Armbian Ubuntu 23.04 can now run on Lenovo X13S Arm laptop

Lenovo X13S Arm Laptop Armbian

The Lenovo X13S Windows 11 Arm laptop based on a Qualcomm Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 processor can now run Armbian-built Ubuntu 23.04 Lunar images with GNOME or XFCE desktop environment. But before getting too excited note that this is a work-in-progress (WiP) port, so while it’s a nice development, there may be some issues. Let’s have a look at the available information. When laptop manufacturers started to sell Windows Arm laptops with Qualcomm processors, people wondered whether it would be possible to run Linux on the device, and a community formed around the idea of porting Linux to the Windows Arm laptops, and that gave rise to projects such as Aarch64 laptop. But the latter has not had any activity for a couple of years, and all the supported laptops are only partially supported. But Ricardo Pardini did some work to create an Armbian build for the Lenovo ThinkPad X13S […]

Arm: “Panfrost is now the GPU driver for the Linux community”

Arm Panfrost Linux

Arm is now saying that “in effect, Panfrost is now the GPU driver for the Linux community” after having extended and expanded the collaboration with Collabora for the development of the open-source Panfrost driver for Arm Mali GPUs, following their first official collaboration in the fall of 2020. Arm goes even as far as to claim that “through the Arm and Collabora partnership, device manufacturers can confidently choose SoCs containing a Mali GPU regardless of the software operating system (OS) and graphics middleware… delivering a high-quality open-source Linux implementation which can be used in their products”. Collabora confirmed the new partnership saying Arm will be instrumental in getting Vulkan support in Panfrost alongside the existing OpenGL and OpenGL ES implementations. Going forward that means SBC vendors will have no excuse for not getting 3D graphics acceleration working on Linux with Panfrost when using an Arm SoC with a recent Mali […]

Mekotronics A58 – A 7-inch display with Rockchip RK3588 SoC and a DSLR camera mount for live streaming

7-inch RK3588 display attached to a DSLR camera

Mekotronics A58 7-inch smart display is powered by a Rockchip RK3588 SoC with up to 16GB RAM and 128GB eMMC flash, and ships with a DSLR camera mount to enable video broadcasting and live streaming on social platforms. In the past, we’ve covered several Rockchip RK3588-powered Arm mini PCs by Mekotronics such as the R58, R58X, and more recently the R58X-Pro and R58X-HDD models, but the company has now leveraged its experience with the platform by launching a 7-inch smart display that can be used for live-streaming, but as we’ll see from the specifications below can also find many other uses. Mekotronics A58 specifications: SoC – Rockchip RK3588 octa-core processor with four Cortex-A76 cores @ 2.4 GHz, four Cortex-A55 cores @ 1.8 GHz, an Arm Mali-G610 MP4 GPU, a 6TOPS NPU, 8K 10-bit decoder, 8K encoder System Memory – 4GB, 8GB, or 16GB LPDDR4X Storage 32GB, 64GB, or 128GB eMMC […]

AMD Versal Premium VP1902 SoC FPGA provides 18.5M logic cells for SoC emulation and prototyping

AMD Versal Premium VP1902 Adaptive SoC

AMD Versal Premium VP1902 adaptive system-on-chip (SoC) is said to be the world’s largest adaptive SoC with the FPGA providing 18.5 million logic cells in order to streamline the verification of complex ASIC and SoC designs. The new AMD Embedded SoC FPGA offers twice the capacity of the previous generation Virtex UltraScale+ VU19P SoC FPGA and is significantly larger than the Intel Stratix 10 GX 10M FPGA with 10 million logic cells. AMD Versal Premium VP1902 highlights: 18.5 million (18,504K) system logic cells, 8,460K LUTs 6,864 DSP engines Dual-core Arm scalar processors 2x Arm Cortex-A72 application processor 2x Arm Cortex-R5F real-time processor Memory 14x hardened DDR memory controllers 239 Mbit Block RAM 619 Mbit UltraRAM Up to 160 high-speed serial transceivers, including up to 32x 112Gbps PAM-4 GTMs and up to 128x 32.75Gbps GTYPs 2,328 SelectIO resources capable of operating at up to 3.2 Gbps Integrated hard IP – 16x […]

Linux 6.4 release – Main changes, Arm, RISC-V and MIPS architectures

Linux 6.4 release

Linux 6.4 has just been released by Linus Torvalds on the Linux Kernel Mailing List (LKML): Hmm. Final week of 6.4 is done, and we’ve mainly got some netfilter fixes, some mm reverts, and a few tracing updates. There’s random small changes elsewhere: the usual architecture noise, a number of selftest updates, some filesystem fixes (btrfs, ksmb), etc. Most of the stuff in my mailbox the last week has been about upcoming things for 6.5, and I already have 15 pull requests pending. I appreciate all you proactive people. But that’s for tomorrow. Today we’re all busy build-testing the newest kernel release, and checking that it’s all good. Right? Released around two months ago, Linux 6.3 brought us AMD’s “automatic IBRS” Spectre defense mechanism, additional progress on the Rust front with User-mode Linux support (on x86-64 systems only), the NFS filesystem (both the client and server sides) gained support for […]

Station P2S Rockchip RK3568 mini PC adds support for 4G LTE cellular connectivity

Rockchip RK3568 mini PC 4G LTE

Firefly’s Station P2S mini PC is a new variant of the Station P2 based on Rockchip RK3568 Cortex-A55 SoC that adds support for 4G LTE cellular data connectivity, but downgrades to WiFi 5 instead of WiFi 6, but only supports shorter M.2 2242 NVMe SSDs. The Station P2S still comes with up to 8GB RAM, 128GB eMMC flash, and supports dual Gigabit Ethernet, HDMI 2.0 4Kp60 video output, 2.5-inch SATA 3.0 storage, and integrates a few USB 3.0/2.0 ports, plus an RJ45 jack for RS232 and RS485 serial interfaces. Station P2S specifications: SoC – Rockchip RK3568 quad-core Cortex-A55 processor @ up to 2.0 GHz with Arm Mali-G52 2EE GPU with support for OpenGL ES 1.1/2.0/3.2, OpenCL 2.0, Vulkan 1.1, 1.0 TOPS NPU for AI acceleration, 4Kp60 H.265/H.264/VP9 video decoding, and 1080p60 H.265/H.264 video encoding System Memory – 2GB, 4GB, or 8GB LPDDR4 Storage 32GB, 64GB, or 128GB eMMC flash 1x […]

Debian 12 “Bookworm” released with Linux 6.1

Debian 12 Bookworm

Debian 12 “Bookworm” operating system has been released with an update to Linux 6.1 LTS and a new non-free-firmware repository making it possible to separate non-free firmware from the other non-free packages. This follows the Debian 11 “Bullseye” release in August 2021, and the version of Debian will serve as the base for other Linux operating systems such as Ubuntu and derivates, Raspberry Pi OS, and so on. Debian 12 can be downloaded on a choice of desktop environments, namely Gnome 43, KDE Plasma 5.27, LXDE 11, LXQt 1.2.0, MATE 1.26, and Xfce 4.18. Bookworm includes a total of 64,419 packages many of which have been updated the to latest version. Nine architectures are supported by Debian 12 “Bookworm”: 32-bit PC (i386) and 64-bit PC (amd64) 64-bit ARM (arm64) ARM EABI (armel) ARMv7 (EABI hard-float ABI, armhf) little-endian MIPS (mipsel) 64-bit little-endian MIPS (mips64el) 64-bit little-endian PowerPC (ppc64el) IBM System […]

Arm unveils Cortex-X4, Cortex-A720, Cortex-A520 CPUs, Immortalis-720 GPU

Arm Cortex-X4 Immortalis-G720 SoC block diagram

Arm has just announced the new Total Compute Solutions 2023 (TCS23) with Cortex-X4, Cortex-A720, and Cortex-A520 Armv9.2 CPU cores, and the 5th generation (i.e. no Valhall) Immortalis-720 GPU that will initially be found in SoC for premium smartphones and laptops before reaching the other markets over the years. The announcement follows TCS22 platform announced in June 2022 with Cortex-X3, Cortex-A715 and 510 cores plus the Immortalis-715 GPU that was eventually found in the MediaTek Dimensity 9200 SoC integrated into OPPO and Vivo smartphones, and the new TCS23 CPU cores offer up to 15% performance improvement, 40% higher efficiency, while the Immortalis-720 GPU offers similar performance and efficiency improvements on the graphics front. A typical TCS23 mobile SoC will have a Cortex-X4 premium core, a few Cortex-A720 high-performance cores, and a few Cortex-A520 efficiency cores managed by the new DynamIQ Shared Unit DSU-120 capable of handling up to 14 cores in […]

UP 7000 x86 SBC