Hardware News Archives

Red Hat's Peter Hutterer is out with two important updates to the Linux input stack: libinput 1.26 has released for this input handling library used both by X.Org and Wayland systems and then secondly he has announced the "gsetwacom" CLI program as a replacement to the "xsetwacom" program.

Queued into the x86 platform drivers' "for-next" branch ahead of the Linux 6.11 kernel cycle is the "Dell PC Extras" driver. Initially this new dell-pc driver is used for controlling fan modes via the Platform Profile setting on capable systems.

ASUS used Computex 2024 for announcing the ROG Ally X, the latest version of their handheld gaming console. The ASUS ROG Ally X continues to be powered by the AMD Ryzen Z1 Extreme SoC but now having more storage, faster RAM, a larger battery, updated controls, and other refinements.

Right now when dealing with quirky/buggy touchscreens a C file needs to be manually manipulated and the Linux kernel recompiled. With a new "i2c_touchscreen_props" kernel command line option on its way to the mainline kernel, the process of overriding touchscreen properties is dramatically easier for those dealing with Linux on touchscreen-enabled devices.

Building off the PowerVR kernel driver merged in Linux 6.8 and PowerVR Vulkan driver in Mesa 24.0 that are both focused on Imagination's newer PowerVR Rogue architecture, Google engineers are working on enabling open-source driver support for the PowerVR Rogue GX6250 as found within the MediaTek MT8173 SoC.

Framework is out today with some exciting announcements from lowering the price of the existing Framework 13 with AMD Ryzen 7040 series SoC to announcing a new Framework Laptop 13 powered by Intel Core Ultra (Meteor Lake) and having a new 2.8K display option for this modular/upgradeable laptop shipping this summer.

The ASUS WMI platform driver for Linux that is predominantly used by ASUS laptops for enabling more functionality under Linux has a new patch series available that is enabling yet more features for the latest ASUS hardware on Linux.

The hardware monitoring "HWMON" subsystem changes for the Linux 6.10 kernel include enabling monitoring of more all-in-one liquid coolers for CPUs, a new driver for exposing monitoring on Lenovo ThinkStation workstations, and other new monitoring capabilities.

The Framework 13 and Framework 16 AMD Ryzen powered laptops make use of an NPCX embedded controller that rely on the ChromeOS open-source embedded controller (EC) firmware. With the Linux 6.10 kernel the Chrome OS "cros_ec_lpc" driver is being extended to support these latest Framework upgradeable laptops.

Following the HID changes last week that brought Steam Deck IMU and ASUS ROG Ally support along with other Human Interface Device additions, on Thursday the input subsystem updates were submitted for this new kernel. The Machenike G5 Pro gaming controller is now supported along with other input additions.

The ACPI and power management / thermal subsystem changes were merged last week for the Linux 6.10 kernel. This cycle there are updates to both the Intel and AMD P-State CPU frequency scaling drivers.

In addition to the Linux 6.10 USB changes and char/misc with the new NTSYNC driver, Greg Kroah-Hartman on Wednesday also sent out the staging updates for Linux 6.10. There isn't much in the way of new code but some 19k lines of code removed thanks to removing an unused driver as well as a broken driver.

Greg Kroah-Hartman sent out the USB/Thunderbolt changes this morning for the Linux 6.10 merge window that is wrapping up this weekend. Surprisingly, in 2024, a new USB to parallel printer port adapter variant is being introduced with Linux 6.10.

Sent out on Tuesday were all of the perf tool changes for the Linux 6.10 kernel. This includes perf event support for recent Intel CPUs as well as initial AMD Zen 5 processor support.

Last week the main SoC/platform updates were sent in for Linux 6.10 that included more ARM-based handheld game consoles and other new Arm devices from ASUS wireless routers to set-top boxes to enabling various SoCs. This week a secondary set of updates were submitted for the Linux 6.10 kernel merge window.

In addition to the CXL updates for Linux 6.10 that were sent in last week, the PCI subsystem updates this week bring a notable addition for Compute Express Link (CXL) devices.

The x86 platform driver updates have been merged for the ongoing Linux 6.10 merge window. The platform-drivers-x86 changes continue to primarily revolve around x86 Intel/AMD laptops but also some other desktop/platform drivers. Now in Linux 6.10 there is also a new "ARM64" sub-section of the platform drivers.

A Linux patch has been posted for delivering a quirk so that the Bigscreen Beyond VR Headset can properly behave under Linux and in turn also jives with the likes of SteamVR.

Linux's Turbostat utility that is developed by Intel for reporting idle/power state statistics, temperatures, and other useful data on modern Intel/AMD processors has seen its changes submitted for the in-development Linux 6.10 kernel.

Merged as part of the IRQ changes for the in-development Linux 6.10 kernel is support for posted interrupts on bare metal hardware.

The Compute Express Link (CXL) subsystem development continues to be led by Intel engineers and with the in-development Linux 6.10 kernel there are yet more features in tow.

While most of you have not thought about or used Firewire (IEEE-1394) in years, there still are some legacy digital video cameras and some professional audio devices relying on the interface. Last year saw a new Firewire maintainer step-up for the Linux kernel after the code had fallen dormant. The plans by that new maintainer, Takashi Sakamoto, are to maintain Linux's Firewire support through 2029. He's continuing to do a good job with the upcoming Linux 6.10 kernel bringing the latest batch of Firewire enhancements.

The Framework Laptops are some great systems with their upgradeable/modular design, friendly Linux support, both Intel and AMD options, the latest models making use of an open-source embedded controller, and nice build quality. The Framework Laptops have proven very popular with Linux/open-source enthusiasts but one of the recurring critiques has been the lack of Coreboot firmware support for these laptops as an alternative (or outright replacement) to the proprietary BIOS/firmware. As a promising avenue for the future, there is experimental work being done on getting Coreboot up and running with the Framework 13 laptop powered by the AMD Ryzen 7040 series.

While much of the emphasis for Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite laptop SoC has been around Windows on Arm PCs, Qualcomm has also been working to have upstream Linux support for this high-end SoC and everything is coming together for said support.

Linux 6.10 is introducing support for Trusted Platform Module (TPM2) encryption and integrity protections to prevent active/passive interposers from compromising them. This follows a recent security demonstration of TPM key recovery from Microsoft Windows BitLocker being demonstrated. TPM sniffing attacks have also been demonstrated against Linux systems too, thus the additional protections be made with Linux 6.10 to better secure TPM2 modules.

In addition to a Framework Laptop EC driver being prepared for Linux that extends the Chrome OS embedded controller (EC) used by recent Framework Laptops, a ChromeOS EC hardware monitoring (HWMON subsystem) driver has also been revived as a further support extension for Framework laptops on Linux.

SHIFTphone 8 is the upcoming modular and easy-to-repair smartphone from Germany's SHIFT GmbH. This is the first major SHIFTphone update in four years and there are pending patches providing mainline Linux kernel support for this forthcoming Qualcomm Snapdragon powered modular/upgradeable smartphone.

In addition to Linux 6.10 expected to drop support for very old DEC Alpha processors (EV5 and earlier), it looks like the PowerPC 40x (early PowerPC 400 series) processor and platform support will be retired too.

The Linux 6.10 kernel is poised to remove support for old DEC Alpha EV5 platforms and earlier.

The modular/upgradeable Framework Laptops employ an open-source embedded controller (EC) firmware derived from Google's Chrome OS EC project. This is great for open-source fans and allows re-using much of the same Chrome OS EC software support that already exists. But there is also vendor-specific commands supported by the Framework Laptop EC and thus a dedicated Linux kernel driver is now being worked on for handling those vendor/device-specific features.

Cirrus engineers have seen a number of patches queued into the Linux sound subsystem's "for-next" branch for enabling audio support on some new laptops with the upcoming Linux 6.10 kernel cycle.

Synaptics this week published a big update to their out-of-tree graphics driver package for DisplayLink USB graphics.

Ahead of the Linux 6.9-rc7 kernel being released later today, some last minute pull requests for the week have enabled some new bits of hardware support where only new device IDs are necessary and thus safe to add at this late stage of Linux 6.9 development.

A patch recently posted to the Linux kernel mailing list is working on implementing ACPI Platform Profile support for modern Dell laptops to allow users to have more control over their balanced / cool / quiet / performance behavior of the laptop and its resulting impact on the fan noise / cooling performance.

Merged back in 2021 with Linux 5.13 was an NZXT Kraken hardware monitoring "HWMON" driver to support sensor monitoring of these all-in-one liquid cooling products from NZXT. Over time more NZXT Kraken AIO coolers have been supported by the Linux kernel and with the upcoming Linux 6.10 kernel the latest NZXT Kraken CPU coolers will be supported.

Last November the PCI-SIG announced CopprLink as the PCI Express cable name for both internal and external cabling. Today the embargo has lifted on the CopprLink cable specifications for both PCIe 5.0 and PCIe 6.0.

For now Fedora / Red Hat is not making any immediate changes, but the ever increasing sizes of required GPU firmware files is causing Linux distribution vendors to re-think including GPU kernel graphics drivers as part of the initramfs.

TUXEDO Computers a few weeks ago announced the first Linux laptop shipping with an AMD Ryzen 7 8840 series SoC and now they've announced another one powered by the latest Ryzen 7 8845HS.

Linux driver support is forthcoming for the ASUS ROG Raikiri gaming controller.

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.