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.
Hardware News Archives
2,096 Hardware open-source and Linux related news articles on Phoronix since 2006.
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.
Being merged today as part of the input subsystem "fixes" for the in-development Linux 6.8 kernel is supporting the controllers of the Lenovo Legion Go handheld game console.
Linux hardware vendor Purism that is known for their crowd-funded Librem 5 smartphone effort, Linux-loaded laptops, and other privacy-minded wares announced a first public offering of Purism stock on the StartEngine platform.
Thanks to the reverse-engineering, open-source community there is already a NZXT Kraken Linux driver for supporting hardware monitoring and controls for various NZXT all-in-one CPU liquid cooler products. A new Linux driver was posted today for supporting the latest generation of the NZXT AIO CPU coolers.
TuxClocker as the open-source, hardware/driver vendor independent overclocking and power management control utility for Linux systems is out with a new feature release. This Qt-based utility for enthusiasts continues adding new controls primarily around greater power/performance tunables for CPUs and GPUs.
Along with the USB/Thunderbolt changes for Linux 6.8, Greg Kroah-Hartman also submitted the char/misc changes during the back-half of the week for this new kernel version.
Merged this week were the USB and Thunderbolt driver changes for the nearly-closed Linux 6.8 merge window.
While the new PCIe Gen5 NVMe SSDs may feel fast with pushing 11~12k MB/s sequential reads and writes, a Ceph storage cluster has just broken the 1 TiB/s threshold.
For those wanting to build/mod their own Linux gaming handheld or craft a controller for other uses, the Adafruit Seesaw gamepad has a driver premiering with Linux 6.8.
A second batch of s390 architecture changes were sent out today for the ongoing Linux 6.8 merge window.
For those interested in Linux on IBM Z / s390, there's a small change yielding measurable benefits to the s390 system call entry performance with the forthcoming Linux 6.8 kernel.
Merged last week for the Linux 6.8 kernel were the platform driver x86 updates, which include a lot of new AMD Ryzen and Intel Core platform support and new laptop functionality.
Merged last week to the mainline kernel were all of the hardware monitoring "HWMON" subsystem driver updates for the Linux 6.8 cycle, which includes introducing the Gigabyte AORUS Waterforce AIO driver.
Along with the Linux 6.8 power management updates, maintainer Rafael Wysocki at Intel also sent in the ACPI updates for this next kernel version. While the ACPI changes for the kernel are often just routine churn, this cycle it's bringing a new feature: device enumeration for CSI-2 and MIPI DisCo for Imaging support. This will allow MIPI cameras moving forward to be enumerated via the platform firmware on ACPI-based systems.
The HID driver updates for Linux 6.8 include some useful additions primarily for Linux gamers or those otherwise making use of modern game controllers for other input purposes.
Making use of dmidecode is the go-to way of being able to read various DIMM memory information on Linux systems like the model number, speed, and other attributes. But sadly using dmidecode is restricted to root due to needing to access /dev/mem. But it turns out there is another less reported way to receive much the same information.
The Error Detection And Correction (EDAC) subsystem updates for Linux 6.8 have been submitted for dealing with ECC reporting under Linux and the other error detection/recovery driver updates.
Debuting in late 2022 was memtest86+ 6.0 as a rewrite of this long-used open-source RAM tester. Coming out today is memtest86+ 7.0 as the latest major update to this leading PC memory testing solution.
A patch for the HP-WMI Linux kernel driver sent out on New Year's Eve aims to allow for better HP OMEN 17 laptop Linux performance by altering the thermal profile behavior so that the OMEN "8BAD" laptop can run at a higher TDP than what's otherwise permitted by the system's embedded controller (EC) without throttling.
Similar to Intel and AMD processors with not all cores necessarily being created equal, Zhaoxin engineers are working on plumbing preferred core support for their processors into the Linux kernel.
Intel Linux engineers continue eagerly working on the Compute Express Link (CXL) code for the Linux kernel with more server hardware coming to market supporting this high-speed open standard for CPU-to-device and CPU-to-memory connections.
Here's a pleasant Christmas present and one I certainly wasn't expecting... Motherboard manufacturer ASRock has announced software for Linux! Well, not any motherboard management/configuration software for their desktop motherboards or anything like that but rather a Linux port of their AI QuickSet software that is intended to help users "experience AI in one click."
Bavarian Linux PC vendor TUXEDO Computers has announced TUXEDO Control Center 2.1 as their newest update to this software for managing your notebook's vitals from the Linux desktop.
It's just not old wired and wireless networking drivers being removed from the mainline Linux kernel but as part of some winter-time cleaning a set of patches have been posted that would remove much of the remaining SPARC32 support for old 32-bit Sun workstations.
A new driver set to be merged in the upcoming Linux 6.8 cycle is "gigabyte_waterforce" as a new kernel driver for supporting Gigabyte AORUS Waterforce AIO coolers.
Back in October the Milk-V Oasis mITX board was announced with this RISC-V board being powered by a 16-core Sophgo SG2380 SoC featuring SiFive-designed cores: 12 P cores and four E cores. While that Milk-V Oasis board isn't expected to ship until Q3'2024, Milk-V shared this week that the SG2380 RISC-V SoC has been revised with additional capabilities.
Holding up some laptops from shipping Linux pre-loaded around the world come down to regulatory certifications for power management not currently being met on Linux while working fine on Windows.
The Linux kernel's thermal driver has the obvious notion of hot and critically-hot trip points while to this point there hasn't been the opposite: cold trip points (events) but that's finally been proposed as we approach the end of 2023.
Storage company Kioxia that was spun off from Toshiba several years ago has donated a software development kit (SDK) to the Linux Foundation for establishing the Software-Enabled Flash SDK. This is for opening new doors and innovative uses around flash memory.
PoCL 5.0-RC1 is out today as the newest feature release being brewed for this "Portable Computing Language" implementation that allows for OpenCL code to run on CPUs as well as running OpenCL code on other back-ends such as atop NVIDIA CUDA and AMD ROCm and other LLVM back-ends.
If the likes of the Steam Deck or ASUS ROG Ally are out of your budget or you just prefer enjoying more classic, less demanding games, there are Linux kernel patches being floated to allow mainline support for a sub-$200 ARM-powered handheld gaming console.
TuxClocker continues on its quest as being one of the leading open-source GUI control panels for overclockers and enthusiasts on Linux. Out this morning is TuxClocker 1.4 that brings more features for making this Qt-based open-source app more useful for those overclocking or just wanting to keep a better eye on their hardware's performance and thermals/power from the Linux desktop.
For those that happen to own an ASRock Rack X570D4U micro-ATX motherboard or are in the market for a server-grade AMD Ryzen 5000 series motherboard, patches are pending as this motherboard works on OpenBMC support as an alternative to the proprietary BMC software stack that ships with this AMD Ryzen 5000 series + ECC DDR4 supported motherboard.
Joining the likes of the Aquacomputer and NZXT water/liquid cooling hardware monitoring/control "HWMON" kernel drivers, a Gigabyte AORUS Waterforce AIO Coolers Linux driver is being developed.
2096 Hardware news articles published on Phoronix.