Hardware News Archives

The latest open-source Linux benchmarks out of Phoronix is a six-way Linux laptop performance comparison featuring laptops/ultrabooks from Lenovo, Hewlett-Packard, ASUS, and Apple.

A couple years ago Broadcom released the Crystal HD as a standalone hardware video decoder chip. While there's been an open-source Linux driver for the Crystal HD, we haven't heard much about it in recent months, but that changed this morning.

With most WiFi adapters and other network hardware having native Linux drivers these days, there hasn't been much to report on with the NDISwrapper project in months -- the project that allows using Windows network drivers on Linux. Changing that is today's NDISwrapper 1.59 release.

It's been a while since last talking about Gummiboot, the FreeDesktop.org project that serves as a simple UEFI boot manager, but it is still (slowly) progressing.

Jolla's first smartphone officially goes on sale today! The device, of course, is running the MeeGo-derived Sailfish OS with Wayland and there's Android app compatibility.

If you have been curious how a particular laptop is performing on Linux, now is your chance to voice your request as I will be buying two laptops this week for Phoronix testing and benchmarking under Linux.

Besides wanting to enable SSD TRIM support for Ubuntu Linux, developers are also looking at moving from DMRAID to MDADM for fake/software RAID configurations on the desktop operating system.

During the first day of the latest virtual Ubuntu Developer Summit, Canonical developers plotted out the enabling of TRIM/DISCARD support by default for solid-state drives on Ubuntu.

For those curious how the performance is impacted for the 2012 "Ivy Bridge" Retina MacBook Pro when upgrading to OS X 10.9 Mavericks, here's some fresh open-source benchmarks comparing the 10.8.5 and 10.9.0 releases for this Core i7 laptop with Intel HD 4000 and NVIDIA GeForce graphics.

There's many exciting Linux 3.13 kernel features already, but we have another one to talk about today. In the input subsystem update for 3.13, support for the Neonode zForce has been added, an interesting touch-screen technology based on infrared light fields.

Canonical with their Ubuntu Touch initiative isn't the only project that's failed to deliver as of yet with a successful non-Android Linux tablet.

An IBM Linux Technology Center has shared that enabling experimental memory power management within the Linux kernel has dropped one of their test system's power consumption by about 2.6% but it's likely even more with experimental hardware.

Takashi Iwai sent in the sound driver audio pull for the Linux 3.13 kernel on Sunday. This update features HDMI audio improvements for Intel and AMD hardware, among other Linux sound improvements.

Intel GMA500 DRM kernel graphics driver patches were published this morning for supporting the Atom-powered Minnowboard.

David Herrmann, the open-source Linux graphics developer of fame for working to kill CONFIG_VT via work on numerous projects and many other open-source contributions, has started a new open-source project. Herrmann's latest initiative is OpenWFD, an open-source implementation of the WiFi Display Standard / Miracast.

It looks like the latest attempt at producing an open-source graphics processor down to the hardware level -- an open-source FPGA GPU design -- will fail and not come to fruition with its targeted Kickstarter campaign.

It's been a long time since hearing anything out of the OpenMoko camp, but Golden Delicious that worked on the GTA04 / OpenPhoneux is now trying for a new initiative. The company wants to develop the Neo900, which would be based around the once-popular Nokia N900 case but utilize upgraded internal components.

After writing earlier this month that UPower 1.0 is nearing, UPower 0.99.0 has been released this morning.

Last week I bought the ASUS Transformer Book T100TA, which is one of the first Intel "Bay Trail" devices in the United States. At a cost of $399 USD, it isn't as cheap as some Bay Trail devices talked up by Intel, but I was eager to see how the "Valley View" graphics would perform and all-around how this Atom SoC would run under Linux. Sadly, the ASUS T100TA appears to be a crap wreck at this point for running Linux.

Coming as soon as later today will be benchmark results comparing the performance of Microsoft Windows 8.1 against Linux in various graphics-focused workloads for Intel, AMD, and NVIDIA hardware.

Every once in a while Phoronix readers that see photos of my office setup inquire about the glass computer desks I use. These particular desks are very functional, built well out of glass and metal, and are surprisingly affordable.

The 1.0 release of UPower, the abstraction layer for enumerating power devices and other power-related tasks that were formerly handled by HAL and then formerly known as DeviceKit-Power, is approaching.

The latest open-source work being done for improving Linux thermal monitoring and tuning is the TMON project that hopes to be mainlined within the Linux kernel.

Imagination Technologies, a name notorious amongst Linux users largely over the company's shoddy Linux driver support for their PowerVR graphics cores, unveiled a new processor core today. Announced today in London was Imagination's first MIPS "Warrior P-Class" CPU core.

ARM and other Linux stakeholders are still working to bring power-aware scheduling to the kernel.

A set of eight patches were published today for the Linux kernel that implement an extended hardware error log driver that provides enhanced Intel MCA event logging. With this driver, certain errors are more useful for users like being able to report the particular memory RAM DIMM where a memory corrected error happened and other detailed information not currently exposed via the Linux kernel.

As first reported yesterday on Phoronix, there's a new effort to raise one million dollars for a LGPLv3-licensed FPGA-based shader-supported graphics processor. Today the Kickstarter campaign kicked off with details in full on this new project.

A company is going to attempt to open-source their graphics accelerator 2D hardware design under the LGPLv3 license. Additionally, they claim for one million dollars they would be able to come up with a 3D shader-based open-source graphics accelerator.

UPower 0.9.22 was released today as mostly a bug-fix release but there's also a couple of new items.

The Lima graphics driver for open-source ARM Mali GPU support on Linux has some performance advantages of ARM Holdings' binary blob, but there's no upstream interest in having the driver mainlined in Mesa.

As a forewarning if you use LM-Sensors' sensor-detect program for detecting available hardware sensor/monitoring drivers of your system hardware, the open-source program is causing "serious trouble" for some newer hardware.

Yesterday's exciting news from LinuxCon NA 2013 was Gabe Newell's keynote where he talked about Linux as the future of gaming and exciting news coming next week. Today the interesting topic at LinuxCon is about IBM investing another billion dollars towards Linux and promoting its POWER architecture.

PengPod, a low-quantity Linux tablet vendor, released the PengPod 1040 tablet today that they claim will "transform the PC and Tablet world by merging both elegantly together to fit any lifestyle." But will it really pan out?

While 4K resolution monitors are still extremely expensive, there's growing curiosity over support for 4K monitors by the open-source Linux graphics drivers.

The input merge happened for the Linux 3.12 kernel merge window. When it comes to input drivers for this next major Linux kernel release, the main addition is a Slidebar driver for Lenovo Ideapad laptops.

For those interested in more of my personal views on Linux hardware support, good Linux-compatible hardware, and other open-source/hardware/benchmarking related topics, earlier this week I was on the Everyday Linux podcast talking about such Phoronix topics.

Many Phoronix readers seem to be infatuated by the MIPS-based Loongson systems, while the hardware is hard to find -- and even if you manage to find it in western markets, it's very expensive. For those fond of the Loongson processors and happen to have a Radeon chipset, Lemote is playing around with Radeon UVD video acceleration.

For those curious how the performance of System76's high-end Linux laptops have evolved over the past two years, here are some benchmarks comparing the latest Gazelle Professional "Haswell" laptop against the Serval Professional from the Intel "Sandy Bridge" days.

Up for some quick Linux benchmarking this Friday afternoon are tests of the Toshiba Q Series HDTS212XZSTA 128GB SATA III Solid State Drive. This SSD drive has been pitted against five other HDD/SSD disk drives on Ubuntu Linux for some interesting performance tests.

The Allwinner A10 and A13 video decode support has been reverse-engineered as open-source.

While x86_64 hardware has been very common for years and it's now almost impossible to find new PC hardware that is x86-only, the Ubuntu download pages have continued to recommend the 32-bit version of Ubuntu Linux by default for new desktop installations. Fortunately, that may finally change.

A new crowd-funding campaign seeks to produce "the first truly free and fully open-source computer utilizing only non-proprietary hardware and software under the GNU General Public License."

During the first day of the latest virtual Ubuntu Developer Summit, there were some brief remarks made concerning the state of the NVIDIA and AMD Catalyst binary drivers in supporting the Mir Display Server for Ubuntu.

As soon as Apple launched their Haswell-based MacBook Air I purchased the "ultrabook" for its long battery life, great build quality, and impressive design. However, running Linux on the 2013 MacBook Air has been a pain. It wasn't running cleanly but it looks like the major kernel booting problem comes down to a UEFI interaction issue.

For those wondering about using the Oculus Rift VR system on Linux for a virtual reality 3D gaming headset, it should work just fine on your favorite Linux distribution.

There's only two and a half days left to Canonical's Ubuntu Edge crowd-funding campaign for building a high-end smart-phone running Ubuntu. Unfortunately, the campaign is still about twenty million dollars short of its $32M goal.

Canonical is going to finally shutdown Ubuntu Friendly, their community approach for users to share with other Ubuntu users how well their laptops/desktops work with the Linux distribution.

Flashrom is the leading way for flashing BIOS/firmware images on hundreds of flash chips, hundreds of motherboards, and dozens of PCI devices. Released today was Flashrom 0.9.7 as the first major update in one year's time and with it comes almost 150 changes to the open-source BIOS/firmware flashing project.

IBM is now following in the steps of ARM Holdings and has decided to allow for licensing of their CPU architecture. IBM and a group of other companies wanting a stake in IBM's POWER architecture have also founded the OpenPOWER Consortium group.

The Jolla Mobile developers that are in the midst of their first smart phone just updated their SDK to support Qt 5, Qt Quick 2, and Wayland.