Hardware News Archives

It's been a rough year for floppy disk support on Linux and goes to show the state of seldom maintained to unmaintained code.

Being sent in as a fix for Linux 5.18-rc3 is supporting various marine navigation keycodes with at least Garmin's boat steering wheels and marine navigation displays running Linux.

Back in February was the interesting work laid out by Red Hat engineers for their looking at using eBPF within the kernel's HID subsystem. A new patch series attempting this innovative use of the in-kernel JIT virtual machine has been published.

While early on DisplayLink's USB2-based devices were friendly with Linux and had upstream open-source driver support, their newer USB3-based display hardware has relied on a binary driver focused on just supporting Ubuntu. Last month DisplayLink released an updated version of that binary blob ahead of Ubuntu 22.04 LTS.

A new release of OpenRazer is available as the community project providing open-source Linux drivers for various Razer devices from their keyboards and mice to headsets and other peripherals from the popular gaming device manufacturer.

Mainlined into the Linux kernel last year was the Aquacomputer HWMON driver initially for their D5 Next water cooling pump. That driver was then extended to support the Aquacomputer Farbwerk 360 RGB controller and now for Linux 5.19 is extended to also support Aquacomputer's OCTO fan controller.

Earlier this week was the news of AMD acquiring Pensando in a $1.9B deal expected to close in Q2. The acquisition announcement isn't slowing down their efforts with today bringing the latest version of their Linux kernel patches for bringing up the Elba SoC.

A Linux driver for the DDC/CI control protocol for modern displays (well, even many of those going back to ~2005) has been available out-of-tree while finally there has been recent work on getting this driver upstreamed into the kernel.

As longtime Linux users likely know or even those reading Phoronix over the years, Wacom devices have generally worked well on Linux. Not that it should be particularly surprising, Wacom recently published a blog post talking up their twenty years of Linux support for their various drawing pens and tablets.

Linux input subsystem maintainer has sent in its batch of changes for the ongoing Linux 5.18 merge window.

Hyperscaler problems these days? Linux servers taking too long to reboot due to having too many NVMe drives. Thankfully Google is working on an improvement to address this where some of their many-drive servers can take more than one minute for the Linux kernel to carry out its shutdown tasks while this work may benefit other users too albeit less notably.

The many USB and Thunderbolt feature patches have landed into the in-development Linux 5.18 kernel.

The x86 platform driver updates have been submitted for the Linux 5.18 kernel merge window. This pull request includes a number of notable additions we have been talking about over recent weeks and months on Phoronix.

The HID subsystem updates have been submitted for the ongoing Linux 5.18 merge window.

It was just back in 2018 that Andes' NDS32 CPU architecture support was added with the Linux 4.17 kernel. But now with Linux 5.18 the AndesCore NDS32 architecture is being removed over lack of active maintenance.

In addition to Imagination working on a open-source PowerVR Vulkan driver for their newest graphics IP within Mesa, Imagination Technologies has also decided to go back and publish their original PowerVR Series 1 macOS/Windows driver as open-source.

Following yesterday's Linux 5.17 release, HWMON subsystem maintainer Guenter Roeck was quick to send in the feature updates for the hardware monitoring subsystem for Linux 5.18.

The Intel-led Sound Open Firmware project for providing open-source firmware for newer Intel audio hardware and even support for some AMD audio hardware is nearing its v2.1 release.

Since the end of last year with Linux 5.16 there has been support for setting the thermal/performance preference with newer HP Omen laptops having ACPI Platform Profile support. This allows for toggling between cool / balanced / performance modes. Now for Linux 5.18 the HP-WMI driver is being improved upon for handling some newer laptops that have a different thermal policy interface.

Since last month's Steam Deck launch a few Phoronix readers have been asking about USB-C hubs for expanding connectivity with this handheld Linux-powered gaming console. Pretty much any reliable USB-C hub should do, while for my purposes the past month I've been using the Anker USB-C Hub.

Going back to the original Razer Copperhead mouse in 2005, I've tested many different Razer mice over the years and have exclusively used Razer mice on my main production system for basically as long. This week the scrollwheel physically broke on a Razer DeathAdder mouse I've used the past few years so quickly ordered a replacement, which sadly turned out to be the worst Razer mouse I've personally ever used, and replaced it a day later.

Smartmontools 7.3 was released as the first update to this open-source package in more than one year for providing a utility (smartctl) and daemon (smartd) for monitoring the SMART capabilities built into modern (S)ATA / NVMe / SCSI / SAS disk drives.

The "hid-sigmamicro" driver is queued up in HID-next ahead of Linux 5.18 for dealing with keyboards exhibiting problematic behavior that use SiGma Micro keyboard control ICs.

While Linux 5.17 is introducing the ASUS WMI EC Sensors driver for greatly expanding Linux's support for hardware sensor coverage on newer ASUS desktop motherboards, already with Linux 5.18 that driver will be deprecated to make way for a new ASUS EC sensor driver replacement.

System76 is today announcing their latest AMD laptop in the form of the Kudu with an AMD Ryzen 9 5900HX processor and up to 64GB of RAM.

JEDEC has published the JESD238 HBM3 standard as the next version for High Bandwidth Memory.

It's just with the in-development Linux 5.17 kernel that the "asus_wmi_ec_sensors" is making its debut for greatly expanded sensor support for modern ASUS desktop motherboards. However, there is already a new driver that has been in development that ultimately aims to be superior to this still-new driver.

If you are in the rare group of folks still relying upon floppy disks and doing so while running up-to-date software stacks, Linux 5.17 will be of interest to you.

The RTC subsystem changes have been submitted for the in-development Linux 5.17 kernel ahead of its merge window winding down this weekend.

Last September I was the first to call attention to Intel working on a new feature to allow updating some system firmware components without needing to reboot such as for mission critical servers that try to avoid downtime at all costs. That Intel "Seamless Update" feature also known as Platform Firmware Runtime Update and Telemetry (PFRUT) has now been sent in for mainlining with Linux 5.17.

In addition to Linux 5.17 introducing Universal Stylus Initiative (USI) support for that new industry standard for styluses/pens that can work cross-device, the input subsystem updates for this kernel also add active pen support for a few more tablets.

The Linux kernel's frame-buffer device "FBDEV" subsystem has thankfully been on the decline over the past number of years thanks to the success of the more useful DRM/KMS drivers and having FBDEV compatibility emulation support. While not actively maintained, the FBDEV subsystem and some drivers remain within the Linux kernel and are used with some interest primarily in some legacy/embedded environments. The subsystem was orphaned while now a Linux kernel developer has stepped up to serve as its maintainer.

The PCI subsystem updates for the in-development Linux 5.17 kernel have been submitted to Linus.

While the MIPS CPU architecture itself is at the end of the road, kernel developers still are busy with MIPS considering the Loongson hardware that is popular in China and lots of older MIPS hardware out there lacking mainline Linux kernel support. For Linux 5.17 several more older, consumer-grade network routers are seeing mainline support.

Lead Fwupd/LVFS developer Richard Hughes of Red Hat today released v1.7.4 for this open-souce utility to allow firmware updating on Linux of system motherboards and peripherals.

Samsung in partnership with Tesla has posted a set of 23 patches for enabling Tesla's Full Self-Driving (FSD) SoC for the mainline Linux kernel.

Over the past two years work has been ramping up a lot on Compute Express Link (CXL) enablement for the Linux kernel and with the in-development Linux 5.17 there is more feature code landing.

The Linux 5.17 hardware monitoring "HWMON" subsystem updates include the new NZXT driver, new drivers to greatly expand sensor coverage on modern ASUS desktop motherboards, temperature monitoring for next-gen AMD Zen processors, and more.

The x86 platform drivers area of the kernel remains very active in recent times thanks to the continued investments by Red Hat as well as growing IHV interest from the likes of Lenovo while also still having many contributions flow in from the likes of AMD and Intel. With Linux 5.17 are a number of driver additions and improvements for benefiting various x86 laptops and tablets.

Last week I called attention to the new "x86-android-tablets" driver being prepared for introduction in Linux 5.17. That driver aims to fix up the mess of various x86 Android-focused tablets failing to run off the mainline Linux kernel or having various device issues in doing so. Since that prior article, more patches have been posted to address additional tablet issues.

A patch series sent out by IBM would introduce a new "LEGACY_PCI" Kconfig option for gating legacy PCI device support, including PCI devices attached to PCI-to-PCIe bridges and PCIe devices using legacy I/O spaces.

For those running Linux on Lenovo ThinkPad laptops, the upcoming Linux 5.17 cycle is set to bring a few improvements to the "thinkpad_acpi" driver.

The MSM Direct Rendering Manager driver providing the open-source kernel display/graphics support for Qualcomm Adreno hardware has ready its batch of changes for DRM-Next to appear in Linux 5.17.

Thanks to the reverse-engineering, open-source community there has been mainline Linux driver support for select NZXT all-in-one water cooling solutions while for the upcoming Linux 5.17 kernel is another new NZXT driver for some of their other products.

Resizable BAR support (also known as ReBAR / AMD Smart Access Memory) has been popular with gamers for supported configurations for being able to improve GPU performance. Intel is now working on enabling the Linux kernel to support Resizable BAR when in the context of I/O Virtualization.

While POWER CPUs have generally been well received by the free software community for being open-source friendly especially with the OpenPOWER Foundation, IBM's latest-generation POWER10 processors are continuing to be an upset.

Going into 2022 the Linux kernel's floppy driver continues to see new code improvements and fixes.

Amazon Web Services today shared that C7g instances are coming powered by Graviton3, their next-gen in-house AArch64 processors.

Back during the Linux 5.15 cycle Intel contributed an improvement for tiered memory systems where less used memory pages could be demoted to slower tiers of memory storage. But once demoted that kernel infrastructure didn't have a means of promoting those demoted pages back to the faster memory tiers should they become hot again, though now Facebook/Meta engineers have been working on such functionality.

Intel open-source driver engineers have been working on USI stylus support for the Linux kernel. The Universal Stylus Initiative (USI) aims to offer interoperability of active styluses across touchscreen devices.