Hardware News Archives

Polychromatic is the open-source software package that serves as a GUI front-end to the OpenRazer drivers for allowing Razer devices to be configured under Linux for managing keyboard/mice RGB lighting and other options. With today's Polychromatic 0.9 release there is a port for the Qt6 toolkit.

The folks behind the very popular Framework upgradeable/modular laptops announced today $18M in new funding and a few other interesting details.

Submitted for code review this weekend was a new MSI WMI Platform driver that was developed via reverse engineering MSI laptops. Initially this MSI WMI Platform driver is just exposing fan speed sensors but ultimately can be more useful for other Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) features.

Right now for buggy HID hardware or other input devices not exactly aligning to specs or having known hardware workarounds required, a new Linux kernel driver tends to be needed or at least quirks to be added to existing kernel driver code. There's no shortage of wonky HID hardware/drivers out there to deal with such odd cases. Due to the lengthy kernel cycles and other factors involved, leveraging (e)BPF has long been talked about as one of the areas where it may make sense for being able to more quickly send out hardware support fixes in the form of eBPF programs. The Rust-written udev-hid-bpf project is ready to help in that enabling effort.

It was just one month ago that open-source developer Tomeu Vizoso was beginning work on reverse-engineering and writing a Rockchip NPU driver following his work on the Vivante NPU IP open-source driver support. He quickly began seeing the driver working and with very viable performance and now today he's shared another update on this Rockchip open-source NPU driver effort.

While TUXEDO Computers has already been offering powerful AMD Zen 4 laptops such as the Pulse 14 Gen 3 with Ryzen 7 7840HS SoC, today the Bavarian company announced their first Ryzen 8000 series mobile laptop.

Microsoft's Azure Linux formerly known as CBL-Mariner for their in-house Linux distribution is out with a new version. Azure Linux 2.0.20240403 was released overnight and comes with a number of security updates and other fixes.

Sent out this morning were a batch of x86 platform driver fixes by Intel engineer and platform-drivers-x86 co-maintainer Ilpo Järvinen. Besides a couple of fixes, worth mentioning is the Intel HID driver seeing support added for upcoming Arrow Lake and Lunar Lake platforms.

UPower as the abstraction layer for enumerating power devices on Linux systems and allowing various battery / power supply features is out with a new feature update.

OpenSSL 3.3 is out today as the latest major feature release for this widely-used SSL library.

While recently there has been more Linux distribution vendor interest in evaluating x86-64-v2 and/or x86-64-v3 baselines for future Linux distribution releases as well as offering optimized packages for higher x86-64 baselines either for x86-64-v3 with being able to assume AVX/AVX2 or in the x86-64-v4 level where AVX-512 is introduced, the prospect of x86-64 micro-architecture feature levels for future processors isn't clear.

Framework Computer as the company behind the popular Framework 13 and Framework 16 upgradeable/modular laptops is hiring for an open-source firmware developer.

One of the latest areas being worked on for enabling Rust programming language use within the Linux kernel is for CPU frequency "CPUFreq" scaling drivers.

The Power Profiles Daemon software under the UPower project has released version 0.21 which now is automatically battery-state aware for adjusting the CPU power/performance behavior depending upon whether your Linux laptop is connected to AC or battery power.

The PCI-SIG announced today that they have published their newest revision "version 0.5" of the forthcoming PCI Express 7.0 specification.

Open-source developer Luke Junes continues doing a great job near single-handedly improving ASUS laptop support for Linux users. His many improvements over time to the ASUS-WMI kernel driver has enabled new features and functionality for ASUS laptops on Linux. Sent out on Monday was the newest patch series with additional feature work to this driver.

After putting their AMD GPU powered Tinybox "on hold" only to decide a few days later to offer both AMD and NVIDIA graphics options for Tinybox compute systems, George Hotz' Tiny Corp has now shared more specifications for these planned "green" and "red" Tinybox designs.

Open-source developer Tomeu Vizoso recently began the effort of creating an open-source, reverse-engineered driver for the Rockchip NPU found in some of the latest Rockchip SoCs. After succeeding at open-source NPU driver support for the VeriSilicon NPU IP, Vizoso took up the challenge of working on Rockchip NPU support. With his open-source user-space driver he's already got his first model running. Not only is it running but it's doing so at similar performance to the proprietary driver.

The Linux 6.9 kernel will be able to boot systems with large amounts of memory -- and in particular making use of HugeTLB pages -- much faster than with previous kernels, netting a noticeable reduction in boot times.

The Linux 6.9 changes for the Error Detection And Correction (EDAC) subsystem are heavy on the AMD changes.

The hardware monitoring "HWMON" subsystem updates were merged at the start of the Linux 6.9 merge window and include the recent trend of more all-in-one liquid/water cooling systems seeing Linux driver support to enable convenient monitoring and controls.

For those that have been interested in Intel's Meteor Lake mobile processors for the great integrated Arc Graphics capabilities and/or the new integrated NPU with open-source Intel iVPU kernel driver upstream, System76 today announced the new Lemur Pro laptops with Core Ultra processors.

The in-development Linux 6.9 kernel is introducing a new USB_DEFAULT_AUTHORIZATION_MODE Kconfig build-time switch to change the default authorization mode for how Linux should deal with attached USB devices.

Tiny Corp has been frustrated before with AMD / ROCm and planned to drop AMD graphics cards in their planned compute boxes over it only to go back to AMD GPUs with their open-source driver stack later. It's now happened again following frustrations over firmware binaries. After recently lobbying AMD to at least open-source some relevant pieces of their firmware and at ~70% confidence over their plans, Tiny Corp announced on Tuesday they are dropping AMD GPUs again from their compute plans.

The x86 cache updates for Linux 6.9 offer an improved memory bandwidth throttling heuristic such as used by Intel Resource Director Technology (RDT) and also AMD EPYC CPUs with the resctrl code.

Along with the input subsystem updates for the Linux 6.9 kernel, the HID subsystem updates were also merged in recent days for this next Linux kernel release. Notable of this pull is enabling support for some newer Samsung Wireless input devices.

The input subsystem updates were merged on Sunday for the in-development Linux 6.9 kernel merge window, among various other input changes is adding support for Snakebyte GAMEPADs to the XPad driver.

All of the x86 platform driver updates have been merged for the ongoing Linux 6.9 merge window. As usual, most of the x86 platform driver work is around better supporting various Intel Core and AMD Ryzen laptops under Linux.

Intel continues leading the development of the Compute Express Link (CXL) subsystem for the Linux kernel while at least for the Linux 6.9 cycle are a few feature patch contributions from AMD.

The PCI subsystem updates were merged this week for the Linux 6.9 kernel. Among the changes are the usual code churn around device-specific quirks and tuning of the power management code.

As noted a month ago that IBM was starting on Power11 CPU/platform enablement for the mainline Linux kernel, indeed the first batch of Power11 code has now been merged for the in-development Linux 6.9 kernel.

Tomeu Vizoso who recently has been working on extending the Etnaviv open-source graphics driver to also support the Vivante NPU IP has made great progress on that with competitive performance to the proprietary NPU driver and upstreaming the Teflon framework into Mesa for handling the Neural Processing Unit. Tomeu Vizoso has now shifted his attention to working on an open-source, reverse-engineered NPU driver for the AI hardware found in various Rockchip SoCs.

While Mobileye has already announced EyeQ6 and EyeQ7, being upstreamed in the Linux 6.9 kernel is finally support for the EyeQ5 SoC used for advanced driver-assistance systems in various automobiles. The EyeQ5 is a MIPS-based platform now capable of running an upstream kernel.

All of the ARM SoC updates and new machine/platform additions were submitted and merged on Tuesday for the ongoing Linux 6.9 kernel merge window.

Last year saw a lot of code clean-up work on the Linux kernel and working to remove support for obsolete hardware no longer being actively maintained within the mainline kernel tree for years. On the CPU side one of the efforts has been to remove unused SPARC 32-bit CPU support for old Sun workstations. The patches for removing unused SPARC32 code was updated this weekend and now undergoing review.

Sent in today as part of the input subsystem fixes for the current Linux 6.8 kernel cycle are adding support for several more HP HyperX gaming controllers.

The Etnaviv DRM kernel driver providing reverse-engineered support for Vivante graphics and NPU IP has sent out their latest feature changes to DRM-Next ahead of the upcoming Linux 6.9 merge window.

Longtime Phoronix readers may recall the Libre-SoC project that for the past 5+ years has been wanting to build a libre/open-source SoC for graphics acceleration and other uses.

For those in Turkey with Casper laptops or otherwise having access to that Turkish PC brand, their Excalibur line of higher-end laptops could soon see better Linux support thanks to a new WMI driver proposal.

When it comes to today's complex RGB lighting for PC peripherals and the like it's mostly been left up to user-space. With most RGB devices interfacing via USB, it's been up to Linux user-space projects like OpenRGB, OpenRazer, etc, to implement their RGB lighting controls as needed. But as RGB lighting use continues to grow in the PC space for better or worse, there's an increasing need for a kernel API to handle complex RGB devices. Such an API is currently being devised.

Back in January 2023 was an attempt to disable kernel drivers for Microsoft's RNDIS protocol. The Remote Network Driver Interface Specification (RNDIS) is home to security concerns for this protocol built atop USB for virtual Ethernet functionality. Later in the year the effort to disable RNDIS on Linux was tried again without going mainline. In recent days it looks like there will be a fresh attempt at getting the RNDIS driver support disabled.

Last April was a display/HDR hackfest hosted in the Czech Republic by Red Hat. Another Linux display hackfest has been announced for this year so upstream stakeholders can collaborate around high dynamic range (HDR) monitor support, color management, variable refresh rate (VRR), and other topics.

Longtime Linux kernel developer Thomas Gleixner with Intel-owned Linutronix has been spending much time over the past several months reworking the Linux kernel's x86 CPU topology evaluation code. This is to clean-up a mess of aging kernel code as well as some areas of the code being incorrect in today's era of hybrid Intel Core processors with a mix of P / E cores with the E cores lacking SMT/HT and thus throwing off prior kernel assumptions. With the code now queued up in a TIP branch today, it looks like that CPU topology rework could be good to go with Linux 6.9.

Power-Profiles-Daemon 0.20 has been released as the newest version of this project now living under the UPower umbrella. The Power-Profiles-Daemon allows for exposing power profiles over D-Bus and in turn integrates nicely with the likes of the GNOME Settings.

Samsung engineers have been extending their "samsung" HID driver to support more of their wireless input devices by the mainline Linux kernel.

After years of work by Qualcomm and Linaro engineers, the Qualcomm SoC support on the mainline Linux kernel has finally matured enough that new hardware support tends to come rather quickly and be well supported. With the forthcoming Linux 6.8 kernel the new Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 can boot on the mainline kernel, the Snapdragon-powered ThinkPad X13s has been popular with Linux developers thanks to the upstream support, and other Qualcomm-powered devices tending to play more nicely with upstream Linux these days rather than having to resort to vendor kernel builds.

SPEC has effectively invalidated more than two thousand SPEC CPU 2017 benchmark submissions after it was discovered the Intel oneAPI DPC++ compiler was effectively "cheating" per their standards with a targeted optimization.

Asynchronous device shutdown support for the Linux kernel has been pursued in the past as with hyperscalers like Google having too many NVMe storage devices can slow the shutdown/reboot process. Red Hat on Wednesday submitted a new patch series aiming to implement async device shutdown support.

On newer Lenovo ThinkPad laptops (2024+ models) there is a new key combination appearing to make it easy to switch between ACPI Platform Profiles for toggling your power/performance preference of the system. With the Linux 6.9 kernel coming in a few months this key will now work under Linux too.

The latest all-in-one liquid cooler receiving a Linux driver to monitor pump speeds and coolant temperatures as well as managing radiator fan speeds under Linux is the ASUS ROG RYUJIN II 360.