SBC News

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

In addition to Collabora's work to add support in mainline Linux kernel for several Chromebooks, these platforms are now being continuously tested as part of kernelci.org. Here's how to set them up for kernel development & automated testing with LAVA. View the full article

OpenQA is a tool for functional, end-to-end testing of operating system distributions. Earlier this year, Collabora undertook a project, sponsored by Meta, to reproduce Fedora’s openQA deployment in the AWS cloud. 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

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

Like all software, Open Source software isn't without it's bugs and issues. However, thanks to the nature of Open Source, resolving or mitigating the issue you encountered can be quite the satisfying adventure when it comes to scratching the itch. View the full article

Last week, a new version of docker.io, the Docker package provided by Debian, was uploaded to Debian Unstable. Quickly afterwards, the package moved to Debian Testing, the first time in two years that docker.io has migrated to "testing". View the full article

Just over a year has passed since the futex_waitv() syscall, part of the new futex2 systems calls, landed in Linux 5.16. But why are both needed? What role do they play in the context of gaming on Linux? Let's find out. View the full article

Just over a year has passed since the futex_waitv() syscall, part of the new futex2 systems calls, landed in Linux 5.16. But why are both needed? What role do they play in the context of gaming on Linux? Let's find out. View the full article

Part 3 of the cmtp-responder series with a focus on USB gadgets explores several new elements including a unified build environment with Docker and an example strategy for building and deploying to a target. View the full article

After months of work, led by Collabora's own Faith Ekstrand, Red Hat's Karol Herbst, and numerous open source contributors, NVK is now considered ready to be merged into the main Mesa project. View the full article

AI development is shifting from implementing models from scratch to composing powerful capabilities via APIs, enabling developers to integrate speech recognition, language models, and tool execution into useful applications with far less effort. View the full article

With VirGL, Venus, and vDRM, virglrenderer offers three different approaches to obtain access to accelerated GFX in a virtual machine. Here are the latest updates around each of these approaches. View the full article

I have recently been involved in reviewing some large feature patchsets for a project at work, and thought it might be interesting to discuss some of the principles we have been trying to stick to when going about these reviews. View the full article

We can now confidently say that PipeWire is here to stay. But of course it is not the end of the journey. There are many new areas to explore going forward, especially in WirePlumber and the ecosystem that builds around PipeWire. View the full article

This year's X. Org Developer's Conference (XDC) is teaming up with WineConf and FOSS XR in Minneapolis at the University of St. Thomas' Opus Hall for a jam-packed three day event. View the full article

Over the next few days, Collabora is very excited to be taking part in three events where we'll be exhibiting as well as giving talks: Augmented World Expo, Automotive Linux Summit and Open Source Summit Japan. View the full article

Kmemleak allows you to track possible memory leaks inside the Linux kernel. Basically, it tracks dynamically allocated memory blocks in the kernel and reports those without any reference left and that are therefore impossible to free. View the full article

Earlier this year, I joined Collabora for a six-month internship to learn how V4L2 (Video4Linux2) supports stateless video hardware decoding, and build a utility that traced and replayed stateless decoding from a userspace perspective. View the full article

Like the bug that no one can solve, many issues occur on the interface between the user application and the operating system. But even in the good Open Source world, understanding what is happening at these interfaces is not always easy. View the full article

Debugging GStreamer View the full article

Collabora will be at Embedded Software Engineering Kongress! Catch our talk as we share our expertise in training large open source models. View the full article

The world of AI has made leaps and bounds from what it once was, but there are still some adjustments required for the optimal outcome. With the help of WhisperLive, VoxAI was able to improve its response time and oratory abilities. 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

At Collabora, we're committed to bringing people together. That's why we're pushing state-of-the-art machine-learning techniques like Large Language Models, Speech Recognition, and Speech-Synthesis techniques. View the full article

Over the next two weeks, Collaborans will be present at four different events across the globe. If you plan on attending at any of these conferences, please reach out and say hello! View the full article

Join us next week in Utrecht for RustWeek! We'll be running a SuperTuxKart tournament to showcase Tyr, the Rust driver for Arm Mali GPUs. Come and see if you've got what it takes! View the full article

Today we all read the announcement of Ubuntu's decision to refocus on cloud and IoT activities, dropping Unity 8 to move back to a GNOME-based desktop for the 17.04 LTS. 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

Powerful video analytics pipelines are easy to make when you're well-equipped. Combining GStreamer and Machine Learning frameworks are the perfect duo to run complex models across multiple streams. View the full article

Using TensorFlow Lite models optimized for the STM3MP2 NPU along with an upstream-ready H.264 encoder (Video4Linux2), this demo showcases GStreamer's all-new analytic metadata framework. View the full article

This fall, we're thrilled to be sponsoring not one, but five great conferences! View the full article

Over the next few days, Collaborans will be getting back on the road and attending two events, one in Manchester and one in Los Angeles. We're also very pleased to be sponsoring one of these events! View the full article

Collaborans are once again hitting the road and will be attending three separate events over the next new two weeks, in London, Las Vegas and Amsterdam View the full article

For the very first time, the GStreamer Conference will be taking place in North America, and we're prepped and ready with no less than 9 talks to share! Catch the latest developments and AI advancements for this multimedia framework. View the full article

The i.MX 6 platform has for the past few years enjoyed a large effort to add upstream support to Linux and surrounding projects. The newly introduced i.MX 8 is seeing lots of work being done, despite hardware being still difficult to get access to. View the full article

The Rockchip RK3588 upstream support has progressed a lot over the last few years. As 2024 comes to a close, it is a great time to have a look at the recent changes, work in progress, and the current state in general. View the full article

A while back I presented USB 2.0 host support that was added to U-boot for the Radxa Rock-5B RK3588 Rockchip board. This time, USB 3.0 was added with support for the host and gadget. View the full article

A look at the USB-PD, PHY, hotplug, and DRM changes involved in making USB-C DisplayPort Alternate Mode work on RK3588/RK3576, and where they stand on the way to mainline Linux. View the full article

Using PipeWire, WirePlumber and a Raspberry Pi, you can create an audio bridge between a Bluetooth® device and an analog speaker system, breathing new life into your old speakers. 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

New DRM drivers are being added to almost each new kernel release, and because the mode setting API is so rich and complex, bugs do slip in that translate to differences in behaviour between drivers. 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

The latest mainline Linux kernel (v6.5) includes 22 patches that enable support for the AV1 uAPI and for two stateless video decoders: one for the Rockchip RK3588 and one for MT8195, a MediaTek SoC. 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

When working on the Linux Kernel, testing via QEMU is pretty common. Here's a look at virtme, a QEMU wrapper that uses the host instead of a virtual disk, making working with QEMU extremely easy. View the full article

For the past few years a clear trend of containerization of applications and services has emerged. Having processes containerized is beneficial in a number of ways. It both improves portability and strengthens security. 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

Ever since Vulkan was announced a few years ago, the idea of creating a Vulkan benchmarking tool in the spirit of glmark2 had been floating in my mind. Recently, thanks to my employer, Collabora, this idea has materialized! The result is the vkmark Vulkan benchmark, hosted on github. View the full article

On the road again! Collaborans are heading to London, A Coruña & Buenos Aires to attend a VR event, a hackfest, a conference on Open Source systems, and a day of technical sessions on Vulkan! See you there? View the full article

Today sees the public release of Vulkan 1.0, the next-generation graphics API from the Khronos Group. As a member of Khronos, Collabora has been committed to improving EGL, OpenGL ES and OpenGL itself, and this continues with Vulkan. View the full article

Collabora will be in Vienna for the Media Summit, Open Source Summit Europe, and Linux Plumbers! Catch one of our many talks. View the full article

Wayland 1.25 refreshes its documentation with three new chapters covering Wayland XML specification, content model updates, and color management design. View the full article

Predictable media latency, low power usage and vastly improved A/V sync. Wayland versus X11 explained on ARM MALI View the full article

I had a great time last week and the Web Engines Hackfest! It was the 7th web hackfest hosted by Igalia and the 7th hackfest I attended. I’m almost a local Galician already. Brazilian Portuguese being so close to Galician certainly helps! Collabora co-sponsored the event and it was great that two colleagues of mine managed to join me in attendance. View the full article

Raspberry PI 2 release announcement! View the full article

Next week our friends at Igalia will be hosting this year’s Web Engines Hackfest. Collabora will be there! We are gold sponsors, and have three developers attending. It will also be an opportunity to celebrate Igalia’s 15th birthday. Looking forward to meet you there! View the full article

Meet the newest members of our ever-growing engineering and administrative teams! Welcome Arnaud, Omar, Correntin, Lakshmipathi, Rebecca, Ezequiel, Ritesh, Ana and Zeeshan! 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

Collabora's involvement in Open Source XR development continues to grow today as we welcome the libsurvive project, the open source lighthouse tracking system, into the fold! 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

The latest release of Weston was made on February 1, 2022. Meanwhile, a few bugs were discovered and we decided to do a bug-fix release, which we haven't had in several years. View the full article

Announced earlier this week, Weston 11.0 brings a number of highlights including optimizations in the DRM-backend, color management infrastructure code and multiple RDP improvements. View the full article

Released last week, Weston 12.0 brings a number of highlights including two new backends, support for multiple scanout devices, and the addition of new protocol implementations. Here's a look at some of the changes that have landed in this new version. View the full article

Weston 13.0 brings multiple fixes and important changes, notably the ability to load multiple backends simultaneously. This can be used to load VNC, RDP, or PipeWire backends for remote access alongside the native DRM backend. View the full article

Recently, both Weston 14.0, and 14.0.1 (bug fix) were released. Here's at look at some of the highlights and changes for this latest release of Wayland's reference compositor. View the full article

Collabora is excited to see Monado at the heart of the new OpenXR runtime for Android XR, a major milestone for Open Source XR interoperability. View the full article

Weston 15.0 has arrived, bringing a brand new Lua-based shell for fully customizable window management, an experimental Vulkan renderer, and a host of improvements to color handling, media playback, and display performance. View the full article

Weston 16 expands HDR and color management support, improves Perfetto debugging and DRM backend performance, and adds new protocol and renderer capabilities for more efficient and flexible Wayland compositor development. 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

Latest Weston features View the full article

In this second article of a three-part series, I look at how Matt Godbolt uses modern C++ features to try to protect against misusing an API that deals with destructive state transition based on a talk he gave on making code easy to use and hard to misuse. View the full article

Abandoned vendor-provided BSP roadblocks can be overcome when mainline Open Source projects like the Linux kernel are integrated directly. Get your upstreamed BSPs from day one. 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

Back in 2022, after a series of issues were found in its design, I made the call to rework some of WirePlumber's fundamentals in order to allow it to grow. So where are we we now? And what's next? Let's dive in! View the full article

By creating a real-time AI chatbot communication system using WhisperLive and WhisperSpeech, we have addressed the unnatural delay in current bot interactions for seamless conversation. View the full article

Collabora is headed to California to take part in the inaugural edition of AI​.dev: Open Source GenAI & ML Summit, a new event aims to bring together the brightest developers from around the world to shape the trajectory of open source AI. View the full article

Text-to-speech (TTS) models are playing a transformative role, from enriching audiobooks to enhancing podcasts and even improving interactions with chatbots. We're introducing a new player in this field – WhisperSpeech, an Open Source text-to-speech model developed by Collabora. View the full article

Earlier this month I had the pleasure of attending the Web Engines Hackfest, hosted by Igalia at their offices in A Coruña, and also sponsored by my employer, Collabora, Google and Mozilla. It has grown a lot and we had many new people this year. 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

Recently, Sean Paul from Google's ChromeOS team, submitted a patch series to enable HDCP - or High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection - support for the Intel display driver. View the full article

Why udisks2 and polkit are the way they are 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

The focus in 2022 was on maturing the Wayland driver and keeping up to date with the Wine upstream internal changes, which involved updating it for the latest internal driver APIs, and making preparations to support WoW64. 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

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

2023 was a great year for the Wayland driver for Wine. After several merge requests, many people are now already able to use the latest Wine release to enjoy some of their favorite Windows applications in a completely X11-free environment! 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

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

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

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

With the upcoming 0.5 release, WirePlumber's Lua scripts will be transformed with the new Event Dispatcher. More modular and extensible with very little redundant processing, they will look and feel completely different. View the full article

Event Dispatcher, part of the upcoming WirePlumber 0.5 configuration system refactoring, is a custom PipeWire event scheduling mechanism designed to address many of the fundamental issues in WirePlumber. View the full article