SBC News

Since you can’t always rely on single board computer (SBC) vendors to provide a case to match your needs, some went the DIY route. William Tarreau designed some laser-cut enclosures with Inkscape for various SBCs, while hominoids went a step further by developing the “SBC Case Builder” tool to automatically generate various types of 3D printable enclosures using OpenSCAD. William designed five similar enclosures for Khadas VIM3/VIM3L, FriendlyELEC NanoPi Fire3, SolidRun Clearfog Base networking SBC, Libre Computer AML-S805X-AC (aka “La Frite”), and AAEON UP Board. All cases are available in Inkscape SVG format, and William accepts contributions for other boards. You’ll ne…

Over the last two years, Bluetooth® audio support has steadily grown in PipeWire and has become a featureful, stable, conformant, open source Bluetooth® audio stack implementation. Here's a look at where things stand. View the full article

To reduce the total number of cores used. Porting the media core to versions 5.17 and 5.18, with simultaneous removal of the station-p2 kernel. View the full article

We’ve seen several hardware devices based on Rockchip RK3566 AIoT SoC that do not make use of the key features of the processor. But QNAP TS-133 1-bay NAS is different, since it relies on the native SATA and Gigabit Ethernet interfaces for network storage, and the built-in NPU is leveraged to accelerate object and face recognition by up to 6 times. The NAS comes with 2GB of RAM, 4GB of storage for QTS 5.0 Linux operating system, USB 3.0 and USB 2.0 ports, and the company promotes it as a “personal private cloud & home multimedia center”. QNAP TS-133 specifications: SoC – Rockchip RK3566 quad-core Cortex-A55 processor @ 1.8 GHz with Arm Mali-G52 EE GPU, 0.8 TOPS NPU/AI…

“Turing Smart Screen” is a low-cost 3.5-inch USB-C display that connects to systems with a USB port, and works with Windows, Linux (including Raspberry Pi), MacOS, and other operating systems that support Python3. But contrary to my initial assumptions, it does not exactly act as a second monitor, and instead, it is an information display, originally designed to show resource utilization, e.g. CPU and memory usage, in Windows, and controlled through commands send to the USB port. Turing Smart Screen specifications: 3.5-inch IPS display with 480×320 resolution, portrait and landscape support MCU – WCH CH552T 8-bit E8051 core MCU for USB devices Host interface – USB Type-C …

Description Update sunxi-5.17 for linux version v5.17.5 Checklist: [x] Test build [x] Test work on the boards View the full article

Khadas VIM4 is a compact Amlogic A311D2 octa-core Cortex-A73/A53 SBC with 8GB RAM, HDMI input and output, WiFI 6 connectivity, and more. You can check our earlier post for the full specifications. The good news is that it will officially launch on May 10. I’ve also just received a Khadas VIM4 review sample today together with accessories. Today, I’ll start by checking out the board, assembling the kit, and trying out OOWOW services to boot OS from the cloud, before testing available operating systems in more detail in the second part of Khadas VIM4 review a little later. Khadas VIM4 kit unboxing I received everything in a bland card board package with several small packag…

Rockchip RK3566 processor is designed for AIoT applications like NVR systems, but we’ve seen it integrated into mini PCs, TV boxes, and now a gaming handheld with the Anbernic RG503 equipped with a 4.95-inch OLED display. The portable gaming console also includes 1GB LPDDR4 and 16GB storage, plus an optional 64GB microSD card with 4193 games, all the buttons you’d expect from a gaming handheld, plus micro HDMI output for connection to a larger screen. Anbernic RG503 specifications: SoC – Rockchip RK3566 quad-core Cortex-A55 processor @ 1.8 GHz with Arm Mali-G52 EE GPU, 0.8 TOPS NPU/AI accelerator System Memory- 1GB LPDDR4 Storage 16GB microSD card Optional 64GB microSD ca…

Orbbec Persee+ is a 3D depth camera running Linux with AI capabilities thanks to Amlogic A311D hexa-core processor equipped with a 5 TOPS NPU (Neural-network Processing Unit). The Persee+ is designed to help researchers, engineers, and hobbyists implement advanced uses for 3D imaging. Orbbec has been around for several years with the first product we covered here being the Orbbec Persee 3D depth camera running Ubuntu or Android on Rockchip RK3288 processor and unveiled in 2015. Last year, the company introduced the Zora P1 Amlogic A311D development board for Orbbec 3D cameras, so in a way, the Orbbec Persee+ is born from the work done on the Persee camera and Zora P1 over…

Looking to use hardware-backed and virtual SocketCAN interfaces inside your Kubernetes Pods? A new device plugin now allows processes inside a pod to communicate with each other using the full Linux SocketCAN API. View the full article

Monado has been accepted for the first time as a mentoring organization for the 2022 Google Summer of Code (GSoC)! Collabora will be providing three mentors to support contributors who want to work on Monado-related projects. View the full article

Monado now has initial support for 6DoF ("inside-out") tracking for devices with cameras and an IMU! Three free and open source SLAM/VIO solutions were integrated and adapted to work on XR: Kimera-VIO, ORB-SLAM3, and Basalt. 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

When developing an application or a library, it is very common to want to run it without installing it, or to install it into a custom prefix rather than on the system. Here's how Meson can help with that. View the full article

Join us next week for Open Source 101, a one-day conference where we'll dive into the latest around FOSS virtual & augmented reality, and look at the implications of enabling automated testing upstream. View the full article

An incredible amount has changed in Mesa and in the Vulkan ecosystems since we wrote the first Vulkan driver in Mesa for Intel hardware back in 2015. Not only has Vulkan grown, but Mesa has as well. View the full article

Every file system used in production has tools to try to recover from system crashes. To provide a better infrastructure for those tools, our kernel team developed FAN_FS_ERROR, a new fanotify event which monitors error notifications. View the full article

The PipeWire project made major strides over the past few years, bringing shiny new features, and paving the way for new possibilities in the Linux multimedia scene. A look what was accomplished in 2021, and what lies ahead for 2022. View the full article

Congratulations to Valve on the release of the Steam Deck, their new handheld gaming PC! With it comes a new release of SteamOS, complete with a brand new A/B design for seamless system updates. View the full article

As the globe still navigates the twists and turns of the times, Collabora can confidently say we've been steadily on the rise. We've added brand new members to our crew who are more than equipped to keep pace. View the full article

At the forefront of contributors for this latest release, our team's work focused on two areas in which we believe GStreamer shines the brightest: embedded systems, and network streaming, in particular WebRTC. 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

Kicking off in a matter of days, this jam-packed weekend will host over 50 devrooms and nearly 700 talks including an in-depth look at Mobian: an open-source project aimed at bringing Debian GNU/Linux to mobile devices. View the full article

Until now, no Valhall devices (Mali-G57, Mali-G78) ran mainline Linux - whilst this made driver development obviously difficult, there’s no better time to write drivers than before the devices even get into the hands of end users. View the full article

My work on Wayland and Weston color management and HDR support has been full of learning new concepts and terms. Many of them are crucial for understanding how color works, and what the values in a pixel actually mean. 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

The new year has only just begun, and already our first conference of 2022 is on the horizon. Join us at linux.conf.au, as we discuss bringing WebM Alpha support to GStreamer, and provide a status update on the futex2 syscall. View the full article

It has been just over a year since we first announced our effort to implement a Wayland driver for Wine. Here's a recap of what has been done since then to improve both the functionality and stability of the driver. View the full article

With over 350 patches authored and nearly 200 reviewed and tested in multiple subsystems, 2021 was a great year for Linux kernel development at Collabora. Here is a look at some of our achievements during the year. View the full article

The Linux desktop in VR goes headless! Introducing wxrd, a standalone Wayland compositor for xrdesktop based on wlroots, with minimal dependencies. View the full article

A year of online conferences that began with linux.conf.au will end on a high note next week as Collaborans present three talks at Open Source Summit Japan + Automotive Linux Summit 2021. Join us! View the full article

A step-by-step guide on how to enable 3D acceleration of Vulkan applications in QEMU through the new Venus experimental Vulkan driver for VirtIO-GPU with a local development environment. 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

Today marks a very exciting day as Fedora 35 has now been released, and with it comes WirePlumber as the default session manager for PipeWire! Under development by Collabora since 2019, WirePlumber has now entered the linux desktop space. View the full article

Maintaining a non-trivial set of GStreamer patches can be tricky. Thanks to the recent move to a single, unified git repo, you can now easily run a GStreamer continuous integration pipeline on your own GitLab instance. Here's how. View the full article

Earlier this year, I joined Collabora as an intern to work on improving testing in libcamera and automating it through KernelCI. Having recently completed the internship, here's a look back at this experience and what was accomplished. View the full article

With the LLVM toolchain seeing increasing development and adoption alongside the older, more established GNU toolchain, projects needing to support both, in particular the GNU C library (glibc), are facing challenges and questions. View the full article

Collaborans will be actively participating in next week's activities with seven talks on topics including Rust build scripts, embedded deep learning on GStreamer, HEVC decoding on mainline Linux, PipeWire and WirePlumber, and more. View the full article

This important milestone is a step forward for the open source driver, as it now certifies Panfrost for use in commercial products containing Mali G52 and paves the way for further conformance submissions on other Mali GPUs. View the full article

GStreamer can be tricky to ship in a constrained device. Thanks to a partnership with Huawei, you can now use gst-build to generate a minimal GStreamer build, tailored to a specific application, or set of applications. Here's how. 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

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

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

After a month of reverse-engineering the Arm Mali G78, we’re excited to release documentation on the Valhall instruction set, available as a PDF, as well as a Valhall assembler and disassembler to be used as a reverse-engineering aid. 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

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

Earlier this month, Collabora took part in the very first KernelCI hackfest, initiated as a joint effort with the Google Chrome OS team. Here's a look at what led to our participation and what was accomplished. View the full article

Despite the many obstacles brought on by the pandemic, Collabora has continued to grow its teams for the road ahead. Join us in welcoming Kiril, Benjamin, Daniel, Shreeya, Ariel, Nicolas and James! 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

Initiated as a joint effort by the Google Chrome OS team and Collabora, the recent KernelCI hackfest brought the addition of new tests including the ability to detect regressions on the Linux kernel that can directly affect cameras. View the full article

Initiated as a joint effort by the Google Chrome OS team and Collabora, the recent KernelCI hackfest brought the addition of new tests including the ability to detect regressions on the Linux kernel that can directly affect cameras. View the full article

There's a lot that has happened in the world of Zink since my last update, so let's see if I can bring you up to date on the most important stuff, including upstream development, support for OpenGL 4.6 & GLES 3.1, and more. View the full article

Panfrost, the open source driver for Arm Mali, now supports OpenGL ES 3.1 on both Midgard (Mali T760 and newer) and Bifrost (Mali G31, G52, G72) GPUs, adding a number of features, notably including compute shaders. View the full article

We first announced our work on the driver last December, and posted an update earlier this year. We are now happy to announce a second update for this driver, adding several major features which increase its scope and utility. View the full article

Simplifying AGL's existing Wayland-based graphical stack and avoiding the use of modules that aren't maintained upstream has lead to the creation of a new compositor based on libweston, bringing more reliable and fine-grained system control. 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

Collabora has been investing into Perfetto to enable driver authors & users to get deep insights into driver internals and GPU performance. Here's how we applied this work to study workloads on the virtualized VirGL implementation. View the full article

The Hantro Video4Linux2 (V4L2) kernel module has gained support for another SoC! The Microchip SAMA5D4 features a single decode unit supporting MPEG2, VP8 and H.264 streams, alongside the built-in post-processing unit. View the full article

DKMS is a framework that is mostly used to build and install external kernel modules. It can also be used to install a specific patch to the modules of the current kernel, such as applying a specific fix to the Bluetooth USB subsystem. 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

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

Recently, we have been using Perfetto to successfully profile Apitrace traces in crosvm through VirGL renderer. We have now added perfetto instrumentation to VirGL renderer, Mesa, and Apitrace to see what happens precisely in a frame. View the full article

As part of a project backed by INVEST-AI, a program managed by IVADO Labs, we have developed a multi-stage neural network-based solution that accurately locates and tracks the hands despite complex background noise and occlusion between hands. 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

The Panfrost project started as a reverse engineering effort to understand Arm Mali Midgard and Bifrost GPU internals. With the driver getting more and more mature, the natural next step was to work on an Open Source Vulkan driver for those GPUs. View the full article

Earlier this year, the Rust compiler gained support for LLVM source-base code coverage. In this post we'll explain how to setup a CI job in a Rust project to feed source-base coverage information to GitLab. 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

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

One year ago, we announced a new partnership with Microsoft to build OpenGL mapping layers to DirectX 12. Today, we're excited to share that the we have passed the OpenGL 3.3 conformance tests, and have now upstreamed the D3D12 driver in Mesa 3D! View the full article

The most complete automated testing and continuous integration tool for the Linux kernel continues to evolve at a rapid pace. Here's a look at the latest improvements to the KernelCI dashboard, the main web interface used by the project. 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

Two months ago we announced a first proposal for a Wayland driver for Wine, the compatibility layer for Windows applications. Here's an update on this effort, which contains more details and instructions for building and running the Wayland driver. View the full article

The first kernel release of 2021 brings a number of highlights contributed by Collaborans, including the new Syscall User Dispatch mechanism, and the destaging of both the H.264 stateless decoding interface and the Rockchip ISP driver. 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

Monado, the OpenXR runtime for Linux, is now officially conformant! In recognition of this milestone, a first major release version of the OpenXR runtime for Linux is now available, bringing with it a SteamVR driver! View the full article

Hwangsaeul, or H8L, a remote surveillance streaming solution, utilizes the capability of libsrt to collect statistics from open SRT sockets and by continuously analyzing the available data tries to detect potential connectivity issues. View the full article

Complex, real-world correctness tests and performance analysis are now possible thanks to gltrim, a new tool recently added to apitrace, designed to trim replayable traces to single, user-defined frames. View the full article

Earlier this week, WebRTC became an official W3C and IETF standard. GStreamer has a powerful and rapidly maturing WebRTC implementation. So, the obvious question is: how do we build this on Windows? View the full article

Last year, from June to September, I worked on the kernel development tool Coccinelle under Collabora. I implemented a performance boosting algorithm for one of Coccinelle's use cases. Here's a look at this work. View the full article

Join us as our 2021 conference schedule gets underway this weekend with the virtual editions of linux.conf.au and MiniDebConf India! Collaborans will be giving talks on recent projects including futex2, and Open Source AI video analytics with Panfrost. View the full article

The open source Panfrost driver for Arm Mali Midgard and Bifrost GPUs now provides non-conformant OpenGL ES 3.0 on Bifrost and desktop OpenGL 3.1 on Midgard (Mali T760 and newer) and Bifrost, in time for Mesa's first release of 2021. View the full article

After several months of work, we are excited to announce a first proposal for a Wayland driver for Wine. The proposal is in the form of an RFC, in order to explore how to best move forward with the upstreaming and further development of the driver. 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

This year, the global pandemic has put a strain on us all. Motivation can become hard to maintain, worries can cloud our minds. Now more than ever, it is important to try and connect with our colleagues. View the full article

Wayland is still lacking proper consideration for color management & support for high dynamic range (HDR) imagery. However, a group of developers has begun an effort to fix this situation. This is their story. 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

This week marks two years since the OpenGL implementation on Vulkan was initially announced. Since then, and especially over the past few months, much has progressed with many new features being added and performance now close to native (95%!). View the full article

Since our previous update on Panfrost, the open source stack for Arm's Mali Midgard and Bifrost GPUs, we've focused on taking our driver from its reverse-engineered origins on Midgard to a mature stack. View the full article

Monado 0.4 OpenXR runtime introduces initial support for Android and passes all of the OpenXR conformance tests with both OpenGL and Vulkan on desktop with a simulated device. View the full article

The 4-day event is dedicated to everything open source and will showcase a program of 250+ talks. Collaborans will once again be actively participating in the week's activities, with no less than eight presentations, a BoF on KernelCI, and two panel discussions! 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

The concept of a remote internship may raise some doubts, or even red flags, for many students, as would remote jobs for professionals. As a result, we pay extra attention to how we onboard and support our interns. 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

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

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

Introducing an accurate and light-weight deep network for video super-resolution upscaling, running on a completely open source software stack using Panfrost, the free and open-source graphics driver for Mali GPUs. View the full article

The lineup of great virtual conferences continues this week with the 2020 edition of X.Org Developer's Conference (XDC), the leading event for developers working on all things Open graphics, including the Linux kernel, Mesa, DRM, Wayland and X11. 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

A high-level introduction of the Linux graphics stack, how it is used within ChromeOS, and the work done to improve software rendering (while simultaneously improving GPU rendering by reducing the boilerplate needed in applications). View the full article

Last year, a (controversial) feature was added to the Linux kernel to support optimized case-insensitive file name lookups in the Ext4 filesystem. Here's a look at why this was merged, what improvements have been made since, and how to put it to work. View the full article