMS "MSM" driver.

While DisplayLink's USB2-based graphics adapters tend to be well supported under Linux even with a DRM/KMS driver, there's been no support for the newer DisplayLink USB 3.0 devices.

PulseAudio now has a native headset backend for dealing with Bluetooth headsets.

The Linux kernel is finally being optimized for use of solid-state hybrid drives (SSHDs) that follow the ATA 3.2 standard.

Today we've received some information a device dubbed the "UT One" that is an Ubuntu Touch tablet powered by an Intel Bay Trail processor and aims to ship in December.

A new open-source GPU design has been published designed to run on FPGAs... What makes this "open hardware" project more interesting than past designs is that their compute unit was designed around AMD's public "Southern Islands" instruction set architecture.

Just months after launching the Fire TV, Amazon today introduced the Fire TV Stick, which is like a mix of a Roku/Chromecast and the Fire TV.

Earlier this month we reviewed some of the newest high-end mouse pads from XTrac. If you're looking for a new mouse pad due to finally amassing a decent selection of Linux game titles, the SteelSeries QcK remains one of the most affordable and suitable choices.

Yesterday I shared my preview of RunAbove's PowerPC cloud using IBM's latest POWER8 CPUs. RunAbove's PowerPC cloud currently offers an instance type up to 176 threads, for which I've spent the past few days of benchmarking. While initially the only operating system enabled in the POWER8 cloud was Fedora 19, now Ubuntu 14.04 LTS is also an option.

If you're after some metal storage cabinets for housing all your extra computer gear, the Sandusky Lee Welded Steel Classic Storage Cabinet is a winner.

Corsair Link comes down to a proprietary protocol for allowing Corsair products within the "Link" ecosystem to allow for a centralized, easy-to-use control panel for fans, water coolers, and more. Corsair doesn't provide any Linux support for Corsair Link, but open-source developers are filling in the gaps.

Imagination Technologies released the PowerVR SDK v3.4 this morning and while it may not sound too interesting for most Phoronix readers, it's a very interesting release in that for the first time they are providing full instruction set documentation for their latest PowerVR GPUs.

Our hardware friends at TYAN have announced their first customer reference system built around OpenPOWER, the collaboration around IBM's Power Architecture with the Power ISA and other technology being opened up. TYAN's "Palmetto System" is promoted as being innovative, collaborative, and open.

The input subsystem pull request was mailed in on Tuesday to Linus Torvalds for the Linux 3.18 kernel merge window.

Back in August Rockchip published a DRM driver for their SoCs. While this driver has yet to be mainlined, Rockchip continues revising the open-source driver to address upstream developer feedback.

While it's been known since last year that Fedora wants to get rid of old GPU drivers that don't have DRM/KMS support and their plans moved forward months ago to rid the system of old GPU drivers, some Linux enthusiasts running against the latest Fedora development code are surprised their GPU driver vanished.

While I've written extensively about the Linux 3.17 kernel and its many new features, there is an interesting addition that was merged for Linux 3.17 that I missed out on noticing (or that of Anzwix) until today.

It looks like Tizen smartphones might finally see the light of day later in the year.

The Video Electronics Standards Association (VESA) this morning officially unveiled the DisplayPort 1.3 specification that takes DP 1.2a even further.

Back in February we wrote about Ubuntu having two phone partners with plans to launch in 2014. Those partners were BQ and Meizu, with the latter Chinese brand at least now expecting to have a working Ubuntu Touch software stack in December to begin shipping their Unicorn-loaded phone.