Hardware News Archives

In addition to the ASUS Z590 motherboards seeing sensor monitoring support with patches queued for Linux 6.4 that were talked about earlier this month on Phoronix, the latest nct6775 driver activity now queued in the hardware monitoring subsystem's hwmon-next branch is allowing support for another three dozen ASUS motherboards.

Another set of drm-misc-next patches were submitted today for queuing in DRM-Next until the Linux 6.4 merge window kicks off this spring.

Last month Qualcomm published updated patches for their Cloud AI 100 kernel driver to support this inference accelerator. The Qualcomm engineers said at the time that their user-space driver and associated compiler would be published shortly. That panned out and the user-space portion of this open-source AI inference stack was recently published.

While Lenovo's ThinkPad X13s has generated a fair amount of attention for being a Qualcomm Snapdragon SoC powered Arm laptop that supports running on the mainline Linux kernel, another option on the way is the Acer Aspire 1 that also makes use of a Qualcomm Soc.

For over a half-decade ASUS has been selling the Tinker Board devices as their line of Raspberry Pi alternatives. To date the ASUS Tinker Board single board computers have all been Arm-based while now they have launched their first RISC-V board, the Tinker V.

Queued up ahead of the Linux 6.4 cycle this spring is removing all of the PCMCIA "char" drivers as part of a broader effort to remove PCMCIA socket and card driver code where there is no apparent users remaining.

Earlier this week Greg Kroah-Hartman submitted the USB/Thunderbolt subsystem updates for the ongoing Linux 6.3 kernel merge window.

The HP Dev One Linux laptop is now sold-out and the production on it has ended. The HP Dev One that launched last year was the very interesting collaboration between HP and System76 for coming out with a Linux laptop catering to developers and running Pop!_OS.

A change made to the Linux kernel back in 2016 is causing issues with NVMe PCIe support on some ARM64 devices like the Microsoft Surface Pro X and Lenovo ThinkPad X13s. A new kernel quirk is on the way for aiming to address that and yield working NVMe storage.

The hardware monitoring support among consumer desktop motherboards continues to improve with Linux 6.3 adding sensor support for many ASUS B650/B660/X670 AMD Ryzen motherboards.

The cryptography subsystem updates for the Linux 6.3 merge window landed earlier this week with a few notable additions this cycle.

The 8BitDo Pro 2 Wired Controller as a popular ~$35 USD gaming controller will see proper support with the Linux 6.3 kernel.

Intel engineers continue carrying out much of the upstream Linux kernel enablement for the Compute Express Link (CXL) subsystem for supporting this high-speed open standard for servers. For the Linux 6.3 cycle is yet more feature work ready for the mainline kernel.

Among the early pull requests for the now-open Linux 6.3 merge window are the RAS (Reliability, Availability and Serviceability) and EDAC (Error Detection And Correction) updates.

These days the MIPS architecture is dead but eight years ago when the Raspberry Pi, the PandaBoard, and other early Arm single board computers were enjoying the limelight, Imagination Technologies decided to release the Creator CI20 MIPS SBC. It's been years since hearing of the CI20 or dusting off my CI20, but a new patch series this week tries to get the mainline Linux kernel to enjoy working WiFi and Bluetooth for this MIPS single board computer.

A driver submitted for review that hopes to be included upstream in the Linux kernel enhances support for MSI laptops under Linux with more features being enabled.

Over the past two years since an Aquacomputer HWMON driver was first introduced to the mainline Linux kernel, it's continued to be extended to support more products from this German PC cooling/peripheral retailer. With Linux 6.3 additional Aquacomputer components are now supported by this kernel driver.

The Etnaviv DRM driver started out in the Linux kernel providing reverse-engineered kernel graphics driver support for Vivante graphics IP developed by VeriSilicon and found within various SoCs. With the upcoming Linux 6.3 cycle the Etnaviv DRM driver is adding support for VeriSilicon's Neural Network Processor (NPU) IP.

While there's been a multi-year effort for Wayland high resolution scrolling, support by the desktop environments for this functionality, and all the other infrastructure work, high resolution scrolling is proving to still be a challenge for Linux in 2023. The latest is now the Linux kernel dropping Logitech high resolution scrolling for mice connected via USB until further improvements can be made.

The Linux 6.3 kernel's IT87 driver is preparing support for the IT87952E super I/O controller that is used by some newer desktop motherboards and will now be able to enjoy hardware monitoring "HWMON" support.

Thanks to Intel another batch of Compute Express Link (CXL) feature code is working its way into shape for the upcoming Linux 6.3 kernel cycle.

Last October marked the release of memtest86+ 6.0 as the first major update to this bootable, open-source RAM testing software in nearly a decade. The memtest86+ 6.0 release marked a rewrite of the software while out today is the first update to that widely-used RAM testing software.

The OpenMPI message passing interface library is ready to completely abandon 32-bit software support with its forthcoming v5.0 release.

Fwupd 1.8.10 is out this morning to kickoff a new week and continuing to enhance the open-source firmware updating support on Linux systems.

Back in November IBM engineers sent out compiler patches for "future" CPUs and notably added new dense math instructions. At the time they noted the new target "may or may not be present" in future IBM Power processors but now they are hoping to get these "future" patches squeeze into the GCC 13 compiler.

Squeezing into the current Linux 6.2 kernel cycle is support for the XP-PEN Deco 01 V2 drawing tablet.

If things go as planned, the TPM2 device found within Microsoft's Pluton security processor on the latest AMD Ryzen SoCs will be supported by Linux 6.3.

The Aspeed ACRY engine found with new AST2600 baseboard management controllers (BMCs) for accelerating ECDSA/RSA signature and verification tasks is set to see an upstream driver with the Linux 6.3 cycle.

While not even midway through the Linux 6.2 cycle yet, the hardware monitoring "HWMON" sensor driver feature changes queuing in the "hwmon-next" branch is seeing more hardware support readied for Linux 6.3.

While back in 2018 when the C-SKY architecture was merged to the Linux kernel it was talked about possibly being the last new CPU arch/port to be mainlined given the growing success of RISC-V even back then, it looks like that upstream kernel developer belief might not hold true. France-based Kalray that focuses on high-performance, data-centric computing from cloud to edge posted their initial Linux kernel patches today for their "KVX" kernel port to get the kernel running on their MPPA3-80 "Coolidge" DPU SoC with the KV3-1 CPU architecture.

GIGABYTE announced this morning they have spun off their server business unit and formed Giga Computing for their enterprise products moving forward.

The D1 is Allwinner's first SoC based on a RISC-V core design. While the Allwinner D1 isn't powerful at all, it's appearance in low-cost boards, RISC-V based design, and the Allwinner development community has made this an attractive entry-level RISC-V target. While various Linux distributions are already supporting D1-based boards, the mainline support for the D1/D1s platform looks like it will finally be merged in 2023.

The Linux USB gadget kernel driver saw a patch published today for exposing of a device's landing page as part of the WebUSB specification. WebUSB as a reminder is the industry standard for providing a JavaScript API to securely access USB devices from web pages and is already supported by the likes of Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge.

For going along with the new keyboard driver and other upstreaming efforts around the PinePhone Pro, getting the display support mainlined has been the latest effort for enhancing this $399 Linux smartphone.

Prior to the holiday weekend Qualcomm engineers posted a set of "request for comments" Linux kernel patches to implement USB audio offloading support for Qualcomm SoCs with a dedicated audio DSP.

Over the past year we've seen a fair amount of work for enabling support for various Aquacomputer devices under Linux. The German parts vendor specializes in various PC cooling solutions and other cooling accessories that can be monitored and managed under Linux thanks to this open-source driver work.

As written about last month, Sony has been working on adding DualShock 4 controller support to their newer PlayStation HID driver in Linux. The DualShock 4 controller has long been supported under the older "hid-sony" driver but now with Linux 6.2 the support can also be found under "hid-playstation".

As expected, the Linux 6.2 kernel is introducing a lot more Compute Express Link (CXL) enablement code.

Last month I wrote about Intel having worked on USB4 wake-on-connect and wake-on-disconnect handling for the Linux kernel and those patches are indeed primed to be introduced next week with the Linux 6.2 merge window.

A new release of Polychromatic is now available, the open-source GUI front-end for managing Razer devices on Linux by way of the community-managed OpenRazer drivers.

Thanks to the ongoing work led by Intel's Linux engineers, the upcoming Linux 6.2 kernel will feature more feature work around enabling Compute Express Link (CXL) functionality.

One of the new hardware drivers set to be introduced in the upcoming Linux 6.2 kernel cycle is the OneXPlayer sensor driver for supporting hardware monitoring on the x86_64-based handheld gaming devices. While OneXPlayer devices ship with Windows by default, Linux is becoming an increasingly sought after target particularly with prospects for running SteamOS.

OpenRGB 0.8 was released on Sunday night as this project's largest release ever and coming after nearly one year in development. OpenRGB as a reminder is the open-source, cross-vendor and cross-platform software for RGB lighting control across many different devices from GPUs and motherboards to keyboards and other lighted peripherals.

At the start of the calendar year Samsung engineers posted Linux patches bringing to enable the Tesla full self-driving "FSD" SoC within the mainline Linux kernel. Linux 5.18 picked up the initial Tesla FSD SoC support and since then other support remnants have continued to be worked on like media functionality. The latest open-source, upstream-focused Tesla FSD SoC work is on enabling PCIe functionality.

This week's batch of platform-drivers-x86 "fixes" for the ongoing Linux 6.1 kernel is a bit more notable than usual. In particular, the Surface Pro 9 and Surface Laptop 5 devices are now supported along with some other hardware support enablement.

With a new patch queued up in the hardware monitoring subsystem's hwmon-next branch, several more ASUS motherboards for Intel and AMD processors will enjoy working sensor monitoring support.

Adding to the growing list of changes expected to be sent in during the Linux 6.2 merge window next month is HID-BPF. This is the Red Hat led effort around using eBPF within the HID subsystem for input devices.

In addition to the previously-reported Ampere SMpro hardware monitoring "HWMON" driver coming for Linux 6.2, there are also at least two other drivers for Ampere's co-processor set to be introduced with this next kernel version.

To the USB4/Thunderbolt driver in the Linux kernel Intel is adding support for system wake on connect/disconnect.

Going back eight years to Linux 3.15 there has been Sony DualShock 4 controller support using the "hid-sony" driver thanks to work from the open-source community. But now Sony is adding DualShock 4 controller support to their newer "hid-playstation" driver that they started for PlayStation 5 controller support and are now extending it backwards for the PS4 controller.