drivers News - CNX Software - Embedded Systems News

July 15, 2026July 15, 2026 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 7 Comments

Reverse-engineering brings RK3576 NPU support to open-source Rocket driver for mainline Linux

Back in 2024, we noted that the open-source driver for RK3588’s NPU by Tomeu Vizoso delivered decent performance for object detection. Since then, good progress has been made, and it’s now known as the Rocket driver in mainline Linux. However, the Rockchip RK3576 SoC is not supported by the Rocket driver in mainline yet, despite sharing a similar NPU. The good news is that Ga Hing Woo has been working on mainline Linux support for the Rockchip RK3576 NPU using the Rocket driver stack and has tested the updates on the Radxa ROCK 4D running Linux 7.1-rc5. This required some serious reverse-engineering work due to hidden registers not documented in the TRM. Ga Hing Woo (also written as Jiaxing Hu) sent us an email explaining some of the challenges: Single int8 convolution now comes out byte-exact against a CPU reference on the open stack. Getting there meant reverse-engineering the compute […]

June 13, 2026June 13, 2026 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 13 Comments

Espressif ESP32-E22 WiFi 6E module gets Wi-Fi CERTIFIED certificate, open-source WiFi and Bluetooth Linux drivers

The ESP32-E22 tri-band Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.4 module has received a Wi-Fi CERTIFIED certificate from the Wi-Fi Alliance, and Espressif has also released WiFi and Bluetooth Linux drivers for the chip. The ESP32-E22 was first unveiled at CES 2026 with a dual-core RISC-V processor clocked at up to 500 MHz, 1MB RAM, tri-band WiFi 6E tested up to 2.1 Gbps with iperf, and dual-mode Bluetooth 5.4/6.0. While it also features 41 GPIO pins, it’s not mainly designed for IoT projects, but instead targets host-based wireless systems needing WiFi 6E / Bluetooth 5.4 connectivity through PCIe 2.0 or SDIO interfaces. In other words, the ESP32-E22 will likely show on M.2 modules, competing against similar products from MediaTek and Intel. Espressif has not said which module was tested for the Wi-Fi CERTIFIED certificate, but I suspect it should be the upcoming ESP32-E22-M2-1 M.2 module listed on the company’s website. From the certificate, […]

February 20, 2026February 20, 2026 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 8 Comments

MediaTek MT7902 wireless chipset finally gets a Linux driver

MediaTek MT7902 wireless modules are used in many Windows laptops, but so far, a Linux driver has been missing. This is about to change, as Mediatek has finally committed a patchset for MT7902 to the mainline Linux mailing list. This is personal. I bought an ASUS Vivobook 16 in August 2023, and Ubuntu 22.04 worked pretty well out of the box, except for support for the Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth module, detected as “Network controller: MEDIATEK Corp. Device 7902” with lscpi but without working drivers. Since then, I’ve been using the laptop connected to the USB dock with Ethernet support when at home, or using USB tethering with my phone when on the road. I initially thought it might just be a matter of time before the driver is ported to Linux, but it took well over two years. I was far from being alone in my ordeal, and you […]

December 18, 2025December 18, 2025 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 19 Comments

Radxa Dragon Q6A Arm SBC gets official Windows 11 preview

While most people use Linux on Arm SBCs, it’s typically possible to run Windows 11 on Arm boards with UEFI support, but with caveats such as the GPU and VPU not working and other issues. One solution is to avoid the Arm architecture altogether and go with an x86 SBC like the Radxa X4, ODROID-H4+, or LattePanda IOTA, among others. But things may change for the better now that Qualcomm SBCs are becoming a thing, and Radxa has just announced official Windows support for the Radxa Dragon Q6A. Note that it is only a preview image for now. Nevertheless, here’s what is working without installing additional drivers on Windows 11: HDMI output (inherited from UEFI GOP) PCIe – Note: NVMe available; system does not include network card drivers eMMC flash UFS USB 2.0 USB 3.0, but devices must be connected before booting into the system But once you install drivers, […]

December 1, 2025December 12, 2025 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 8 Comments

Linux 6.18 LTS release – Main changes, Arm, RISC-V, and MIPS architectures

Linus Torvalds has just announced the release of Linux 6.18 on the Linux Kernel Mailing List (LKML), which will likely become the next LTS kernel [update: it’s now official]: So I’ll have to admit that I’d have been happier with slightly less bugfixing noise in this last week of the release, but while there’s a few more fixes than I would hope for, there was nothing that made me feel like this needs more time to cook. So 6.18 is tagged and pushed out. Most of the last-minute fixes are minor fixes to drivers, with some random noise elsewhere (bluetooth, ceph, afs..). Nothing strikes me as standing out, but hey, there’s a shortlog appended if you want to see the details. And this obviously means that the merge window will open tomorrow, and I already have three dozen pull requests pending. Thanks. And as I already mentioned a couple of […]

November 18, 2025November 18, 2025 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 12 Comments

The Librephone project aims to remove proprietary blobs from smartphones running an open-source OS

Some of you may already be running an open-source operating system on your smartphone, which could be Android-based, such as LineageOS, GrapheneOS, and e/OS, or Linux-based like postmarketOS and Ubuntu Touch. However, due to closed-source firmware files/proprietary blobs, you’re only running a partially open-source OS. The Free Software Foundation aims to change that with the Librephone project, whose goal is to reverse-engineer nonfree blobs and provide open-source alternatives. Some proprietary blobs are used to run WiFi, Bluetooth, 4G LTE/5G modems, touchscreen, fingerprint sensor, and other hardware. So it won’t be a trivial task, as serious reverse-engineering work is needed and done in a clean-room way to prevent copyright lawsuits, plus there may be regulatory issues with the code handling the radios\ frequency and power from the FTC and other governmental agencies around the world. To be clear, the Librephone project won’t be another operating system, and the only goal is […]

March 27, 2025March 27, 2025 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 6 Comments

FourThirdsEye is an open-source hardware 10.7MP IMX294 camera module for the Raspberry Pi 5/CM4

FourThirdEyes IMX294 camera module Raspberry Pi 5

Will Whang’s FourThirdsEye project is an open-source hardware camera module designed for Raspberry Pi 5 SBC and Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 SoM using a Sony IMX294 Type 4/3 CMOS image sensor. The camera module can capture 10.7 MP images and 4K (4096 x 2160) videos with improved low-light performance and dynamic range (4.63 μm pixel size) compared to existing Raspberry Pi camera modules. Will claims it’s perfect for photography enthusiasts, developers, and makers who want a more powerful camera for their Raspberry Pi projects. FourThirdsEye camera module specifications: Sony IMX294 sensor Output image size – Diagonal 21.63 mm (Type 4/3) aspect ratio 17:9 & 4:3 Number of effective pixels 4168 (H) × 2176 (V) approx. 8.93M pixels (aspect ratio 17:9) 3792 (H) × 2824 (V) approx. 10.71M pixels (aspect ratio 4:3) Unit cell size – 4.63 μm (H) × 4.63 μm (V) Optical blacks Horizontal – Front: 0 pixels, […]

May 13, 2024 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 2 Comments

Linux 6.9 release – Main changes, Arm, RISC-V, and MIPS architectures

Linus Torvalds has just announced the release of Linux 6.9 on LKML: So Thorsten is still reporting a few regression fixes that haven’t made it to me yet, but none of them look big or worrisome enough to delay the release for another week. We’ll have to backport them when they get resolved and hit upstream. So 6.9 is now out, and last week has looked quite stable (and the whole release has felt pretty normal). Below is the shortlog for the last week, with the changes mostly being dominated by some driver updates (gpu and networking being the big ones, but “big” is still pretty small, and there’s various other driver noise in there too). Outside of drivers, it’s some filesystem fixes (bcachefs still stands out, but ksmbd shows up too), some late selftest fixes, and some core networking fixes. And I now have a more powerful arm64 machine […]