SBC News

The beauty of Open Source is that we can reuse code written by many other people, keep their authorship, and credit them for their work, without needing to reinvent anything! View the full article

Part steadfast approach - part welcoming spirirt; Collabora continues to successfully expand with new talent amply on deck. Well ahead of the remote work curve, our new joiners have settled into their roles from their respective corners of the planet. View the full article

Our recent efforts on the Hantro kernel driver have resulted in the addition of H.264 decoding support and multiple performance improvements. We are now introducing High Efficiency Video Coding, also known as H.265, decoding support on NXP's i.MX8 M. View the full article

Rockchip SoCs, notably the RK3399, are popular in devices such as Chromebooks and single-board computers. Indeed, they bring some interesting features, one of them being the Arm Frame Buffer Compression (AFBC). View the full article

Getting PanVk, an open source driver for Arm Mali Midgard and Bifrost GPUs, closer to conformancy by implementing one of the core Vulkan features: support for secondary command buffers. View the full article

Prior to joining Collabora, I took part in Round 17 of the Outreachy internships, to work on the virtual drivers in the media subsystem of the Linux kernel, or more specifically, on the vicodec driver. View the full article

Earlier this year, from January to April 2021, I worked on adding support for stateless decoders for GStreamer as part of a multimedia internship at Collabora. Here's a recap of this completed work. View the full article

Collabora is proud to sponsor this year's annual GStreamer conference, taking place in London, UK. Join us as we showcase the latest with machine learning analytics, WirePlumber, and more. View the full article

The testing ecosystem in the Linux kernel has been steadily growing, but are efforts sufficiently coordinated? How can we help developers and maintainers integrate code more efficiently? How can we mitigate maintainer burnout? View the full article

A student intership experience at Collabora View the full article

Collabora is proud to sponsor this year's annual Debian conference, taking place in Brest, France. Join us as we showcase the latest with Apertis, discuss Debian running on mobile devices, and more. View the full article

Next week, Collaborans including Julian Bouzas and Enric Balletbò i Serra will be in Paris to participate in the 3rd edition of Embedded Recipes and 8th edition of Kernel Recipes View the full article

Now included in our Debian images & available via our GitLab, you can build a complete, working BL31 (Boot Loader stage 3.1), and replace the closed binary blob with an open-source binary that anyone can compile. View the full article

With only a few months passing since our last new joiner update, it should come as no surprise that the Collabora crowd has expanded yet again. Our flexible disposition affords us an exceptional bunch to onboard when opportunity knocks, but also leaves room to hear new voices as we shape our path forward. View the full article

Google Open Source has announced their 2020 first quarter Google Open Source Peer Bonus winners, and Alyssa Rosenzweig, Software Engineer at Collabora, is among the recipients! View the full article

Join us on June 18 for our low-latency ML video analytics demo on the Ryzen AI Max 300 Series at the AMD Embedded Computing Summit! View the full article

We’ll be in Frankfurt this Thursday for the AMD Embedded Computing Summit! See a live demo of our AI Magic Mirror for a touchless, real-time experience. View the full article

Did you know you could run a permissively-licensed MTP implementation with minimal dependencies on an embedded device? Here's a step-by-step guide on how to easily run cmtp-responder on a Rock Pi 4 or any other board equipped with a UDC. View the full article

Interested in learning more about low-level specifics of the eBPF stack? Read on as we take a deep dive, from its VM mechanisms and tools, to running traces on remote, resource-constrained embedded devices. View the full article

The second part of this series takes a more in-depth look at the eBPF VM and program studied in the first part. Having this low level knowledge is not mandatory but can be a very useful foundation for the rest of the series. View the full article

In part 1 and 2 of this series, we took a condensed in-depth look at the eBPF VM. In part 3, we define the high-level components of an eBPF program, including the backend, loader, frontend and data structures. View the full article

Now that we've studied the mainstream way of developing and using eBPF programs on top of the low-level VM mechanisms, we'll look at projects taking different approaches, attempting solutions to some of the unique problems faced by embedded Linux. View the full article

Up until now, talking in-depth about userspace tracing was deliberately avoided because it merits special treatment, hence this part devoted to it. We'll now look at the why of it, and we'll examine eBPF user tracing in two categories: static and dynamic. View the full article

Initcalls, which serve to call functions during boot, were implemented early on in the development of the Linux Kernel. Read on as we take a closer look, including their purpose, their usage, ways to debug them (using initcall_debug or FTrace), and more. View the full article

During the past few months significant progress has been made on the Open Source Arm Mali GPU driver front, culminating in the Panfrost driver targeting Mali T and G-series of GPUs being available now. View the full article

This summer, Christoph Haag and I had the pleasure of taking part in Google Summer of Code as mentors for xrdesktop, the Open Source project bringing the Linux desktop to VR on Valve's SteamVR & Monado. Here's what was accomplished. View the full article

As we begin winding down 2019, it's time to take a moment to celebrate the new Collaborans who joined our various engineering and administrative teams in Q2 & Q3 this year! View the full article

Android uses the HWC API to communicate with graphics hardware. This API is not supported on the mainline Linux graphics stack, but by using drm_hwcomposer as a shim it now is. View the full article

Getting Android up and running on the iMX6 platform using an open source graphics stack has been impossible up until recently, but now you can. Here's a guide through the steps. View the full article

GPUs like Intel and Vivante support storing contents of graphical buffers in different formats. Support for describing these formats using modifiers has now been added to Android and Mesa, enabling tiling artifact free running of Android on the iMX6 platform. View the full article

More progress is being made in the area of i.MX6, etnaviv and Android. Since the last post a lot work has gone into upstreaming and stabilizing the etnaviv on Android ecosystem. This has involved Android, kernel and Mesa changes, many of which are available upstream now. View the full article

The weekend saw some of the NetSurf developers gather once again to do battle against the Red Queen...no, wait. I mean plan and write code. View the full article

Now based on Debian Bookworm, Apertis is a collaborative OS platform that includes an operating system, but also tools and cloud services to optimize development and increase reliability. View the full article

Apertis v2025 has landed with all the updates from Debian 12.9. This release has a variety of updates including new supported boards, improved release processes, and more! View the full article

Based on Debian 13 (Trixie), Apertis v2026 delivers updated system libraries, development tools, compilers, and core services, alongside a new default Wayland compositor, a reworked SDK, and smarter packaging pipelines. View the full article

Spring is in bloom in the northern hemisphere, and with it comes three tech events we'll be attending - PyCon US, Shell & Display Next Hackfest, and Linaro Connect! View the full article

In the embedded world, many modern SoCs such as the ST Microelectronics STM32MP1 now include coprocessor cores which can be used for a wide range of tasks and can offload some of the work from the main processor. View the full article

In continuation with our series about Kernel Integration we'll go into more detail about how regression detection, processing, and tracking can be improved to provide a better service to developers and maintainers. View the full article

This week, two Collaborans will be in Dresden, Germany to take part in the AGL All Member Meeting. George Kiagiadakis and Daniel Stone will be in attendance, with the former also giving a presentation on the latest happenings in upstream multimedia. View the full article

Collaborans are in Tokyo this week to take part in the AGL All Member Meeting. They'll be discussing the future of IVI Window Management, and also look at the latest upstream work around the PipeWire framework and how it can benefit the automotive industry. View the full article

In our previous post, we presented a project backed by INVEST-AI which introduces a multi-stage neural network-based solution. Now let's dive into the machine learning details of our innovative, open source hand-tracking pipeline. View the full article

MLBench enables developers and maintainers to effortlessly gauge how their frameworks perform compared to other implementations, prior code versions, or across different boards, with respect to both runtime performance and other metrics. View the full article

With only free software, a Mali G31 chip can now run Wayland compositors with zero-copy graphics, including GNOME 3. We can run every scene in glmark2-es2, 3D games like Neverball can be played, and video players mpv and Kodi are now supported. View the full article

Adhering to the fundamentals of open source, the Atari VCS OS is based on Debian using the Apertis infrastructure, and the graphics rely on Weston as its Wayland compositor. View the full article

Blink font-size-adjust via CSS properties View the full article

Collabora brought Bluetooth Auracast broadcasting to MediaTek Genio 700 for Embedded World 2026. Here's the complete, fully Open Source setup featuring Debian, BlueZ, PipeWire, with all the code and configs from our live booth demo. View the full article

I have been working on getting U-boot upstream up to speed for the Radxa Rock-5B Rockchip RK3588 board. One of the cool features that I recently published upstream is the ability to boot the board without any kind of non-volatile media (NVM) used. View the full article

In this tutorial, we'll look at how to create a functional and simple Arch Linux virtual machine image, that can have network access, display graphical windows and share a folder with the host. View the full article

After cleaning up and expanding Whisper-Hindi to 3,000 hours, we now have explicit timestamp prediction, faster I/O, and fine-tuned models across all sizes, bringing us even closer to fully reliable, production-ready Hindi ASR. View the full article

We're proud to announce that Whisper is now available in Hindi! With 2,500 hours of Hindi speech data and innovative techniques like Indic Normalization, this model sets a new benchmark for Hindi ASR. View the full article

In Linux, the Industrial Input/Output subsystem manages devices like Analog to Digital Converters, Light sensors, accelerometers, etc. On the other hand, the Input subsystem handles keyboards, mice, touchscreens, and any device that has a human interface. View the full article

Thanks to a new, low overhead extension in Mesa, OpenGL and Vulkan applications can now talk to each other, bringing more flexibility to application developers while easing the transition path between the industry-standard Khronos® APIs. View the full article

After fighting with the divide between implicit and explicit synchronization with Vulkan on Linux for over seven years, we may finally have some closure. We're not to synchronization nirvana quite yet, but this is an important step along the way. View the full article

BitNet-style ternary brings LLM inference to ExecuTorch via its Vulkan backend, enabling much smaller, bandwidth-efficient models with portable GPU execution on edge devices. Presented at PyTorch Conference Europe 2026. View the full article

With the recent release of the OpenXR 1.0 specification, the presence of numerous Open Source platforms for Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality, and a growing community of developers, the need for a collaborative Open Source XR Conference became clear. View the full article

Over the past few months, I've been working on a side project to improve Meson sub-project support. The best stress test is to build projects on Windows, without msys2, because it has no dependencies or tools installed (e.g. pkg-config). View the full article

This partnership ensures customers can build embedded products with long-term maintenance viability that will meet the challenges of tomorrow, such as compliance with the CRA, all built on proven Toradex platforms and upstream-first software. View the full article

Building GTK 4 as a Meson subproject for your own application is not only useful for Windows builds, but also for many Linux distributions that do not yet package a recent enough version of GTK 4 and/or its dependencies. View the full article

With each board running a mainline-first Linux software stack and tested in a CI loop with the LAVA test framework, the Farm showcased Collabora's recent hardware enablement and Continuous integration (CI) efforts. View the full article

The Holo Core aarch64 preview provides early binaries, sources, and containers for an Arch Linux-based aarch64 port, backed by tooling and CI work for reproducible rolling-release builds. View the full article

Developing Linux for Android on Qemu allows you to do some things that are not necessarily possible using the stock emulator. For my purposes I need access to a GPU and be able to modify the driver, which is where Virgilrenderer and Qemu comes in handy. View the full article

Both the Le Potato and OrangePi Zero Plus2 boards are already supported by Armbian. But how do you get a minimal Debian upstream image with only the packages you want? Debos is the perfect tool to do this. View the full article

Join us in Montreal for the 10th edition of RustConf! Catch our talk on Tyr, the new Rust kernel driver for Arm Mali GPUs. View the full article

With the advent of meson and gst-build, it is now possible to set up a GStreamer Windows development environment that rivals the finest Linux has to offer, with full support for Visual Studio debugging into the library. View the full article

GStreamer relies on various 2D font rendering and layout libraries such as Pango and Cairo to generate text for the Pango plugin, which contains elements such as textoverlay. Here's how to add the Pango plugin to a gst-build installation on Windows. View the full article

Tyr’s latest Rust GPU kernel driver work puts GPU memory management in place, from VM binding and GPUVM to GEM-backed buffers and firmware boot, moving key pieces upstream before tackling synchronization next. View the full article

See how Tyr moves beyond MCU firmware boot to build the group, queue, VM, submission, and completion paths needed to run real Vulkan workloads on Mali CSF GPUs. View the full article

Earlier this month, Collabora sponsored & hosted the XMMP Sprint, the first developer event in the XMPP community in a long time. Here's a look at what was accomplished over the weekend, and what's next for this open standard. View the full article

We're headed to France’s southern Occitanie region to attend and sponsor the 6th edition of Capitole du Libre, a weekend dedicated to free and Open Source software! View the full article

Taking one step towards democratizing the daunting task of dataset generation by making image synthesis and automatic ground truth data generation maintainable, cheaper, and more repeatable. View the full article

Labeling errors are common in present open-source 3D perception datasets, which could have impactful consequences. To tackle this issue, we used Carlafox to generate an error-free synthetic dataset for 3D perception automatically. View the full article

We recently assisted a customer who wanted to upgrade their system from X11 to Wayland. The problem: they use CEF as a runtime for web applications and CEF was not Wayland-ready. View the full article

After a successful team effort, the patch enabling the Chromium Embedded Framework (CEF) Ozone builds to run with different platform backends, such as Wayland, has finally landed upstream. View the full article

Standing on the shoulders of giants. As Collabora turns 10 years this month, we are forced to stop and marvel at the accomplishments of GNU in its 30 years of existence. Happy 30th anniversary GNU View the full article

D-Bus API features View the full article

As JSON becomes used more and more in place of XML, we need a replacement for tools like xmllint to check that JSON documents follow whatever format they are supposed to be following. View the full article

A deep dive on the current status of Chromium enablement on MediaTek Genio SoCs, including what the numbers look like when MediaTek’s hardware codecs are driven by Chromium’s V4L2 paths. View the full article

When you work on a piece of software, you usually want to be able to build and test it manually on your local system, but without compromising your system or destabilizing the distribution provided software. View the full article

In collaboration with Inria, the French Institute for Research in Computer Science and Automation, Tathagata Roy shares the progress made over the past year on the CoccinelleForRust project, co-sponsored by Collabora View the full article

With DebConf19, the annual conference for Debian contributors and users, in full swing this week in Curitiba, Brazil, what better time to look at the contributions made by Collaborans to the latest Debian release! View the full article

After a particularly long cycle of over 10 months, GStreamer accumulated many improvements that are now available in the 1.14 release. Here's a look at some of the contributions from Collabora's engineers that we're particularly proud of. View the full article

After a year-long development cycle, the much anticipated release was made available recently. With it came a number of exciting new features we're especially proud of, including per-element latency tracer and support for planar or non-interleaved audio. View the full article

A move to GitLab. A switch to the powerful Meson build system. A fast and reliable CI system implemented. The GStreamer community has been busy, bringing a bevy of enhancements to 1.18. Here's a look at the key contributions by Collaborans. View the full article

Linux Kernel 4.10 is out, and this time Collabora contributed a total of 39 patches by 10 different developers. View the full article

Linux Kernel 4.11 was released yesterday, and 9 different Collabora developers contributed a total of 44 patches, while also reviewing 22 other patches. View the full article

Linux Kernel 4.12 is out, with 12 Collabora developers having contributed, a new record number of developers contributing to a single kernel release for Collabora! View the full article

Linux Kernel 4.13 is out, with 12 Collabora developers having contributed, pairing up with 4.12 as another kernel release with our highest number of Collabora developers! View the full article

Linux Kernel 4.14 is out, and once again Collabora developers were very active, contributing nearly 200 patches, reviews & sign-offs combined during this development cycle! View the full article

Linux Kernel 4.15 was released yesterday, and it once again contained patches contributed by Collabora, including bigger patchsets like V4L2 Explicit Synchronization and UTF-8 case insensitive lookups for EXT4. View the full article

Collabora is proud to share that we've partnered with Flipper Devices to work together on building an open Linux platform for hardware hackers. The long-awaited Flipper One will be built on the Rockchip RK3576! View the full article

Collabora and MediaTek are advancing upstream Linux support for the latest Genio IoT boards and Chromebook Plus laptops, enabling full hardware functionality, improved security, and broader access to the open source community. View the full article

As champions of open source development in the embedded community, Collabora will be at Booth 4-404 with an impressive lineup of live demonstrations spanning graphics, machine learning, continuous testing, and real-world applications. View the full article

We're headed to Brussels, Belgium for FOSDEM 2017, the two-day event organized by volunteers to promote the widespread use of free and open source software. View the full article

From May 9 to 11, Collabora will be attending the GENIVI All Member Meeting & Open Community Days: Advancing Connected Vehicles in a Connected World, in Birmingham, UK! View the full article

Collabora is heading to Amsterdam with talks, demos, and workshops covering Embedded Linux, KernelCI, Bluetooth & Auracast, mainline video capture for Rockchip, and more. Join us to see our latest open source work in action! View the full article

Comprised of some of the most motivated and active Open Source contributors and maintainers around the world, our team shares a passion for technology and Open Source, as do these newest members. Welcome Gert, Gustavo, Erik, Christoph, Ryan & Ana! View the full article

Yesterday, we celebrated the release of GStreamer 1.10, the culmination of 7 months of very hard work from the GStreamer community. Collabora's multimedia team is extremely proud of our contributions to this new major feature release. View the full article

In the first part of my review of Collabora's participation in GStreamer 1.10, I discussed the work done by Guillaume & Nicolas around leak tracing, acoustic echo cancellation, Wayland, V4L, etc. Today, I'll go over the contributions from the rest of our multimedia team. View the full article

Along with the usual load of memory leaks, crashes and other bugs, Collabora's multimedia team once again contributed a number of improvements across a wide number of areas. View the full article

Collabora upstream work on Linux kernel View the full article