SBC News

In this second part of this blog post series on Linux kernel initcalls, we'll go deeper into implementation, with a look at the colorful __device_initcall() macro, the rootfs initcall, and how modules can be executed. View the full article

Initial support for Rockchip's RK3576 has landed in Linux kernel 6.12, a new System-on-a-Chip (SoC) introduced earlier this year. With the main target being industrial applications, it is less of a powerhouse than the RK3588, but it still reuses many components. View the full article

The Linux Foundation Members Summit is an opportune time to gather on the state of open source. Our talk will address the concerns and challenges of maintaining a stable kernel. View the full article

PipeWire continues to evolve with the recent integration of libcamera, a library to support complex cameras. In this blog post, I'll explain why libcamera exists, what it does, and how we integrated it in PipeWire. View the full article

In Debian and derivative systems, there are many ways to build images. The simplest tool of choice is often debootstrap. It works by downloading the .deb files from a mirror and unpacking them into a directory which can eventually be chrooted into. View the full article

In Debian and derivative systems, there are many ways to build images. The simplest tool of choice is often debootstrap. It works by downloading the .deb files from a mirror and unpacking them into a directory which can eventually be chrooted into. View the full article

The dawn of VR video players demand new features in terms of projection and hardware access. In his recent R&D work, a Collaboran implemented a way to view spherical videos with GStreamer on a Virtual Reality headset. In this article, he gives his thoughts on VR video and how he created SPHVR, a Python / Gtk VR video player. View the full article

NVK, an open-source Vulkan driver for NVIDIA hardware that is part of Mesa, now supports the Vulkan extension VK_KHR_multiview. View the full article

Say hello to a brand new, open-source Vulkan driver for NVIDIA hardware in Mesa, written almost entirely from scratch using the new official headers from NVIDIA. View the full article

Today, Collabora is excited to announce a partnership with Microsoft to build OpenCL and OpenGL mapping layers on DirectX, in order to bring OpenCL 1.2 and OpenGL 3.3 support to all Windows and DirectX 12 enabled devices. View the full article

Adventures in NIR-land: the past, the present, and what's lies ahead for the native NIR back-end for Mesa's R600 driver. View the full article

The last year has seen substantial progress on the DRM infrastructure required to write GPU drivers in Rust. Developed in collaboration with Arm and Google, Tyr is a new Rust-based DRM driver targeting CSF-based Arm Mali GPUs. View the full article

For the last month or so, I've been playing with a new project during my work at Collabora, and as I've already briefly talked about at XDC 2018, it's about time to talk about it to a wider audience. View the full article

Following the release of the OpenXR 0.90 Provisional Specification by The Khronos Group, Collabora is proud to announce Monado, an open source implementation of the newly released OpenXR spec. View the full article

Introductory talk on libnice (done as part of Collabora's tea time training) View the full article

Earlier this year I worked on a certain GStreamer plugin that is called “ipcpipeline”. This plugin provides elements that make it possible to interconnect GStreamer pipelines that run in different processes. In this blog post I am going to explain how this plugin works and the reason why you might want to use it in your application. View the full article

Contributing to the Vulkan Working Group since 2015, Jason has continues to make a significant impact. His expertise and dilligence has helped to shape the group and we're proud to see his hard work see some well earned spotlight. View the full article

Years ago, I joined the open-source community with a passion and a mission: to enable equal access to high-quality computing via open-source software. With this mission, I co-founded Panfrost, aiming to create an open-source driver for the Mali GPU. View the full article

JPEG-XR support on browsing technologies View the full article

Even amidst the chaos and uncertainty that 2020 brought, Linux Kernel development keeps moving forward at a constant and relentless pace. Collabora remains active, developing, maintaining, documenting and testing many parts of the kernel. View the full article

With their latest contributions all around the kernel, notably to the Video4Linux APIs and hardware enablement, Collaborans continue to expand on their efforts to close the gap between hardware support on vendor trees and mainline. View the full article

Collabora's team working directly on the Linux kernel is growing. Collaborans continue to expand on their efforts to close the gap between hardware support on vendor trees and mainline. View the full article

With an ever-increasing interest in more modern hardware support, and a more reliable kernel that is thoroughly tested, contributions by Collabora's developers continue to help make this a reality for the Linux kernel. View the full article

It might be smaller than the last few kernels, but with well above 10,000 non-merge changes, the latest Linux kernel release still packs a punch. Released on October 31, kernel 5.15 brings lots of exciting new features. View the full article

With kernel 5.16, the community has once again produced a release full of great features, including two projects that had been in development for some time by our kernel team: the new futex syscall and the new fanotify event. View the full article

While eastern Europe has experienced ghastly events that have shaken the world, the latest Linux kernel release could aptly be named "Solid & Steady." Here's a look at some of the contributions made by Collabora's kernel team. View the full article

Released by Linus Torvalds on May 22 after a busy two-month development cycle, Linux kernel 5.18 brings new features and lights up new hardware. Let's take a look at the contributions made by our engineering team. View the full article

As usual, there are quite a few changes merged into the mainline kernel. Let's take a look at some of the contributions by Collabora's kernel team! View the full article

This latest release is the first to contain development work accomplished amid the lockdown measures. Despite these significant changes, Collaborans have also been steadfast in their contributions, with multiple projects progressing. View the full article

The ability for a relatively small software consultancy to contribute at this level demonstrates a fantastic improvement in vendors' mindset when it comes to working Open First and providing mainline support out-of-box as early as possible. View the full article

Collaborans continue to be very active in the Linux kernel, authoring over 150 commits in this release. Here's a look at the improvements, and new features, contributed by our team, notably in hardware support, multimedia, graphics and testing. View the full article

Collabora's contributions include mainlining the HEVC uAPI, adding VIRTIO documentation, upstreaming MediaTek smartphones, and adding support for two new Chromebooks and for the Mali-G57 GPU in the Panfrost kernel driver. View the full article

Collabora's contributions include ongoing upstreaming of the RockChip RK3588 and MediaTek Helio X10 (MT6795) SoCs, numerous bug fixes and improvements for Cedrus and Hantro IPs, and memory shrinker support for the VirtIO-GPU driver. View the full article

The latest kernel 6.10 release brings multiple core changes and updates to BH workqueues. Let's examine the developments implemented by Collabora's engineers. View the full article

The latest 6.11 kernel release is here! This release improves performance, security, and hardware compatibility, increasing the kernel's flexibility and efficiency for various computing environments. View the full article

Linux kernel 6.12 is here with real-time preemption support and an extensible scheduler class. Take a look at the contributions our kernel team made for this release. View the full article

The latest Linux kernel release is here, bringing improvements to the DRM subsystem, further enablement of Rockchip SoCs, a new debugging guide for developers, and more! Here's a recap of Collabora's contributions for 6.13. View the full article

The kernel release emphasizes the continuing growth and maturity of the Linux ecosystem and delivers new features, improvements, and optimizations that everyone will be eager to explore. See where Collabora's kernel team contributed to this release. View the full article

The latest Linux kernel brings expanded hardware support for MediaTek and Rockchip, enhanced graphics drivers, and more. Collabora played a key role in this release, with no less than 20 authored contributors! View the full article

The latest Linux kernel brings enhanced MediaTek Platform enablement, Rockchip performance, and more. Collabora contributed to this release with no less than 22 authored contributors! View the full article

The kernel 6.17 release benefits from improvements in the graphics subsystem, hardware enablement, and more! See where Collabora's kernel team contributed to this release. View the full article

In the latest Linux kernel release, Collabora’s engineering team delivers multiple contributions including Tyr, a Rust driver for CSF-based Arm Mali GPUs, as well as ongoing hardware enablement and improved support for MediaTek SoCs. View the full article

Collabora continues to be a key contributor to the Linux kernel, with 125 patches from 21 developers! Highlights include Arm Mali GPU improvements, expanded MediaTek and Rockchip SoC support, Rust integration progress, and new Rockchip video capture functionality. View the full article

With more SoC support, a new V4L2 driver and a new dma-buf locking convention among its contributions, Collabora was one of the most active employers for this latest kernel development cycle. View the full article

Released earlier this week, Linux Kernel 6.3 brings thousands of new lines of code to improve the core kernel, architectural support, networking and filesystems. View the full article

Released earlier this week, Linux kernel 6.4 brings new features such as support for Intel LAM (Linear Address Masking), user events for tracing, and the ability for the machine keyrings used for Machine Owner Keys to store only CA-enforced keys. View the full article

Released last week, Linux kernel 6.4 brings new features such as support for Intel LAM, user events for tracing, and the ability for the machine keyrings used for Machine Owner Keys to store only CA-enforced keys. View the full article

Linux Kernel 6.6 has arrived, bringing a significant amount of new features and performance enhancements. Collabora has actively contributed many patches, including work on MediaTek and Rockchip. View the full article

Collabora's kernel team made a number of key contributions including a new kselftest for verifying driver probe of Devicetree-based platforms, multiple improvements to further improve support for MediaTek SoCs found in Chromebooks, and more. View the full article

The latest Linux Kernel 6.8 release brings thousands of new lines of code, improving the core kernel, architecture support, networking, file systems, and more. View the full article

Collabora's engineers continue to be involved in the hardware enablement for a few different system-on-chips (SoCs) and platforms, and have also contributed significant improvements to kernel testing. View the full article

Linux kernel 7.1 brings improvements across filesystems, networking, scheduling, graphics, Rust, and hardware enablement, with Collabora contributing 65 patches from 16 engineers across Panthor, DRM, Rockchip, MediaTek, and driver fixes across the kernel. View the full article

Linux kernel 7.2 adds broad core, Rust, and hardware-support updates, with Collabora contributing 102 patches across graphics, media, virtualization, networking, power management, and SoC enablement. View the full article

Once you've setup a virtual machine in QEMU using debootstrap, there are a number of tools available for testing, tracing and debugging, such as Kmemleak for memory leaks, GDB (GNU Debugger), ftrace et dynamic_debug. View the full article

After waiting in the Linux-next integration tree for about 18 months, the basic Rust infrastructure finally landed in the mainline Linux kernel with the imminent release of v6.1. View the full article

The kernelci.org project aims at continuously testing the mainline Linux kernel, from stable branches to linux-next on a variety of platforms. When a revision fails to build or boot, kernel developers get informed via email reports. View the full article

It's with excitement and nervousness that I'm writing this post, sitting on a plane heading to Boston where I will attend the MIT Reality Hack as a mentor. View the full article

Presenting a new, hardware-backed, software graphics driver, built upon the Mesa gallium driver framework, which uses kernel kms drm nodes for memory allocation. View the full article

Kraid, the new compiler for the Panfrost driver stack, now passes all 800,000 Vulkan CTS compute shader tests. This marks a major milestone, with work continuing on additional shader stages, code quality, and performance optimization. View the full article

Kraid is a new Rust-based compiler for Panfrost that replaces the aging Bifrost-rooted compiler stack with a cleaner, more flexible design for modern Mali GPUs, improving IR structure, register allocation, hardware testing, and long-term maintainability. View the full article

MLfix is an open-source tool that combines novel unsupervised machine-learning pipelines with a new user interface concept that, together, help annotators and machine-learning engineers identify and filter out label errors. View the full article

Over the past 18 months, we have been on a roller-coaster ride developing futex2, a new set of system calls. As part of this effort, the futex_waitv() syscall has now landed in Linux 5.16. But what exactly is futex? View the full article

Be part of the FOSSXR lineup by submitting your talk by September 5th, 2022. That means there's one week left for all you AR and VR enthusiasts and industry movers to share your exciting XR projects/news/demos with the world. View the full article

A few weeks ago, Ryan Pavlik presented "Unifying Reality: Building Experiences with OpenXR", a master class on OpenXR, the open standard API for building VR and AR experiences that work across devices, now and into the future. View the full article

HTC Vive (Pro) and Valve Index hardware users can now experiment with positional tracking in Monado, thanks to the implementation of a libsurvive driver using the libsurvive library developed by Charles Lohr, David Berger and many contributors. View the full article

Next week, Collaborans will be in Bangkok, Thailand, to participate in the 25th edition of Linaro Connect, a gathering of the world's leading open source engineers working on Arm. Tomeu Vizoso and Gustavo Padovan will be in attendance to present Panfrost. View the full article

This week, Daniel Stone and Tomeu Vizoso will be taking part in Linaro Tech Days, a series of technical sessions presented live online via Zoom webinar and streamed on YouTube. These sessions are free to attend and open to the public! View the full article

September's busy conference schedule kicks off next week with the Fall edition of Linaro Virtual Connect. Join us as we look at how to master your PipeWire streams with WirePlumber, and de-mystify GFX virtualization with VirGL! View the full article

Join us this week at the Spring edition of Linaro Virtual Connect, as we discuss bringing stateless video decoding support to Linux, and take a look at where we are, and what's to come, for open drivers for Arm GPUs. View the full article

Starting today, and running until Saturday, join us at Linux App Summit for a look at Linux graphics, PipeWire, our work with Valve, and a virtual office hour with our Engineering Manager! View the full article

Like starting a car with the hood open, sometimes you need to run your program with certain analysis tools attached to get a full sense of what is going wrong – or right. View the full article

We're very excited to be sponsoring and speaking at the very first Linux Developer Conference Brazil, taking place on November 11 at the Instituto de Computação in Campinas! View the full article

This weekend, Collaborans are in São Paulo, Brazil, to take part in the third edition of Linux Developer Conference Brazil, a conference which aims to take the Brazilian Linux development community to the international level. View the full article

The recent disclosure of Meltdown and Spectre hardware vulnerabilities were unprecedented in the history of computing. They affect a substantial portion of chips powering most of the infrastructure used by our society today. View the full article

Linux Kernel 4.16 was released over the weekend, and with it came 33 patches contributed by 8 different Collabora developers, including the addition of usb3 and extcon support for Rockchip RK3399 devices, and display support for the Nokia N9. View the full article

Linus Torvalds has now released the official Linux 4.17, so it’s time for our traditional blog post summing up our contributions to the latest version of the Linux kernel, which include a number of patches to the DRM subsystem. View the full article

Another two months and a half have passed, Linux Kernel v4.18 has been released, which means it's time to stop along the way and make a little retrospective. This time around, seven Collaborans have contributed to the kernel, authoring 61 commits. View the full article

As the curtains rose on opening day of Embedded Linux Conference Europe & Open Source Summit Europe in Edinburgh, the latest release of the Linux Kernel, 4.19, was made available by Greg Kroah-Hartman. Collaborans were once again very active. View the full article

A few weeks ago, in the final days leading up to Christmas, Linus Torvalds released Linux Kernel 4.20. Collaborans were once again active during this development cycle, contributing 22 patches, 112 reviews & 55 sign-offs. Here's a look at their contributions. View the full article

Linux Kernel 4.6 was released this week, with a total of 9 Collabora engineers taking part in its development, Collabora’s highest number of engineers contributing to a single Linux Kernel release yet. In total Collabora contributed 42 patches. View the full article

The first major release of Linux for the year 2019 was made available earlier this week, and with it came a new version number: 5.0. Here's a look at contributions made by Collaborans! View the full article

Earlier this week, Linux Kernel 5.1 was released, and with it came over 13,000 commits from developers all around the world, including Collaborans. This time around, no less than 12 different developers contributed commits (64), sign-offs (111) & more. View the full article

With 11 engineers authoring, reviewing and testing nearly 170 patches for this latest release, Collabora ranked 8th in the list of most active employers by lines changed, sharing ranks with some of the prominent employers in Linux kernel development. View the full article

Linux 5.3 was released over the weekend, which means it's time for our usual "where does Collabora stand in this picture?" tour. As has been the case for several years now, Collabora continues being an active contributor to the Linux kernel. View the full article

Linus has released the 5.4 kernel and Collabora was once again a very active contributor with 12 Collaborans authoring 95 commits while also helping the kernel maintainers by contributing 124 Reviewed-by tags. View the full article

With the 5.5 kernel released earlier this week, here's a detailed look at Collabora’s contributions, including work to improve upstream support of peripherals used together with the i.MX 6 family of processors. View the full article

Looking back, it's amazing how much has happened in NVK in just the last 7 months. If development continues at this crazy pace, we may be looking at a pretty decent driver before too much longer. View the full article

The 6.5 release is here and it comes with many changes. As is often the case, Collabora has been actively involved in the submission of patches, mostly in the task of hardware enablement for Mediatek and Rockchip SoCs. View the full article

Recently I was asked to present a short introduction to the Linux kernel for our project managers. I put together a short slide deck for the presentation which I have decided to share. View the full article

When the kernel crashes, it's good to know how to analyze the log and to discover exactly where the error occurred. This blog post shows a simple technique to retrieve the buggy line from the addresses shown in the log and also enabling specifics logs with Dynamic Debug. View the full article

Last month in Nice, active media developers came together for the annual Linux Media Summit to exchange insights and tackle ongoing challenges in the media subsystem. Here’s a brief summary of the key discussions and upcoming areas of focus. View the full article

Collabora is proud to be once again sponsoring the annual Linux Plumbers Conference, the developer conference that brings together the top developers working on the “plumbing” of Linux: kernel subsystems, core libraries, windowing systems, etc. View the full article

Widely recognized as the premier event for developers working at all levels of the Linux kernel's plumbing layer and beyond, this year's edition of LPC is jam-packed with microconferences, a refereed track, a Kernel Summit track, multiple BoFs, and more. View the full article

With the advent of 5G networks, it's now possible to stream high quality video in real-time with a very low latency that wasn't possible with the past generations of mobile networks. View the full article

Describes ability of performing work while the machine is in a low power state such as suspend. View the full article

Following a great weekend in Brussels for FOSDEM, Collaborans headed east to Belarus to attend & speak at the winter session of the international conference for free/libre open source software developers and users, LVEE. View the full article

Machine learning is increasingly seeing more applications and it's important to have FOSS options to accelerate such workloads. With that in mind, we began an effort earlier this year to get a TFLite model running on a VIM3 NPU using Etnaviv and OpenCL. View the full article

When it comes to buffer sharing synchronization in the kernel there are two ways of doing it: Implicit Fencing and Explicit Fencing. The difference between them relies on the fact that the kernel may or may not share synchronization information with userspace, it will either be implicit, with no fencing information provided, or explicit with all information available to userspace. View the full article

In the first part we covered the main concepts behind Explicit Synchronization for the Linux Kernel. Now in the second part of the series we are going to look to the Android Sync Framework, the first (out-of-tree) Explicit Fencing implementation for the Linux Kernel. View the full article

In the last two articles we talked about how Explicit Fencing can help the graphics pipeline in general and what happened on the effort to upstream the Android Sync Framework. Now on the third and final post of this series we will go through the Explicit Fencing implementation on DRM and other elements of the graphics stack. View the full article