Linux 6.6 LTS release – Highlights, Arm, RISC-V and MIPS architectures

Linux 6.6 release

The Linux 6.6 release has just been announced by Linus Torvalds on the Linux Kernel Mailing List (LKML): So this last week has been pretty calm, and I have absolutely no excuses to delay the v6.6 release any more, so here it is. There’s a random smattering of fixes all over, and apart from some bigger fixes to the r8152 driver, it’s all fairly small. Below is the shortlog for last week for anybody who really wants to get a flavor of the details. It’s short enough to scroll through. This obviously means that the merge window for 6.7 opens tomorrow, and I appreciate how many early pull requests I have lined up, with 40+ ready to go. That will make it a bit easier for me to deal with it, since I’ll be on the road for the first week of the merge window. Linus About two months ago, […]

Mixtile Cluster Box supports four Rockchip RK3588 SBCs connected over PCIe

Mixtile Cluster Box

The Mixtile Cluster Box is comprised of four Mixtile Blade 3 Pico-ITX single board computers each powered by a Rockchip RK3588 processor and connected over a 4-lane PCIe Gen3 interface through a U.2 to PCIe/SATA breakout board. We mentioned the Cluster Box last year, but Mixtile had few details about it at the time. The company has now released more technical information, worked on the software, and just launched the box for $339 (without the SBCs). Mixtile Cluster Box specifications: Supported SBCs – Up to 4x Mixtile Blade 3 with Rockchip RK3588, up to 32GB LPDDR4 each, up to 256GB eMMC flash each Control board running OpenWrt 22.03 SoC – MediaTek MT7620A MIPS processor @ 580 MHz System Memory 256 MB DDR2 Storage – 16 MB SPI Flash PCIe Switch – ASMedia ASM2824 with four PCIe 3.0 4-lane ports Storage interfaces via 4x U.2 breakout boards 4x NVMe M.2 M-Key […]

OpenWrt 23.05 released with MbedTLS by default, Rust packages, over 1,790 supported devices

OpenWrt 23.05

OpenWrt 23.05 open-source Linux operating system for routers and resource-constrained headless embedded systems has just been released with over 4300 commits since the release of OpenWrt 22.03 a little over a year ago. The new release now supports over 1790 devices or about over 200 new devices compared to the OpenWrt 22.03 release with notable new targets including the ipq807x target for the Qualcomm IPQ807x WiFi 6 SoCs, the mediatek/filogic subtarget for the Mediatek Filogic 830 and 630 SoCs, and the sifiveu target for the HiFive Unleashed and Unmatched RISC-V development boards. OpenWrt 23.05 switches from wolfSSL to MbedTLS as default because the latter has a much smaller footprint and offers a more stable ABI (application binary interface) and LTS releases, but it does lack support for TLS 1.3, so users who need the latter may still switch to wolfSSL if needed. Another highlight of the new OpenWrt release is […]

SECO Modular Vision HMI displays support Arm and x86 SMARC 2.1 modules

SECO Modular Vision SMARC HMI panel PC

SECO has unveiled a new HMI family of smart displays called the “Modular Vision” with NXP i.MX 93 (Arm), NXP i.MX 8M (Arm), or Intel Elkhart Lake (x86) powered SMARC 2.1-compliant system-on-modules and a display size ranging from 7-inch up to 15.6-inch. The goal is to offer a flexible platform to customers who can select various display sizes (7-inch, 10.1-inch, or 15.6-inch currently) and a SMARC module that closely matches the product’s requirements for example for a standalone panel PC. SECO Modular Vision key features and specifications: SoC 7-inch model – NXP i.MX93 single or dual-core Arm Cortex-A55 @ 1.7 GHz, Arm Cortex-M33 @ 250MHz, Arm Ethos U-65 microNPU 10.1-inch model – NXP i.MX 8M Plus dual or quad-core Arm Cortex-A53 @ 1.8 GHz, Arm Cortex-M7 @ 800MHz, optional GPU/VPU/2.3 TOPS NPU 15.6-inch model – Intel Atom x6000E, Pentium, and Celeron N and J Series  “Elkhart Lake” CPUs with Intel […]

LuckFox Pico Rockchip RV1103 Cortex-A7/RISC-V camera board comes with an optional Ethernet port

LuckFox Pico Plus Camera Board

LuckFox Pico is a small Linux camera board based on the Rockchip RV1103 Cortex-A7 and RISC-V AI camera SoC and offered with an Ethernet port in a longer version of the PCB called LuckFox Pico Plus. Both models come with 64MB RAM (apparently embedded in RV1103), a microSD card slot for storage, a MIPI CSI camera connector, a USB Type-C port for power, and a few through holes for expansion through GPIO, I2C, UART, and so on. LuckFox Pico and Pico Plus specifications: SoC – Rockchip RV1103 with Arm Cortex-A7 processor @ 1.2GHz, RISC-V core, 64MB DDR2, 0.8 TOPS NPU, 4M @ 30 fps USP Storage MicroSD card slot LuckFox Plus only – 1Gbit (128MB) SPI flash (W25N01GV) Camera – 2-lane MIPI CSI connector Networking (LuckFox Pico Plus only) – 10/100M Ethernet RJ45 port USB – USB 2.0 Host/Device Type-C port Expansion – 2x 20-pin headers with up to 24x […]

Linux 6.5 release – Notable changes, Arm, RISC-V and MIPS architectures

Linux 6.5 release

Linus Torvalds has just announced the release of Linux 6.5 on the Linux Kernel Mailing List (LKML): So nothing particularly odd or scary happened this last week, so there is no excuse to delay the 6.5 release. I still have this nagging feeling that a lot of people are on vacation and that things have been quiet partly due to that. But this release has been going smoothly, so that’s probably just me being paranoid. The biggest patches this last week were literally just to our selftests. The shortlog below is obviously not the 6.5 release log, it’s purely just the last week since rc7. Anyway, this obviously means that the merge window for 6.6 starts tomorrow. I already have ~20 pull requests pending and ready to go, but before we start the next merge frenzy, please give this final release one last round of testing, ok? Linus The earlier […]

Cool Pi Arm Linux Laptop with Rockchip RK3588 SoM sells for $358 and up.

Cool Pi Laptop

Cool Pi has put its CM5 Rockchip RK3588 system-on-module to good use by integrating it into a 14.1-inch laptop with 1920×1080 resolution running Android 12, Ubuntu 22.04, or other Linux distributions. The Cool Pi laptop comes with up to 32GB LPDDR4X memory, up to 256GB eMMC flash, features an M.2 socket for additional NVMe storage, as well as HDMI 2.1 video output and a USB-C port with DisplayPort Alt. mode to enable triple display setups with the laptop.   Cool Pi laptop specifications: System-on-Module – Cool Pi CM5 SoC – Rockchip RK3588 octa-core processor with 4x Cortex‑A76  cores @ up to 2.2 GHz, 4x Cortex‑A55 core @ 1.8 GHz Arm Mali-G610 MP4 “Odin” GPU @ 1.0 GHz Video decoder – 8Kp60 H.265, VP9, AVS2, 8Kp30 H.264 AVC/MVC, 4Kp60 AV1, 1080p60 MPEG-2/-1, VC-1, VP8 Video encoder – 8Kp30 H.265/H.264 video encoder 6 TOPS NPU System Memory – 4GB, 8GB, 16GB, or […]

TerraMaster F2-212 is a 2-Bay NAS powered by Realtek RTD1619B Arm Cortex-A55 SoC

TerraMaster F2-212

TerraMaster F2-212 is a 2-bay NAS powered by Realtek RTL1619B quad-core Cortex-A55 processor with support for support TRAID flexible disk array management tool, BTRFS file system, Snapshot, and TFSS disaster recovery tool. If you’ve never heard about TRAID (TerraMaster RAID) and TFSS (TerraMaster File System Snapshot) that may be because those are developed internally by TerraMaster as respectively a RAID solution with an automatic combination of disk space, hard disk failure redundancy protection, and automatic capacity expansion, and a BTRFS snapshot tool with support for COW (copy-on-write), filesystem level snapshots, custom snapshot schedules, and more. TerraMaster F2-212 specifications: SoC – Realtek RTD1619B quad-core Cortex-A55 processor @ up to 1.7 GHz System Memory – 1GB RAM Storage 2x SATA bays for 3.5-inch SATA HDD and/or 2.5-inch SATA SSD/HDD for up to 2x 22TB drives; hot swapping support File systems Internal Drive – BTRFS, EXT4 External Drive – EXT3, EXT4, NTFS, FAT32, […]

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