Showing headlines posted by bob

Overnight Linux creator Linus Torvalds wrote another well crafted message that reaffirms the Linux kernel position of not being against AI and lashing back against some kernel developers that are against AI/LLM usage within the kernel project...

Clintech has launched a Crowd Supply campaign for the Clintech Pico Board, an open-hardware microcontroller board based on Raspberry Pi’s RP2354B. The board retains the 51 × 21mm Raspberry Pi Pico footprint while exposing all 48 GPIOs available from the larger RP2354B package. The RP2354B combines dual 150MHz Arm Cortex-M33 cores with dual Hazard3 RISC-V […]

The FreeBSD Foundation's Laptop Support and Usability Project, which has received more than $750k USD in funding to improve the experience of FreeBSD on laptops, is out with its newest monthly progress report. A lot continues to happen for improving the FreeBSD laptop story, which in many aspects also benefits FreeBSD on the desktop too...

Earlier this month on Phoronix I reviewed the Razer Blade 18 RZ09-0582 as the first laptop Razer is certifying for Linux use via Canonical's hardware certification program for Linux. It offered very nice performance with the Intel Core Ultra 9 290HX Plus and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 graphics albeit costly with a configured price of $5399 USD. That review featured benchmarks on Ubuntu 26.04 LTS but for those wondering about the performance of Ubuntu against Windows 11 on this gaming/AI developer laptop, here are comparison benchmarks plus also tossing in the rolling-release CachyOS distribution.

Back in May OpenCL 3.1 was announced with a focus on AI and HPC workloads. Just over two months later, this incremental update over OpenCL 3.0 mow has its first listed conformant OpenCL 3.1 implementation for passing the OpenCL 3.1 conformance test suite cases. It's Apple Silicon M1/M2 graphics running on Asahi Linux with the Mesa Rusticl driver...

System76 today announced their new Adder Pro laptop that they are promoting as the "gamer's dream machine" with its NVIDIA graphics, 2K OLED 500 nit display, up to 96GB RAM, and 3.37 lb weight...

As of this past week in the FreeBSD source tree for FreeBSD 16, the last of the GNU GPL licensed code from the base system has been retired...

Stemming from looking at a proposed Linux kernel patch to alter the Linux kernel's system call number handling, veteran Linux kernel developer Thomas Gleixner went down a rabbit hole of the kernel's system call entry handling to make a number of clean-ups and improvements to the code. That rework to the system call entry handling is now expected to land for the Linux 7.3 kernel cycle...

Alfonso Siciliano, who has been one of the FreeBSD developers leading the effort on adding a KDE-based desktop option to the FreeBSD installer, provided an update on recent work around adding integrating this desktop option...

While the Raspberry Pi 5 is already over two and a half years old, one of the missing elements of its support from the mainline Linux kernel has been the IOMMU driver. We are now seeing Raspberry Pi's downstream IOMMU driver being adapted for mainline with hopes of getting it into the upstream kernel...

Following the recent GA of the AWS M9g series as the first instances powered by the new Graviton5 CPUs, I recently ran benchmarks looking at Graviton4 vs. Graviton5 CPU performance. There was very nice generational gains for the new AWS Graviton processors with the shift from Arm Neoverse-V2 to Neoverse-V3 cores and from DDR5-5600 to DDR5-8800 memory, among other improvements. For those wondering how the Graviton5 ARM server processors compare to AMD EPYC and Intel Xeon, here are some additional comparison data points from the Amazon EC2 cloud.

F&S Elektronik Systeme GmbH has showcased the armStone MX8ULP, a Pico-ITX single board computer based on the NXP i.MX 8ULP processor. The 100 × 72 mm platform targets industrial, IoT, and human-machine interface applications, combining low-power processing, real-time capabilities, and multiple connectivity options. The armStone MX8ULP integrates the NXP i.MX 8ULP SoC, which combines two […]

Similar to Linux 7.2 enabling Eswin SoC support by default in the RISC-V "defconfig" kernel build, UltraRISC RISC-V coverage is also now being enabled by default for RISC-V kernel builds in Linux 7.2...

Linux 7.2-rc3 is now available for testing in working toward the stable Linux 7.2 kernel version coming up in August...

The staging driver fixes that were sent out this week ahead of the Linux 7.2-rc3 release is predominantly made up of hardening the Realtek RTL8723BS WiFi driver. In particular, a number of fixes for addressing out-of-bounds behavior when connecting to "bad" WiFi hosts...

HackerBox has released Issue 0128, titled “Mesh Deck,” a DIY communications platform built around a ProMicro nRF52840 development board, an SX1262-based LoRa module, a GPS receiver, an OLED display, and a miniature QWERTY keyboard. The kit focuses on assembling and configuring a portable Meshtastic node for decentralized messaging without cellular or internet service. The main […]

The Harmonic Firmware Initiative "HFI" is trying to provide a generic, standardized power-on firmware experience for RISC-V boards. Akin to the x86 world with having immediate graphics card initialization to provide a display while the system is booting and also having a BIOS setup utility for system configuration, HFI is trying to do the same for the RISC-V world...

KDE developers continue to be very busy this summer landing more features for the upcoming Plasma 6.8 desktop...

Debian 13.6 is out today as the newest point release of Debian Trixie to ship the latest security fixes and other maintenance updates...

Microsoft has officially unveiled Azure Linux 4.0, the latest version of its open-source Linux distribution designed for cloud infrastructure, enterprise workloads, and modern data centers. Formerly known as CBL-Mariner, Azure Linux has powered Microsoft's internal cloud services for years, but version 4.0 marks its biggest evolution yet by becoming a general-purpose server operating system that organizations can deploy both inside and outside Azure.