SBC News

August ends on a high note with two virtual events this week: DebConf20, Debian's annual conference, and Linux Plumbers Conference, the premier event for developers working at all levels of the Linux kernel's plumbing layer and beyond. View the full article

We have now integrated Mali GPU hardware counters supported by Panfrost with Perfetto's tracing SDK, unlocking all-in-one graphics-aware profiling on Panfrost systems! View the full article

Key performance improvements and fixes to GStreamer's RTP stack have landed in GStreamer 1.18, due in the coming months. The latest enhancements provide an important boost in throughput, opening the gate to high bitrate video streaming. View the full article

Following our recent presentation at OSSummit, many showed interest in learning more about solving real-world problems with computer vision. Here is a new blog series, on computer vision, object detection, and building a system on the edge. View the full article

Recent work in Weston, the industry-standard Wayland compositor, has enabled DRM/KMS backends to be tested in the absence of real hardware, enabling more battle testing of corner-case and error conditions within automated testing frameworks. 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

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

It is with great pleasure that we announce the availability of WirePlumber (the PipeWire session manager) version 0.3.0. This release brings support for desktop use cases and is a working drop-in replacement for PipeWire's example session manager. 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

Earlier this year, we announced a new project with Microsoft: the implementation of OpenCL & OpenGL to DirectX translation layers. Here's the latest on this work, including the steps taken to improve the performance of the OpenGL-On-D3D12 driver. View the full article

Despite the many obstacles brought on by the pandemic, Collabora continues to build and strengthen its engineering and administration teams for the road ahead. Join us in welcoming Angelica, Raghavendra, Doug, Italo and Theodotos! View the full article

The recent improvements in Monado like out of process compositing and multi-layer rendering released with v0.2 prepared the requirements to implement OpenXR's XR_EXTX_overlay extension. View the full article

Syzkaller is much needed tool for Linux kernel testing and debugging. With some work, it can also be enhanced to find bugs in specific drivers, such as V4L2. Here's how. View the full article

Previously, we discussed about how Rust can be a great language for embedded programming. In this article, we'll explain an easy setup to cross build Rust code depending on system libraries, a common requirement when working on embedded systems. View the full article

Collabora will be presenting on five separate occasions during the virtual editions of Embedded Linux Conference North America and Open Source Summit North America, taking place later this month. View the full article

Adaptive streaming is a technique to provide flexibility and scalability by offering variable bit-rate streams to the client. Here's a quick guide on how to generate a MPEG-DASH stream (the most completely adaptive streaming technique) using GStreamer. 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

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

Coding hss begun for this year's Google Summer of Code (GSoC) projects, announced earlier last month. The 2020 edition selected 1,199 students from 66 countries, to work with 199 mentoring organizations over the course of the summer. View the full article

With the excellent (online) edition of Augmented World Expo 2020 in full swing this week, what better time to announce version 0.2 of the Monado OpenXR runtime for Linux. It's been a very busy three months since the last Monado developer update! View the full article

Device drivers can support more revisions and SoC platforms by abstracting away specific hardware interface layouts. Let's examine a specific instance of this process, namely the effort to make the MIPI DSI host controller driver more generic. 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

gst-build is one of the main build systems used by the community to develop the GStreamer platform. In my last blog post, I presented gst-build and explained how to get started with it. Now, let's get straight to the point regarding cross-compilation. View the full article

In part 2 of this series on syzkaller, we looked at how to install the tool and use it to improve our code base. Now, how does syzkaller report a bug it finds in the execution path of a system call? Let's add a new syscall description and see how it goes. View the full article

Sponsored by Valve, this latest release of the Open Source project which enables interaction with traditional desktop environments, such as GNOME and KDE, in VR, brings the largest amount of changes yet, with many new features and architectural improvements. View the full article

An in-depth look at WirePlumber, the modular and extensible session manager for PipeWire that brings advanced device management, policy control and security enforcement capabilities. View the full article

A new monado-service binary and out of process compositor has landed in Monado, the fully Open Source OpenXR runtime for Linux! Here's a demo of the compositor's new abilities running with the new Blender OpenXR VR Session. View the full article

With Rust gaining traction among the GStreamer community as an alternative to C to write applications and plugins, we began wondering, could the size of such Rust plugins be a problem for embedded systems? View the full article

The Panfrost project building a free, Open Source graphics driver for modern Mali GPUs has reached a new milestone: the first 3D render, including basic texture support, on a Bifrost chip (Mali G31)! View the full article

In these times of disruption and uncertainty, how about some positive news for a change? Let's take a moment to celebrate the newest members of our engineering and administration teams: Mylène, Christopher, Melissa, Ricardo and Leandro! 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

In my previous blog post, we discussed the importance of testing, what is fuzzing, and how the syzkaller fuzzes the kernel in order to find bugs. Now, let’s install the tool and starting using it to improve our code base. View the full article

Open Source software development thrives on remote collaboration, and continues to do so in 2020, with multiple projects announcing releases in the first quarter. 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

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

Despite the challenges presented by COVID-19, Linux kernel development continues. Here's a look at the various projects Collaborans have been involved in, and the progress made in kernel 5.6, which was released over the weekend. 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

With the code base of the Linux kernel constantly changing and deployed in devices around the world, performing proper testing is crucial. Here's a look at syzkaller, a valuable tool widely adopted by the kernel community to detect bugs in the kernel. 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

GStreamer relies on multiple repositories such as base and good to build its ecosystem, and now owns more than 30 projects in Gitlab. So, a unified tool/build system has always been necessary to build a specified version. View the full article

Here at Collabora, we trust our people to work remotely, we give them full responsibility for their output, and we believe it helps creating an even stronger internal culture and comes with some other positives. View the full article

PipeWire 0.3 was released a few days ago, marking a big step forward in the effort of making this emerging media service the core layer of all multimedia on Linux. View the full article

Panfrost's ES 3.0 support has landed in upstream Mesa and works with a mainline Linux kernel. The support is still early, but if you're feeling adventurous, feel free to give it a try on your favourite ES 3.0 applications and games. View the full article

Ever since announcing the project at GDC 2019, we have been working on improving the full open source XR stack to a usable state. Today, we are very happy to tag version 0.1 of the Monado OpenXR runtime for Linux! View the full article

When a bug surprises you when doing Apertis packaging of a typical vendor code signing tool, it's time to debug it using the compiler's built-in tools. 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

From KernelCI's new home, the latest on Zink (OpenGL on Vulkan), OpenXR & Monado, PipeWire in the automotive industry, JPEG2000, and GStreamer on the Magic Leap One, Collaborans gave talks in 6 different devrooms, as well on the main track. 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

In less than 10 days, Collabora will be in Brussels to take part in this year's edition of FOSDEM! Come say hello, or catch one of the dozen talks (in the main track and 6 different devrooms) given by Collaborans! View the full article

What better way to start the new year than by highlighting the newest members of our engineering and administrative teams who joined in Q4 2019! Please join us in welcoming Antonio, Afonso, Narciso and Eleni! View the full article

If you have a device with a Mali T720 or T820 GPU, you’re in luck – your device is now supported in upstream Mesa at feature parity with other GPUs. Get out your Allwinner H6 or Amlogic S912 board, grab the latest Mesa, and enjoy a match of SuperTuxKart! View the full article

PipeWire, the new and emerging open source framework that aims to greatly improve the exchange and management of audio and video streams inside a Linux system, has seen a number of improvements and bug fixes over the past year. 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 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

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

Following three days at ELCE, Collaborans are continuing their stay in the capital of France’s Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region to take part the annual GStreamer Conference, as well as the Automated Testing Summit. View the full article

The KernelCI project, which powers kernelci.org with automated testing for the upstream Linux kernel, has found a new home after sailing through uncharted waters for over five years. View the full article

Next week, Collabora will be sponsoring, exhibiting & speaking at ELCE in Lyon, France. We'll be showcasing not one but two demos at our booth this year: arcade racing on a ROCK Pi 4 with Panfrost, and GStreamer on the Magic Leap One. View the full article

I recently went to XDC 2019, where I gave yet another talk about Zink. I kinda forgot to write a blog-post about it, so here’s me trying to make up for it… or something like that. I’ll also go into some more recent developments as well. 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

What HDCP is, and why supporting HDCP in Weston is justified in both an economical and technical context. View the full article

Collabora is proud to be hosting in Montreal the 2019 edition of the 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

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

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

Showcasing two brand new Open Source software demonstrations featuring the Xilinx high-performance Zynq UltraScale+ MPSoC, and the Magic Leap One augmented reality headset. 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

With the release of virglrenderer 0.8.0, getting accelerated OpenGL within a virtual machine (VM) made a big leap forward. Since virglrenderer-0.7.0, the code base has seen ~600 commits, and Collabora provided more than 80% of these contributions. View the full article

Starting tomorrow, Collabora will be exhibiting & speaking at Embedded Linux Conference North America (ELCNA), the premier vendor-neutral technical conference for companies and developers using embedded Linux. View the full article

Ongoing work on the reverse-engineered Panfrost OpenGL ES driver for Arm Mali GPUs has turned the RK3399 SoC into a very attractive platform to try out Wayland on ARM devices. View the full article

As part of its unwavering commitment to open source and open standards, Collabora is proud to be part of bringing the recently-released OpenXR 1.0 to life, and to be pioneering the Monado open source runtime for OpenXR. 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

Today, we are very excited to announce xrdesktop, a new open source project sponsored by Valve, enabling interaction with traditional Linux desktop environments, such as GNOME and KDE, in VR. View the full article

There's been quite a few updates to Zink, an OpenGL implementation on top of Vulkan, since I last wrote about it. Here's an overview of the recent changes, as well as an exciting announcement! 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

A little over a month and a half ago, Collaborans including Aaron Boxer, George Kiagiadakis, Guillaume Desmottes, Stéphane Cerveau and myself took part in the GStreamer Spring Hackfest in Oslo. This year, the hackfest was kindly hosted by Pexip. 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

In my last Panfrost blog post, I announced my internship goal: improve Panfrost to run GNOME3. GNOME is a popular Linux desktop making heavy use of OpenGL; to use GNOME with only free and open source software on a machine with Mali graphics, Panfrost is necessary. View the full article

Dummy_hcd which consists of a software-emulated host controller and a UDC chip. In other words, this means you can play with USB gadgets even if you don't have the appropriate hardware, because your PC can act as both a USB host and a USB device. View the full article

For many, June 21, day of the Solstice, is a day of celebrations. At Collabora, we're also celebrating, as we take a moment to welcome all the newest members of our engineering and administration teams who've joined over the last year! 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

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

A few days ago, coding began for this year's Google Summer of Code (GSoC) projects. Along with four GStreamer and Wayland related projects, this year's edition also includes two Debian projects for which Collaborans will be mentors. View the full article

With virtme, you can run a custom built kernel on top of our running root filesystem. In this post, we explore another example of virtme in action, and see how to test Video4Linux2 drivers on bleeding edge GStreamer builds. View the full article

Introducing cmtp-responder - a permissively licensed Media Transfer Protocol (MTP) responder implementation which allows embedded devices to provide MTP services and supports a core set of MTP operations. 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

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

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

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

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

A previous post introduced the SPURV Android compatibility layer for Wayland based Linux environment. In this post, we're going to dig into how you can run an Android application on the very common i.MX6 based Nitrogen6_MAX board. 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

GStreamer's logging system is an incredibly powerful ally when debugging but it can sometimes be a bit daunting to dig through the massive amount of generated logs. I often find myself writing small scripts processing gst logs when debugging. View the full article

The recent release of version 6 of the Weston compositor has brought with it the weston-debug protocol, a new feature that allows developers and users alike to display on-the-fly various debugging (logging) information generated by the compositor. View the full article

A well-known Linux kernel developer once said, a poor craftsman famously complains about his tools, but a good craftsman knows how to choose excellent tools. Here's a python-based tool that integrates git and patchwork, and can greatly improve your toolbox. 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

Collabora contributes elements implementing the RIST Simple Profile to GStreamer. This specification adds retransmissions to RTP streams in a way that it compatible with existing broadcast encoders and decoders. 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

It's now possible to run Android applications in the same graphical environment as regular Wayland Linux applications with full 3D acceleration. Here's a look at SPURV, our experimental containerized Android environment. 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

In the previous post I introduced you to the subject of USB gadgets implemented as machines running Linux. In this post, we look at how to implement your very own USB function with FunctionFS and how to integrate that with systemd. View the full article