Hardware News Archives

While not as popular as their Snapdragon SoCs, Qualcomm has been offering their Cloud AI line of accelerators for scalable AI inference. The current flagship is the Qualcomm Cloud AI 100 Ultra as a 150 Watt rated PCIe Gen4 x16 card for up to 870 TOPS INT8 performance, 576MB of SRAM, and 128GB LPR4x memory. But given the latest open-source Linux driver patch activity, Cloud AI 200 "AIC200" wares are on the way.

For those wanting to run Coreboot or Coreboot-derived firmware on a modern desktop motherboard with good performance and features, the main contender currently is 3mdeb's Dasharo downstream that can be flashed on the MSI PRO Z790-P/Z790-P motherboards for using with Intel Core Alder Lake and Raptor Lake processors. Firmware consulting firm 3mdeb today published a new Dasharo firmware update for the MSI PRO Z790-P WIFI motherboard.

IBM engineers announced they are deprecating the upstream CXL and CXLFLASH Linux kernel drivers with plans to then remove the drivers from the mainline kernel the following cycle. Before getting too worked up when seeing the "cxl: Deprecate driver" patch, this is about the Coherent Accelerator Processor Interface (CAPI) that predates the Compute Express Link.

New Linux patches from Huawei engineers are preparing new driver support for controlling High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) with the ARM-based Kunpeng high performance SoC.

Along with the staging changes, Greg Kroah-Hartman this morning also sent out the USB/Thunderbolt changes for the nearly-over Linux 6.13 merge window.

In prior years the Free Software Foundation (FSF) has published an Ethical Tech Giving Guide for holiday shopping where they recommend products like old AMD Opteron motherboards and USB to parallel printer cables that "respect your freedoms" and meet their strict free software definitions. Out today is their newest annual FSF Ethical Tech Giving Guide.

Google engineer Ricardo Ribalda has proposed a set of patches for the common "uvcvideo" kernel driver that supports UVC-compliant web cameras and the like to provide granular power saving support.

The RDMA subsystem updates were sent out last Friday for the ongoing Linux 6.13 kernel cycle. Most notable with the RDMA updates is the NVIDIA Mellanox "MLX5" network driver introducing a new Data Direct Placement (DDP) feature to further help with performance.

Sent out today were the big set of PCI subsystem updates ready to be merged for the Linux 6.13 kernel. Most notable of the PCI updates is PCI Express TLP Processing Hints (TPH) with that kernel support worked on by AMD engineers as part of one of the new hardware features found with the AMD EPYC 9005 server processors. Over on the Intel side is the new PCIe cooling driver and other changes.

The x86 platform driver updates were merged this week for the in-development Linux 6.13 and include some nice refinements, especially for those using AMD Ryzen on Linux.

The four pull requests adding various SoC and board/platform support have now been merged for the Linux 6.13 kernel. This includes support for many older Apple iPad/iPhones, supporting another SoC with a combination of RISC-V and ARM cores, and a wide variety of other mostly ARM hardware support.

The Error Detection And Correction (EDAC) subsystem updates landed this week for the ongoing Linux 6.13 kernel merge window.

Linux 6.13 has merged support for the Secure Digital Ultra Capacity "SDUC" standard for 2TB to 128TB storage capacity SD cards.

The HID subsystem updates have been submitted for the Linux 6.13 kernel cycle.

Ahead of SC24, MiTAC Computing has published their open-source firmware for their Open Compute Project (OCP) designed Capri2 AMD EPYC server. This open-source firmware stack makes use of AMD's in-development openSIL for open-source CPU silicon initialization.

Following the proposed patches this week to adjust the Linux kernel's module loader to treat the TUXEDO Computers drivers as proprietary due to being GPLv3 licensed rather than GPLv2 to jive with the rest of the upstream kernel code, some of the TUXEDO drivers have now been re-licensed.

Patches posted on Thursday for the Linux kernel add support for the newest hotkey being found on Lenovo ThinkPad laptops... The "Phone Link" hotkey for launching the Microsoft Phone Link software for linking your Android/iOS smartphone to your laptop. This hotkey can be adapted for similar purposes on Linux.

A new patch series posted today to the Linux kernel mailing list would block kernel modules/drivers from TUXEDO Computers from accessing GPL-only symbols in the kernel.

Framework Computer has been promoting a RISC-V motherboard option for their Framework Laptop 13 to complement their existing Intel Core and AMD Ryzen motherboard options. This RISC-V motherboard is being developed in cooperation with DeepComputing. Early access pricing and more details on this quad-core StarFive JH7110 powered mainboard for the Framework 13 have now been announced.

Memtest86+ 7.0 debuted back in January while now as we approach the end of 2024, Memtest86+ 7.20 is now available as the latest significant update to this open-source memory tester commonly used on Intel and AMD systems.

Upstreamed at the start of the year was the Imagination PowerVR open-source DRM kernel driver for newer Imagination Rogue GPUs. That upstream kernel driver is now being extended to cover the Imagination BXS-4-64 MC1 GPU.

Merged back in 2019 was the Fieldbus subsystem as a set of network protocols for real-time distributed control of automated industrial systems. But now five years later, Fieldbus is being removed from the mainline Linux kernel since the code hasn't been maintained.

Due to the possibility of DMA attacks from connected Thunderbolt devices, Linux and other platforms have built up safeguards over the years and different security levels for Thunderbolt to better protect systems having this high speed interface exposing PCIe. With the upcoming Linux 6.13 kernel, the logic of the kernel is being enhanced to better detect and trust built-in Thunderbolt controllers.

Select newer Dell/Alienware laptops with a "WMAX" thermal interface will see ACPI Platform Profile support now exposed with the upcoming Linux 6.13 cycle.

For the past year Intel software engineers have been developing a PCIe cooling driver to reduce the PCIe link speed to cope with thermal issues. In the future with PCI Express 6.0 this driver may be further adapted to also reduce the PCIe link width when encountering thermal problems. This cooling driver is now ready for merging with the upcoming Linux 6.13 kernel.

Submitted today were a set of x86 platform driver fixes for merging ahead of the Linux 6.12-rc5 release due out on Sunday. For the most part mostly mundane fixes. But notable is an ASUS WMI fix to address the Core Ultra 200V "Lunar Lake" performance issue I've pointed out now in several articles.

Qualcomm has upstreamed the audio firmware for the Qualcomm Snapdragon X1 "X1E80100" series laptop SoCs to linux-firmware.git.

Merged back in 2019 was the Fieldbus system for connecting different systems/components/instruments within industrial environments. Five years later the code isn't being well maintained and looks like it will be on its way out the door if no one steps up to better maintain this driver support for industrial systems for process automation.

Sent out overnight were a few input subsystem patches ahead of the Linux 6.12-rc4 kernel release tomorrow. Notable from this pull is adding input support for the MSI Claw A1M gaming handheld as well as the 8BitDo Ultimate 2C Wireless gaming controller.

For those that happen to have a Corsair Void headset or are looking for a new gaming headset this upcoming holiday season, the upcoming Linux 6.13 kernel cycle is expected to merge a new driver for these wired and wireless PC gaming headsets.

With a number of patches queued this week into the staging tree ahead of the Linux 6.13 kernel, a number of old and no longer maintained hardware drivers are set to be removed in the next kernel cycle.

Originally published last summer were patches from Intel for the Linux kernel to introduce a PCI Express bandwidth controller Linux driver to provide a PCIe cooling mechanism via bandwidth reduction to devices in order to prevent thermal issues. One year later this driver continues to be worked on and today brought the eighth iteration of these patches.

Following work last month for extending the Dell WMI sysman Linux driver to handle Alienware systems for managing the system BIOS within the confines of Linux, another separate improvement is on the way for enhancing Alienware hardware support under Linux. This newest effort is introducing the "dell-wmi-awcc" driver for handling functionality found under Windows with the Alienware Command Center.

OpenRazer 3.9 is out today as the newest version of this community project providing open-source driver support for Razer peripherals on Linux. This out-of-tree set of Linux kernel drivers allows for various Razer devices to be configured and fully leveraged under Linux.

The Qualcomm Cloud AI 100 accelerator caters to a variety of edge-to-cloud industries. While the Qualcomm Cloud AI hardware isn't talked about as much as the AI accelerators from other vendors, there is the QAIC driver within the mainline Linux kernel for supporting the Cloud AI 100 along with associated open-source compiler and user-space stack. It turns out the Qualcomm Cloud AI family is growing with a Cloud AI 80 "AIC080" accelerator coming to market at a lower-cost.

If you have been trying out Linux 6.12-rc1 or a recent Linux Git snapshot and discovered your laptop's touchpad is no longer working, you are far from alone. The good news is the issue has been quickly tracked down and has led to a new input driver being reverted.

With the third quarter drawing to a close, here's a look back at the most popular Linux/open-source related content for the quarter. This quarter there's been more than 730 news articles and 50 Linux hardware reviews / featured benchmark articles all written by your's truly covering a range of areas.

The x86 platform driver changes that were merged last week for the Linux 6.12 kernel continue to be quite lively with changes for enhancing Linux laptop support along with other Intel platform improvements.

The hardware monitoring "HWMON" subsystem updates for Linux 6.12 added some new drivers as well as adding new device support to some of the existing drivers.

The LoongArch architecture support for these Chinese processors continue seeing better support with the upstream Linux kernel.

Ahead of the Linux 6.12 merge window wrapping up this weekend with the Linux 6.12-rc1 release, merged on Friday were all of the Compute Express Link (CXL) updates for the new kernel.

The input subsystem updates merged this week bring a number of improvements to existing drivers while adding one new input driver.

Similar to the ACPI CPUFreq and AMD/Intel P-State CPU frequency scaling driver and scaling governor benchmarks and power efficiency comparisons I routinely do on Phoronix, when recently having the Supermicro AmpereOne server in the lab with the 192-core A192-32X processor, I carried out some CPPC CPUFreq schedutil vs. performance governor benchmarks for curiosity and reference purposes while looking at the performance and power efficiency.

Patches for wiring up async device shutdown within the Linux kernel were queued via the driver core branch for the in-development Linux 6.12 kernel. However, at the last minute these asynchronous device shutdown patches were reverted so that they can be reworked and hopefully land for the Linux v6.13 kernel in the new year.

The USB/Thunderbolt subsystem updates were submitted today for the Linux 6.12 kernel merge window along with the other areas of the kernel overseen by Greg Kroah-Hartman. A new USB driver is the 9p network gadget driver that has been in development for quite a while and aims to help ease embedded Linux device development.

The Dell-WMI-Sysman driver on Linux allows for managing BIOS settings from within Linux using sysfs. This dell-wmi-sysman kernel driver supports most Dell platforms from 2018 and newer for convenient BIOS management.

The PCI changes for the in-development Linux 6.12 kernel add support for Native PCIe Enclosure Management "NPEM" as a code contribution by Intel for implementing the PCIe spec to standardize storage LEDs.

While not as exciting as some of the shiny new features for Linux 6.12 like real-time going mainline and Lunar Lake and Battlemage graphics by default, the Firewire (IEEE-1394) subsystem has seen some significant alterations this cycle. With Firewire hardware increasingly rare, the maintainer is hoping to get this Linux 6.12 code better tested by the community.

The Haiku open-source operating project known for letting the BeOS spirit live on is out with their newest monthly progress report.

Following the other recent work around Linux enablement for Snapdragon X1 powered laptops, yesterday patches were posted for getting the X1 Elite powered Dell XPS 9345 working with Linux but not all functionality is currently working.