SBC News

This week, Collabora is heading to the city of lights, Paris, to sponsor and attend the very first (and sold-out!) edition of Embedded Recipes, as well as the 6th edition of Kernel Recipes! View the full article

Many thanks to Google for recording all the XDC2017 talks. To make them easier to watch, here are direct links to each talk recorded at XDC2017. View the full article

The 2017 X.Org Developer's Conference kicks off today in Mountain View, California, and along with Collaborans attending & presenting, we're delighted to announce the first ever Collabora XDC Happy Hour! View the full article

Collaborans will be giving five talks during this year's edition, which starts today in Los Angeles! View the full article

Linux Kernel 4.13 is out, with 12 Collabora developers having contributed, pairing up with 4.12 as another kernel release with our highest number of Collabora developers! View the full article

Last week, I attended DebConf 17 in Montréal, returning to DebConf for the first time in 10 years (last time was DebConf 7 in Edinburgh). It was great to put names to faces and meet more of my co-developers in person! View the full article

Collabora is proud to once again be a Gold Sponsor of this year's DebConf, the annual Debian conference for developers! This year's week-long conference takes place from August 6 to 12 at Collège de Maisonneuve in beautiful Montréal, where one of our two offices is located! 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

More progress is being made in the area of i.MX6, etnaviv and Android. Since the last post a lot work has gone into upstreaming and stabilizing the etnaviv on Android ecosystem. This has involved Android, kernel and Mesa changes, many of which are available upstream now. 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

Linux Kernel 4.12 is out, with 12 Collabora developers having contributed, a new record number of developers contributing to a single kernel release for Collabora! View the full article

Debugging graphics performance in a simple and high-level manner is possible for all Gallium based Mesa drivers using GALLIUM_HUD, a feature that adds performance graphs to applications. View the full article

Our worldwide team of Open Source engineers and developers continues to grow with new additions in Core, Graphics & Web! Welcome Denis Pynkin, Alexandros Frantzis and Santosh Mahto! View the full article

At Collabora one of the many things we do is build Debian derivatives/overlays for customers on a variety of architectures including 32 bit and 64 bit ARM systems. And just as Debian does, our OBS system builds on native systems rather than emulators. View the full article

The feature to improve NVMe performance over emulated environments has now been officially released in the NVMe Specification Revision 1.3 under the name "Doorbell Buffer Config command", along with an implementation in the mainline Linux kernel! View the full article

GPUs like Intel and Vivante support storing contents of graphical buffers in different formats. Support for describing these formats using modifiers has now been added to Android and Mesa, enabling tiling artifact free running of Android on the iMX6 platform. View the full article

Collabora is proud to once again be sponsoring the latest round (Round 14) of Outreachy internships, which began earlier this week! More specifically, Collabora has chosen to sponsor the Linux kernel projects for the May-August semester. 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

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

From May 9 to 11, Collabora will be attending the GENIVI All Member Meeting & Open Community Days: Advancing Connected Vehicles in a Connected World, in Birmingham, UK! View the full article

Along with the usual load of memory leaks, crashes and other bugs, Collabora's multimedia team once again contributed a number of improvements across a wide number of areas. View the full article

Linux Kernel 4.11 was released yesterday, and 9 different Collabora developers contributed a total of 44 patches, while also reviewing 22 other patches. View the full article

Getting Android up and running on the iMX6 platform using an open source graphics stack has been impossible up until recently, but now you can. Here's a guide through the steps. View the full article

With GStreamer you can easily receive a AES67 stream, the standard which allows inter-operability between different IP based audio networking systems and transfers of live audio between profesionnal grade systems. View the full article

If you're looking to change the Android boot animation to something other than the stock one, here's a hands-on guide to help you to do it. View the full article

With GStreamer 1.12's first release candidate out for testing and the final release expected soon, here's a brief preview of some of the (many) new features, bugfixes and improvements that will be arriving with this release. 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

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

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

Today, Olivier Crête, libnice maintainer and Collabora Multimedia Lead, announced the availability of libnice 0.1.14, the latest release of the NAT traversal library implementing the RFC for Interactive Connectivity Establishment (ICE). View the full article

Android uses the HWC API to communicate with graphics hardware. This API is not supported on the mainline Linux graphics stack, but by using drm_hwcomposer as a shim it now is. View the full article

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

At the GTK hackfest in London (which accidentally became mostly a Flatpak hackfest) I've mainly been looking into how to make D-Bus work better for app container technologies like Flatpak and Snap. View the full article

Check out the April issue (#222) of Linux Format magazine for our new monthly column on all things Open Source, including graphics, multimedia and more! View the full article

Modern CPUs implement a number of technologies that may affect application performance in unpredictable ways. Figuring out what is going wrong with an application can be a hard task, but it can become much easier with the correct analysis tools. View the full article

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

Before being able to write firmware data to any production Chromebook device, the Write-Protect screw has to be removed. 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

The past few months have been busy ones on the open-source graphics front, bringing with them Wayland 1.13, Weston 2.0 and Mesa 17.0. Here's a look at some of these developments, including Collabora's behind-the-scenes work on performance improvement. View the full article

How to create your custom Android image, and APK app(s), all at once. View the full article

Starting today, and for the next few days, Collaborans will be taking part in this year's Embedded Linux Conference North America, the "premier vendor-neutral technical conference for companies and developers using Linux in embedded products". View the full article

Linux Kernel 4.10 is out, and this time Collabora contributed a total of 39 patches by 10 different developers. View the full article

How to set up a fully functional ChromiumOS development environment on actual Chromebook hardware. View the full article

Over the past few weeks, I have been working for Collabora on plumbing DRM format modifier support across a number of components in the graphics stack. This post documents the work and the related consequences/implications. View the full article

On February 8 & 9, Collabora will be attending Integrated Systems Europe 2017, the world's largest tradeshow dedicated to professional AV and electronic systems integration, taking place at the Amsterdam RAI. View the full article

We're headed to Brussels, Belgium for FOSDEM 2017, the two-day event organized by volunteers to promote the widespread use of free and open source software. View the full article

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

Last month I gave a short talk about the Chamelium board from the ChromeOS team, a board that is getting more and more usage outside of Google as it can help you automate the testing of your display (and not only!) code and hardware. View the full article

A look at the fundamentals of building and booting a kernel in QEMU using debootstrap, so you have the needed infrastructure to test your kernel changes in QEMU. View the full article

Linux Kernel 4.9 was released this week and once more Collabora developers took part on the kernel development cycle. This time we contributed 36 patches by 11 different developers, our highest number of single contributors in a kernel release ever. Remember that in the previous release we had our highest number total contributions. View the full article

Some exciting news today as GStreamer launches its redesigned documentation site, complete with dynamic navigation, search function and new tutorials. This new iteration is powered by HotDoc, a tool created by Collabora's Mathieu Duponchelle! View the full article

Our ongoing work on improving WebKitGTK+ performance brought us to take a closer look as to why GTK+ was experiencing significant speed issues when used with Wayland and HiDPI screens, revealing the root cause to be within the lower level toolkit. View the full article

Almost all of Collabora's customers use the Linux kernel on their products. Often they will use the exact code as delivered by the SBC vendors and we'll work with them in other parts of their software stack. But it's becoming increasingly common for our customers to adapt the kernel sources to the specific needs of their particular products. View the full article

In the first part of my review of Collabora's participation in GStreamer 1.10, I discussed the work done by Guillaume & Nicolas around leak tracing, acoustic echo cancellation, Wayland, V4L, etc. Today, I'll go over the contributions from the rest of our multimedia team. View the full article

Yesterday, we celebrated the release of GStreamer 1.10, the culmination of 7 months of very hard work from the GStreamer community. Collabora's multimedia team is extremely proud of our contributions to this new major feature release. View the full article

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

In the previous post, I gave an overview of the Open Build Service software architecture. In this second part, a tutorial on setting up a package build with OBS from Debian packages is presented. View the full article

openSUSE distributions’ build system is based on a generic framework named Open Build Service (OBS), I have been using these tools in my work environment, and I have to say, as Debian developer, that it is a great tool. In this blog post I plan for you to learn the very basics of such tool and provide you with a tutorial to get, at least, a Debian package building. View the full article

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

Being someone who has already experimented with two transformation box approaches for Pitivi in the past, maintainers thought I might be the right person to do a modern one. Creating a user interface for a video transformation requires three things: the implementation of the transformation, a way to draw the widgets over the viewer, and mapping the input to the reverse transformation. View the full article

Collabora is proud to be a Platinum Sponsor of this year's GStreamer Conference, taking place at the Betahaus in Berlin, Germany on 10-11 October 2016. Come say hello, or catch one of the four presentations given by Collaborans during the conference! 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

Linux Kernel 4.8 is out and once more Collabora engineers did a significant contribution to the Kernel. For this latest release, Collabora provided 101 patches from 8 engineers, our biggest contribution to date in single kernel release! 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

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

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

Collabora will be exhibiting at IBC 2016, the premier annual event for professionals engaged in the creation, management and delivery of entertainment and news content worldwide. View the full article

Developing Linux for Android on Qemu allows you to do some things that are not necessarily possible using the stock emulator. For my purposes I need access to a GPU and be able to modify the driver, which is where Virgilrenderer and Qemu comes in handy. View the full article

Nowadays, in Google Cloud Engine (GCE), it is possible to attach a local SSD with the NVMe interface to your virtual machine. Unfortunately, you only get a good number of iops (input/output operations per second) if you instantiate a machine with nvme-backports-debian-7-wheezy image; other available distributions on GCE will have a lower number of iops. 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

For years the open source Linux OpenGL drivers have been playing catchup to the proprietary drivers and in the case of Intel hardware to the Windows driver. Recently, a major milestone was reached in bridging this gap with the enablement of OpenGL 4.4 for the Intel Broadwell and Skylake platforms. View the full article

Linux Kernel 4.7 was released this week with a total of 36 contributions from five Collabora engineers. It includes the first contributions from Helen as Collaboran and the first ever contributions on the kernel from Robert Foss. Here are some of the highlights of the work Collabora have done on Linux Kernel 4.7. View the full article

For a long time I believed that echo cancellers had no place inside GStreamer. The theory was that GStreamer was too high level and would never be able to provide accurate enough delay information for any canceller to work. View the full article

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

Collabora is proud to be sponsoring DebConf16, the annual Debian developers meeting, taking place in Cape Town, South Africa, from 2 July to 9 July 2016. View the full article

I’ve been fortunate enough lately to attend the largest virtual reality professional event/conference : SVVR. This virtual reality conference’s been held each year in the Silicon Valley for 3 years now. This year, it showcased more than 100 VR companies on the exhibit floor and welcomed more than 1400 VR professionals and enthusiasts from all around the world. View the full article

I'm back from the GTK hackfest in Toronto, Canada and mostly recovered from jetlag, so it's time to write up my notes on what we discussed there. View the full article

At Collabora, our multimedia team is always looking to improve QA tools in GStreamer. This week, we're introducing a new QA tool: a GStreamer tracer to track leaked objects. View the full article

At Collabora, our multimedia team is always looking to improve QA tools in GStreamer. This blog introduces a new QA tool: a GStreamer tracer to track leaked objects. View the full article

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

Collabora will be exhibiting at InfoComm 2016, the largest, most exciting event in the United States focused on the pro-AV industry, in Last Vegas on June 8-10, 2016. View the full article

Quite a lot has happened in xdg-app since last time I blogged about it. Most noticeably, it isn't called xdg-app any more, having been renamed to Flatpak. It is now available in Debian experimental under that name, and the xdg-app package that was briefly there has been removed. View the full article

Progress in they VC4 graphics camp and the Wayland camp now enables us to run Weston on top of the drm backend for VC4 platforms. Previously software acceleration using pixman was needed, but this is no longer the case. Let's explore running hardware accelerated Weston on the Raspberry Pi. View the full article

After missing the last few GStreamer hackfests I finally managed to attend this time. It was held in Thessaloniki, Greece’s second largest city. The city is located by the sea side and the entire hackfest and related activities were either directly by the sea or just a couple blocks away. View the full article

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

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

Starting today, 13 May, and throughout the weekend, four Collaborans will be attending the GStreamer Spring Hackfest 2016 in Thessaloniki, Greece! 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

How the use of Yocto and OpenEmbedded helps corporations migrate to free software. View the full article

On Thursday 28th of April in Paris, France Bosch and Collabora will be hosting the first Apertis hands-on session during the GENIVI AMM. The session will give everyone present an opportunity to work first hand with Apertis and produce applications to be deployed on automotive targets. View the full article

Linux Kernel 4.5 was released earlier this week, and once again Collabora engineers played a role in its development. In addition to their current projects, seven Collabora engineers contributed a total of 33 patches to the new Kernel. View the full article

How is an uncompressed raster image laid out in computer memory? How is a pixel represented? What are stride and pitch and what do you need them for? How do you address a pixel in memory? How do you describe an image in memory? Pekka discusses the essential digital imaging concepts for programmers. 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

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

Apart from upstreaming work which may be done for clients, Collabora encourages its engineers to spend up to two hours weekly for upstreaming, and use up to five days per year as Community days. View the full article

Over the last few days I've been at the GNOME Developer Experience hackfest in Brussels, looking into xdg-app and how best to use it in Debian and Debian derivatives. View the full article

As JSON becomes used more and more in place of XML, we need a replacement for tools like xmllint to check that JSON documents follow whatever format they are supposed to be following. View the full article

Linux Kernel 4.4 was released this week and Collabora engineers helped in the development of the new kernel in a few different areas. A total of 38 patches from 8 Collabora engineers were added, making it the kernel release with the most Collabora developers ever! View the full article

Amsterdam, The Netherlands - from 09/02/2016 to 12/02/2016: We'll be exhibiting at ISE 2016, the world's largest tradeshow dedicated to professional AV and electronic systems integration. Collabora booth 8-K321 View the full article

Collabora developers contributed a total of 48 patches to kernel 4.3 as part of our current projects. View the full article