Hardware News Archives

From SC23 going on in Denver, the PCI-SIG team sent out a news release that they have announced the naming for their next-generation PCI Express cabling... CopprLink.

The Aurora supercomputer originally was supposed to be completed by Intel and Cray/HPE for the Argonne National Laboratory back in 2018. Now at the end of 2023, it's made its first debut on the TOP500 list... But only as a partial deployment and is coming in at spot number two.

The USB/Thunderbolt subsystem updates were merged a few days ago for Linux 6.7. As Greg Kroah-Hartman put it in the pull request, "nothing really major in here, just lots of constant development for new hardware."

While Intel hasn't released a new Atom SoC in years on the consumer side, thanks to the work by Red Hat engineers and others in the open-source community, even drivers for aging Intel Atom platforms continue to receive improvements. One of the areas of ongoing work has been the Linux kernel driver for the Atom ISP camera interface for image signal processing in supporting the web camera on some of these old devices. With Linux 6.7 there is yet more work on the Intel Atom ISP driver.

Bavarian Linux PC vendor TUXEDO Computers has introduced their first Ryzen 7040 series "Zen 4" Linux laptop in the form of the Pulse 14 Gen 3.

The HID subsystem updates for the Linux 6.7 kernel don't bring any shiny new features or notable hardware support additions, but there is a clean-up to the Logitech HID++ (logitech-hidpp) driver probing code as well as some notable quirks/fixes to different hardware.

A wide variety of x86 platform driver changes were merged for the in-development Linux 6.7 kernel from new hardware support to improving the state of Linux on various Intel/AMD laptops.

The Linux kernel's subsystem for Compute Express Link that is playing a vital role in servers moving forward continues picking up new features and evolving the code-base as more CXL hardware enters the world.

There is some interesting new Arm and RISC-V SoC support to be found in the in-development Linux 6.7 kernel.

Guenter Roeck today sent out the hardware monitoring "HWMON" subsystem updates for the Linux 6.7 merge window.

Linux 6.6 is set to be released as stable this weekend unless Linus Torvalds has reservations and decides to extend the cycle by one week. In any case there are some last minute fixes heading in to fix-up nine different Lenovo laptops with AMD Ryzen SoCs to make the hardware more usable under Linux.

Earlier this month Framework 13 began shipping out their AMD Ryzen powered modular laptop. Unfortunately though the launch-day testing of the Framework laptop under Linux was hampered by a BIOS issue. It's taken longer, but this week a new BIOS is now available for testing that resolves the AMD Linux graphics issue. Here's how to go about easily flashing the system BIOS with Fwupd and LVFS to get up and running well on Linux.

For those that happen to have QLogic 10Gb PCIe Ethernet adapters, the mainline Linux kernel is planning to remove this driver from the kernel source tree unless any active users step-up.

In addition to working on the likes of the Milk-V Duo and high-end Pioneer board, Milk-V has now announced the "Oasis" as a forthcoming mini-ITX RISC-V board that will feature 16 cores and up to 64GB of LPDDR5 system memory.

Ever since the release of TuxClocker 1.0 last month, this open-source community software project for enhancing overclocking controls under Linux has been living up to the "release early, release often" mantra. Out today is TuxClocker 1.2.

Raptor Computing Systems as the company behind the open-source friendly, POWER-based Talos II server and Blackbird microATX desktop has continued leveraging POWER9 given the binary blobs and challenging state around POWER10. But looking ahead to next year it looks like they'll be debuting some new hardware platforms.

Adding to the list of vendors exposing ACPI Platform Profile controls under Linux so the user can easily set their power/performance preference for the system is major Chinese hardware company Inspur.

A set of patches to the community-developed MSI-EC Linux kernel driver would allow toggling MSI's Cooler Boost functionality under Linux for enhancing laptop cooling performance.

System76 has announced their latest design improvements to their in-house manufactured, Linux-loaded Thelio desktop computers.

Following the release last month of TuxClocker 1.0 as a GUI overclocking solution currently for NVIDIA graphics cards on Linux, this years-in-development open-source utility is up to version 1.1 and with some new capabilities.

The latest Linux kernel patches for enabling the Milk-V Pioneer board have been posted, which is that interesting 64-core RISC-V micro-ATX board with two PCIe x16 slots and more.

The Mobileye EyeQ 5 SoC that can power fully-autonomous (Level 5) driving for vehicles and provide other assisted-driving technologies for a variety of automobiles could soon see mainline support in the Linux kernel.

Today the review embargo lifts on the first AMD-powered Framework laptop. There's one of the AMD Framework laptops in the lab for Linux testing and benchmarking but unfortunately no review for launch day due to being held up by a BIOS regression and thus unable to properly utilize accelerated graphics until a new BIOS revision is made available in the coming days.

Several months back was work to disable all Microsoft Remote Network Driver Interface Specification (RNDIS) drivers in the Linux kernel on the basis of being insecure and other factors. That plan of disabling the RNDIS drivers was faced by opposition around concerns of potentially disrupting USB tethering support and the like. It's been months since hearing anything about updated plans for disabling or dropping the RNDIS drivers but the Git branch was updated today for disabling this class of drivers.

TuxClocker has been in development for several years as another open-source GPU overclocking GUI for Linux. TuxClocker initially provided a Qt5-based user interface for GPU overclocking and ultimately established a D-Bus API as well with the new release. TuxClocker 1.0 was finally released today as the latest update to this Linux GPU overclocking software.

While Simultaneous Multi-Threading (SMT) isn't as common on Arm SoCs as it is in the x86 and POWER worlds, there are some SMT-capable designs like with the HiSilicon Kupeng 930 for Arm servers. HiSilicon engineers are working now to extend Linux's SMT run-time controls to work on ARM64 (AArch64).

For those curious about the power consumption of USB-C devices, there are some nifty devices out there that have a LED display and can report the voltage, Amps, Wattage, and USB power delivery protocol version of connected devices. It's a neat display but with a new POWER-Z driver coming to the Linux kernel it's possible to propagate that information from the system itself with this new driver.

While the Linux 6.6 merge window is over, sent out today were a set of x86 platform driver fixes that include adding a quirk so that the tablet mode switch event properly occurs with the new ASUS ROG Flow X16 laptop.

The LoongArch CPU port is seeing a number of new kernel features enabled with Linux 6.6 as well as seeing some new hardware features wired up such as for Loongson Binary Translation (LBT) and allowing LSX/LASX instruction use in kernel-space.

In addition to the ASUS laptop improvements for Linux 6.6 with the ASUS-WMI driver, additional feature work is on the way for future kernel versions with one of those interesting additions being support for the ASUS Screenpad. Some higher-end ASUS laptops feature a secondary screen "screenpad" on the laptops and the pending ASUS-WMI driver patch will properly support it.

Merged a few days ago for the ongoing Linux 6.6 merge window were the x86 platform driver updates, which bring a few interesting Intel/AMD laptop improvements as well as a new driver to support altering select HP BIOS settings from within the confines of Linux.

In addition to the HID updates bringing rumble for Google's Stadia controller and other gaming peripheral improvements, the input subsystem updates were sent out this week for Linux 6.6 that bring more enhancements for Linux gamers. In particular, the common XPad driver saw some additions for this next kernel version.

The sound subsystem and audio driver updates were merged last week for the ongoing Linux 6.6 merge window. Interesting about the sound work this cycle is a fair amount of work around AMD Van Gogh platforms, which so far is just the APU that's known to power Valve's Steam Deck.

The ACPI and power management updates were merged last week for the Linux 6.6 kernel.

The DeviceTree changes for Linux 6.6 add the ability to generate DeviceTree (DT) nodes for PCI devices. AMD spearheaded this effort for applying DeviceTree overlays to PCI devices containing non-discoverable downstream devices.

The hardware monitoring "HWMON" subsystem updates have been submitted and merged for the ongoing Linux 6.6 kernel merge window.

In recent days a number of feature patches were queued in HID-next to provide new driver features and hardware support within the Human Interface Device subsystem.

The DeviceTree additions to allow the Orange Pi 5 64-bit ARM single board computer (SBC) to work on the upstream Linux kernel are working their way closer to mainline.

The upcoming Linux 6.6 kernel will finish removing old remnants of Wireless USB support.

The Linux kernel's "dimmtemp" driver allows for reporting memory temperatures with capable memory modules and when exposed by the Intel processor's PECI (Platform Environment Control Interface). Currently though the DIMM temperature driver is hard-coded to only allow reporting up to 32 DIMMs while a change queued for Linux 6.6 will extend that limit.

While Simultaneous Multi-Threading (SMT) on Intel/AMD x86_64 processors is limited to providing one additional thread per core, SMT on IBM POWER hardware can provide 4-way and even 8-way SMT for some processor models. With Linux 6.6 the /sys/devices/system/cpu/smt/control interface is being extended to allow greater control over managing partial SMT states in cases of the CPUs supporting more than 2-way SMT at Linux run-time.

Qualcomm engineers have begun rolling out a new open-source V4L2/media driver for a new Qualcomm "Iris" video accelerator hardware for video encode and decode on Qualcomm SoCs.

For processors supporting CPU performance boosting with higher performance states available beyond the base states, Linux allows toggling the boosting on a per-CPU basis. However, a new patch proposed this week would allow per-policy performance boosting where capable.

Loongson Binary Translation (LBT) support for the Chinese LoongArch CPU architecture is slated for introduction in the upcoming Linux 6.6 cycle. Loongson Binary Translation aims to help speed-up and handle ARM / x86 / MIPS binary translation on LoongArch more efficiently with capable LoongArch processors.

The DRM subsystem is slated to pickup a GPU Virtual Address "VA" Manager with the Linux 6.6 kernel that is motivated by work around Vulkan sparse memory binding requirements.

In addition to Intel engineers being responsible for much of the Linux kernel driver work around USB4 and Thunderbolt, they have now published thunderbolt-utils as a collection of user-space utilities for managing USB4/Thunderbolt on Linux environments.

Similar to the Dell WMI system management driver and Lenovo's Think-LMI driver, the HP-BIOSCFG driver now poised for introduction in Linux 6.6 allows for managing and configuring BIOS settings on capable HP laptops/desktops from under Linux itself.

Queued up ahead of the Linux 6.6 cycle later this summer is a new input driver for the Azoteq IQS7210A/7211A/E controllers.

Imagination Technologies today published their fourth iteration of their in-development PowerVR DRM kernel graphics driver targeting their Rogue architecture and future graphics IP. This open-source kernel driver ultimately will go along with their PowerVR Vulkan driver they continue developing within the Mesa code-base.

For months Linux hardware vendor System76 has been teasing their in-house designed and manufactured "Virgo" laptop to be built at their facility in Denver. They are hoping to develop the quietest yet most performant Linux laptop. Today they published the initial open-source design files for their custom motherboard PCB in this laptop.