SBC News

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

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

Tomorrow, March 14, Collabora will be in Düsseldorf, Germany, to take part and exhibit at the second edition of the Renesas European R-Car Consortium Forum! View the full article

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

With just a few simple steps, you can compile and boot a Raspberry Pi using the Linux kernel mainline source code. Here's how. 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

Since the last Debian release, a number of changes have been made in the Debian Cloud Team, both on the technical & organisational level within the community. Here's a look at what's in store for Buster! View the full article

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

Following two months of work to develop a new kernel driver for Midgard and Bifrost GPUs, the kernel side of Panfrost is now in a form close to be acceptable in the mainline Linux kernel. View the full article

Collabora is headed to Nuremberg, Germany to take part in this year's edition of Embedded World, the leading international fair for embedded systems! Come say hello, booth 4-280! View the full article

A look at how to implement USB gadget devices on Linux machines which have the necessary UDC hardware, automate the manual configfs process via declarative gadget "schemes", and use systemd for gadget composition at boot time. View the full article

From the latest on Open Source projects Zink (OpenGL on Vulkan) and VirGL (virtual 3D GPU for QEMU), to a state of the union on GStreamer embedded, and a look at how the KernelCI project is getting a second breath, Collaborans presented in five devrooms. View the full article

In just over a week's time, Collabora will be heading to Brussels to take part in the 2019 edition of FOSDEM! Come say hello, or catch one of the 8 talks (in 5 different devrooms) given by Collaborans! 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

Panfrost, a project that delivers an open source implementation of a driver for the newest versions of the Mali family of GPUs, now includes support for running Wayland compositors and zero-copy GPU-accelerated clients. View the full article

As one year ends and another begins, Collabora is proud to be once again an Includer sponsor for the latest round (#17) of Outreachy internships, which began earlier this month! More specifically, Collabora is sponsoring the Linux kernel projects for the December 2018 – March 2019 semester. View the full article

Released a few months ago, the Google Pixel 3 is the first Android phone running with the mainline graphics stack. A feat that was deemed impossible 10 years ago is now a reality thanks to a lot of hard work from the entire community. View the full article

This week, Collaborans will be taking part, and speaking, in this year's ESE Kongress, Germany's largest congress for professional embedded software engineering. View the full article

In an ideal world, everyone would implicitly understand that it just makes good business sense to upstream some of the modifications made when creating your Linux powered devices. Unfortunately, this is a long way from being common knowledge. View the full article

How can we measure the comprehensiveness of a test suite? Code coverage is the standard metric used in the industry and makes intuitive sense. However, it can often present some difficulties for large scale surveys. View the full article

A real-world use case of eBPF tracing to understand file access patterns in the Linux kernel and optimize large applications. View the full article

After a great time in Vancouver, Collaborans are headed this weekend to southern France to attend and speak at the 2018 edition of Capitole du Libre, a weekend dedicated to free and Open Source software! 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

While our regular column (this time on Video4Linux, written by Ezequiel Garcia) is alive and well in this month's issue of LXF, there's also something else worth highlighting: a 6-page interview with none other than Collabora's Graphics lead, Daniel Stone! View the full article

Did you know you could register your own PC, or a spare laptop collecting dust in a drawer, to get instant CI going on GitLab? Not only will you get faster CI, but you'll also reduce the queue on the shared runner for others! 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

After three great days attending and catching up with the community at ELCE, Collaborans are continuing their stay in Edinburgh to take part in the GStreamer Conference & Hackfest, the Linux Media Summit and the Automated Testing Summit. 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

For projects of any value and significance, having a comprehensive automated test suite is nowadays considered a standard software engineering practice. Why, then, don't we see more prominent FOSS projects employing this practice? View the full article

Next week, Collabora will be sponsoring, exhibiting & speaking at Embedded Linux Confererence Europe in Edinburgh, Scotland. Now in its 13th year, ELCE is the premier vendor-neutral technical conference for companies and developers using embedded Linux. View the full article

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

After I started working for Collabora in April, I've finally been able to put some time on maintenance and development of Geoclue again. While I've fixed quite a few issues on the backlog, there has been some significant changes as of late. View the full article

We're headed to Heraklion, Greece, to meet with the Panhellenic FOSS community at FOSSCOMM, a conference for programmers, students and anyone else interested in the open source movement! 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 month, the first "MicroDebConf" took place at the Gama campus of the University of Brasilia. Here's a look at how this one day event came to be, and what was accomplished during that day. View the full article

Next week, Collaborans will be heading to Paris, A Coruña & Berlin, to sponsor and speak at four different conferences: Embedded Recipes, Kernel Recipes, All Systems Go and XDC 2018. See you there? 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

From September 14 to 18, Collabora will be exhibiting at the IBC Show 2018, the "world's most influential media, entertainment and technology show"! If you are planning on attending, please make sure to stop by our booth, D-15 in Hall 14! View the full article

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

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

Starting tomorrow, Collaborans will be in beautiful British Columbia to take part, and speak, in this year's Open Source Summit North America! If you are planning on attending, come say hello or catch one of our presentations! View the full article

Working with a git based project that has a defacto upstream repository means that you perioducally want to fetch the canonical master branch. This can be simplified with a .gitconfig alias. View the full article

A look at the work and motivation behind implementing the Khronos EGLDevice extensions in Mesa. These extensions allow users of open source graphics drivers to cleanly describe & select which device to use in heterogeneous systems. 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

GNOME Builder is an Integrated Development Environment designed for the GNOME ecosystem. It most notably features a deep integration to the Git version control system, allow to debug applications quickly and allow in-line documentation viewing. 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

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

Collabora is heading East to sponsor & attend DebConf18, the annual Debian conference! The week-long event takes place for the first time in Asia, at the National Chiao Tung University Microelectronics & Information Research Center, in Hsinchu Taiwan. 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

By this time next week, Collaborans will have arrived in Almería, Spain, to attend and speak at the 2018 edition of GUADEC, the annual GNOME conference. Come say hello! 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

Launched by Haivision in 2017, and freely available on GitHub via the Mozilla Public License 2.0, SRT is an innovative UDP-based protocol enabling high-quality, low-latency video streaming across unpredictable networks. View the full article

Embedded devices are a popular deployment target for GStreamer yet they are not tested on the project's Continuous Integration (CI) system. Here's a look at work done to introduce a Raspberry Pi for automated on-board testing using Jenkins, LAVA & more. View the full article

In late January 1998, Netscape surprised everyone by releasing the source for Communicator, its web browser, making it readily available to all. The marked a turning point, and the birth of a new term, in software development: Open Source. 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

At the start of 2018 in January, I joined Collabora, an open source software consultancy, as a Software Engineer Intern with the Multimedia team. Reaching the end of that internship, I would like to take the time to share my experience. View the full article

Earlier this month, Olivier Crête, Nicolas Dufresne, George Kiagiadakis & I attended the GStreamer Spring Hackfest in Lund, Sweden. Hosted by Axis, it was a great opportunity for the GStreamer community to touch base and work on open bugs and pet projects. View the full article

A few months ago, Robert Foss wrote a blog post about virtualizing GPU Access. Here's a look at some of the major improvements that have landed upstream since then, including QEMU using OpenGL ES acceleration, as well as our plans for the future. View the full article

Generously hosted by Axis in the beautiful Lund, Sweden, the annual spring hackfest is an occasion for the community to get together to bond, but also to co-ordinate the next half year of development of the GStreamer multimedia framework. View the full article

This weekend, we're headed to Gothenburg, Sweden, to meet the Nordic FOSS community at foss-north, a free / open source conference covering both software and hardware from the technical perspective! 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

Attending the NAB Show in Las Vegas? Make sure to stop by Collabora's booth, #N2908VR in the North Hall, and get a firsthand look at the latest in Open Source software integration! 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

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

Following on from part 1 in the series, part 2 covers more developments in low-level graphics, including support for buffer modifiers in the kernel, Mesa, Wayland, Weston, Mutter and GNOME Shell, and X.Org. View the full article

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

After a great time in Portland last week for ELC, Collaborans have arrived in Singapore for the 2018 edition of FOSSASIA Summit, the premier Open Technology event in Asia for developers, contributors, start-ups, and technology companies. View the full article

The latest enhancements to the DRM subsystem have made mainline Linux much more attractive, making drivers easier to write, applications portable, and a much more friendly and collaborative community than we've ever had. 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

It's that time of the year again! The snow has melted, spring is right around the corner and the annual Embedded Linux Conference begins next week in Portland! If you are planning on attending, come say hello or catch one of our three presentations! View the full article

Today, Google Open Source announced their first 2018 Open Source Peer Bonus winners, and our graphics lead, Daniel Stone, made the list! View the full article

This week, we're in Nuremberg, Germany to take part in this year's edition of Embedded World, the leading international fair for embedded systems! Come say hello, booth 4-170! View the full article

From an introduction to Flatpak, to managing build infrastructure of a Debian derivative, to modern tools to debug GStreamer, Collaborans presented in six different developer rooms, as well as in the main track, at FOSDEM 2018. View the full article

Released earlier this month, the latest version of VLC, the free & open source multimedia player (which also uses the GStreamer framework) now contains SRT modules which had been in development in VLC's master branch. View the full article

Transmitting low delay, high quality video over the Internet is hard. The trade-off is normally between video quality and transmission delay (or latency). Internet video has up to now been segregated into two segments: video streaming and video calls. 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

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

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

Brussels, here we come! We're thrilled to be sponsoring this year's edition of FOSDEM, taking place in just over a week's time (February 3 & 4), at the Université Libre de Bruxelles. Come say hello, or catch one of a dozen talks given by Collaborans! 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

Widely recognized as the best conference of its kind in Europe, the 2018 edition of FOSDEM promises to be no different, with a jam-packed schedule of over 600 lectures, lightning talks, developer rooms, and more. View the full article

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

For a second time this year, Collabora is proud to be sponsoring the latest round (Round 15) of Outreachy internships! More specifically, Collabora has chosen to sponsor the Linux kernel projects for the December 2017 - March 2018 semester. View the full article

With less than 12 days to go before Christmas, here are 12 reasons, from 12 different people who became Collaborans this year, on why you should consider joining our team! 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

Getting ChromiumOS building is reasonably easy, but running it under QEMU requires some work. Here's a guide to help you build all of the software needed to do so. View the full article

We're delighted to be one of the 33 new members of the Secure Reliable Transport (SRT) Alliance, a group dedicated to accelerating interoperability of video streaming solutions and fostering collaboration with industry leaders to achieve lower latency internet video transport. View the full article

Ozone is Chromium’s next-gen platform abstraction layer for graphics and input. When developing either Ozone itself or an application that uses Ozone, it is often beneficial to be able to run the code on the development machine, which is usually a typical GNU/Linux desktop system, since doing so speeds up the development cycle. 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

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

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

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

Running crosvm outside Chromium OS is quite easy, with the only complication being that minijail isn't widely packaged in distros. In these instructions, we hack around the issue with linker environment variables so we don't have to install it properly. View the full article

On November 8, we'll be in Düsseldorf, Germany, to take part & exhibit at the 1st edition of the Renesas European R-Car Consortium Forum, a one-day event aimed at bringing together OEMs and Tier1s to discuss the future of car mobility. 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

Following a weekend at the GStreamer Conference, Collabora will be continuing its week-long stay in Prague by sponsoring, exhibiting and speaking at Embedded Linux Conference Europe 2017. View the full article

We're thrilled to be once again a platinum sponsor of the annual GStreamer Conference, taking place this weekend (October 21 & 22) at Node5 in Prague, Czech Republic. Come say hello, or catch one of the five presentations given by Collaborans! 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

In this post, I will show one more example of how easy it is to disrupt performance of a modern CPU, and also run a quick discussion on why performance matters - as well as present a few cases where it shouldn't matter. View the full article