Collabora Newsroom RSS Feed

Weston 14.0: DRM-backend, color management, and output mirroring

Marius Vlad — Wed, 27 Nov 2024 20:35:42 +0000

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.

Kernel 6.12: Small but mighty

Dmitry Osipenko — Tue, 26 Nov 2024 18:39:00 +0000

Linux kernel 6.12 is here with real-time preemption support and an extensible scheduler class. Take a look at the contributions our kernel team made for this release.

Integrating kernels and minds at the Linux Foundation Member Summit

Kara Bembridge — Fri, 15 Nov 2024 19:26:00 +0000

The Linux Foundation Member Summit is an opportune time to gather on the state of open source. Our talk will address the concerns and challenges of maintaining a stable kernel.

Hello, MediaTek Genio!

Mark Filion — Thu, 14 Nov 2024 12:57:00 +0000

Today, we are delighted to announce a growing collaboration with MediaTek which will enable Collabora to introduce, improve, and maintain MediaTek's IoT Edge AI Genio platforms upstream.

electronica 2024 with Renesas

Mark Filion — Wed, 06 Nov 2024 11:14:13 +0000

Join us at electronica 2024! In partnership with Renesas, Collabora will be showcasing GStreamer open source AI video analytics on the Renesas RZ/G2L, leveraging the MYIR RemiPi.

Mesa CI and the power of pre-merge testing

Deborah Brouwer — Tue, 08 Oct 2024 14:09:53 +0000

Having multiple developers work on pre-merge testing distributes the process and ensures that every contribution is rigorously tested before merging.

X.Org Developer's Conference 2024

Kara Bembridge — Mon, 07 Oct 2024 17:20:01 +0000

XDC kicks off October 9 and we have 7 talks to share with the community! Join us as we share the latest news on open source graphics.

Upping the AI game at the GStreamer Conference 2024

Kara Bembridge — Thu, 03 Oct 2024 10:44:00 +0000

For the first time in over a decade, the GStreamer Conference will be taking place in North America, and we're prepped and ready with no less than 10 talks to share! Catch the latest developments and AI advancements for this multimedia framework.

Kernel 6.11: Power moves and hardware grooves

Shreeya Patel — Thu, 19 Sep 2024 14:53:00 +0000

The latest 6.11 kernel release is here! This release improves performance, security, and hardware compatibility, increasing the kernel's flexibility and efficiency for various computing environments.

PanVK support for Arm V10 GPUs

Erik Faye-Lund — Wed, 18 Sep 2024 13:09:00 +0000

It is now possible to start kicking the tires on Vulkan with an open source driver on Arm Mali-G610 and Mali-G310 GPUs. The Panfrost project continues to grow!

Waltzing into a packed Open Source week

Kara Bembridge — Mon, 16 Sep 2024 13:11:29 +0000

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

First on the SIDO scene

Kara Bembridge — Fri, 13 Sep 2024 22:35:00 +0000

As guests at the STMicroelectronics booth, Collabora will be demonstrating how the STM32MP2 chip is perfectly suited for enabling edge AI solutions in industrial environments.

Connecting the remote dots at IBC 2024

Kara Bembridge — Thu, 29 Aug 2024 19:01:00 +0000

Collabora is headed to Amsterdam for IBC! Drop by to see our work on the DAB protocol, our integration of LCEVC, and our latest XR project, ElectricMaple.

A shifty tale about unit testing with Maxwell, NVK's backend compiler

Faith Ekstrand — Thu, 15 Aug 2024 14:29:00 +0000

After rigorous debugging, a new unit testing framework was added to the backend compiler for NVK. This is a walkthrough of the steps taken to achieve this.

A journey towards reliable testing in the Linux Kernel

Laura Nao — Thu, 01 Aug 2024 19:22:00 +0000

We're reflecting on the steps taken as we continually seek to improve Linux kernel integration. This will include more detail about the tests used to enhance the quality of testing processes and coverage.

Testing in the Cloud: Enabling Fedora's openQA for flexible cloud deployment

Deborah Brouwer — Wed, 24 Jul 2024 19:18:00 +0000

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.

Kernel 6.10: Keep the updates coming

Sebastian Reichel — Thu, 18 Jul 2024 18:29:00 +0000

The latest kernel 6.10 release brings multiple core changes and updates to BH workqueues. Let's examine the developments implemented by Collabora's engineers.

Taming the Panthor: OpenGL ES 3.1 conformance achieved on Mali-G610

Eric Smith — Mon, 15 Jul 2024 09:05:00 +0000

The Panthor kernel driver and Mesa Panfrost driver combination has achieved official conformance for OpenGL ES 3.1 on the Mali-G610 chip, ensuring reliable performance for users on Mesa version 24.1.1.

Building a Board Farm for Embedded World

Christopher Obbard — Thu, 27 Jun 2024 10:04:00 +0000

With each board running a mainline-first Linux software stack and tested in a CI loop with the LAVA test framework, the Farm showcased Collabora's recent hardware enablement and Continuous integration (CI) efforts.

Smart audio filters with WirePlumber 0.5

Julian Bouzas — Wed, 26 Jun 2024 14:16:57 +0000

WirePlumber 0.5 arrived recently with many new and essential features including the Smart Filter Policy, enabling audio filters to automatically insert themselves in between client streams and devices.

ElectricMaple: Open Source remote-rendering debuts at AWE 2024

Mark Filion — Wed, 19 Jun 2024 09:45:00 +0000

Making its debut this week at Augmented World Expo (AWE) in Long Beach, ElectricMaple is an innovative, open source project by Collabora and PlutoVR designed to enhance standalone XR experiences through remote-rendering.

The latest on cmtp-responder, a permissively-licensed MTP responder implementation

Andrzej Pietrasiewicz — Wed, 12 Jun 2024 14:49:19 +0000

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.

A roadmap for VirtIO Video on ChromeOS: part 3

Daniel Almeida — Thu, 06 Jun 2024 15:00:00 +0000

The final installment of a series explaining how Collabora is helping shape the video virtualization story for Chromebooks with a focus on the future plans for cros-libva and cros-codecs.

Hacking on the PipeWire GStreamer elements

George Kiagiadakis — Wed, 05 Jun 2024 13:40:38 +0000

Last week I attended the GStreamer spring hackfest in Thessaloniki to work on the PipeWire GStreamer elements and connect with the community.

Making a spatial impact at AWE 2024

Kara Bembridge — Thu, 30 May 2024 17:35:56 +0000

Join us at Augmented World Expo for a first-hand look at our recent XR work including ElectricMaple remote rendering, and xrdesktop showcasing a fully open-source 3-window desktop configuration with gaze-driven window selection.

Transforming speech technology with WhisperLive

Kara Bembridge — Tue, 28 May 2024 11:20:00 +0000

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.

Mesa 24.1 brings new hardware support for Arm and NVIDIA GPUs

Faith Ekstrand — Wed, 22 May 2024 19:18:23 +0000

Mesa 24.1 is out, and the graphics team at Collabora has been working hard to bring a slew of new features and bug fixes to Panfrost, Zink, NVK, and Mesa in general. Here's a look at their contributions for this release cycle.

Implementing DRM format modifiers in NVK

Faith Ekstrand — Thu, 16 May 2024 15:39:00 +0000

This week we merged support for the VK_EXT_image_drm_format_modifier extension in NVK, the new open-source Vulkan driver for NVIDIA hardware. We've also back-ported the code to the Mesa 24.1 staging branch, part of the upcoming Mesa 24.1 release.

Kernel 6.9: Enable, test, repeat

Nícolas Prado — Tue, 14 May 2024 15:22:00 +0000

Collabora's engineers continue to be involved in the hardware enablement for a few different system-on-chips (SoCs) and platforms, and have also contributed significant improvements to kernel testing.

SteamOS 3.6: How the Steam Deck atomic updates are improving

Ludovico de Nittis — Fri, 10 May 2024 11:15:00 +0000

Highlighting some of the key changes Collabora worked on with Valve to improve the system update tooling on SteamOS, including the move to Desync, making applying system updates significantly faster and more reliable.

Debuting at IOT Solutions World Congress

Kara Bembridge — Thu, 09 May 2024 14:56:00 +0000

This year will be Collabora's first time exhibiting at IOTSWC, in partnership with STMicroelectronics. Collabora will be showcasing how the STM32MP2 is an ideal chip to enable edge AI solution in industrial environments.

Effortless GStreamer Analytics Cross-Platform Support via ONNX Runtime

Aaron Boxer — Mon, 29 Apr 2024 13:58:00 +0000

GStreamer's support for diverse hardware and software platforms extends to its upstream Machine Learning capabilities, exemplified by its cross-platform ONNX Runtime implementation.

Re-converging control flow on NVIDIA GPUs - What went wrong, and how we fixed it

Faith Ekstrand — Thu, 25 Apr 2024 14:37:00 +0000

While I managed to land support for two extensions, implementing control flow re-convergence in NVK did not go as planned. This is the story of what went wrong and how we fixed it.

Collabora, not just Earth Day. Every day.

Kara Bembridge — Mon, 22 Apr 2024 18:10:00 +0000

As part of our commitment to social responsibility, we've been part of the 1% for the Planet Network since 2022. The environmental partners we support help to better the planet.

Monado stays ahead: Keeping pace with OpenXR 1.1 for cross-platform, open source XR

Frederic Plourde — Wed, 17 Apr 2024 15:12:00 +0000

Monado, the cross-platform open source XR runtime, has recently received significant updates to align with the features and specifications of OpenXR 1.1, ensuring compatibility and optimal performance for developers and users alike.

Blast from the past at Embedded World: Atari plays for Linux

Kara Bembridge — Thu, 11 Apr 2024 11:22:00 +0000

Adhering to the fundamentals of open source, the Atari VCS OS is based on Debian using the Apertis infrastructure, and the graphics rely on Weston as its Wayland compositor.

Up close and personal with STMicroelectronics' STM32MP2 at Embedded World

Mark Filion — Wed, 10 Apr 2024 12:16:00 +0000

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.

New unixfd plugin in GStreamer 1.24

Xavier Claessens — Mon, 08 Apr 2024 17:36:00 +0000

GStreamer 1.24 was recently released, and with it came with a new plugin to help separate pipelines into different processes.

Embedded Open Source Summit 2024

Kara Bembridge — Fri, 05 Apr 2024 17:45:00 +0000

Seattle is hosting this year's Embedded Open Source Summit, the umbrella conference for a collection of open source events. This is the premier space for the open source community and we'll be there with 6 talks!

Collabora's WhisperFusion nominated for Embedded Award 2024

Mark Filion — Wed, 03 Apr 2024 16:07:00 +0000

Honoring outstanding innovations in the field of embedded system technologies, the annual Embedded Award ceremony will be taking place next week at Embedded World 2024 in Nuremberg.

OpenXR & Monado: Recent progress and what's to come

Frederic Plourde — Tue, 02 Apr 2024 18:09:42 +0000

As we reflect on the strides made in recent months, it's remarkable to see how OpenXR and Monado have evolved and are shaping the future of XR development. Let's take a closer look at the progress made and noteworthy achievements.

Future-proofing at Embedded World 2024

Kara Bembridge — Fri, 22 Mar 2024 10:24:00 +0000

One of the largest trade fair of its kind, and a global platform for the embedded community, Embedded World will be taking place next month at the NürnbergMesse in the quaint city of Nuremberg, Germany

GStreamer 1.24: New heights in embedded, network streaming & analytics

Daniel Morin — Tue, 19 Mar 2024 13:11:52 +0000

Thanks to sponsors like STMicroelectronics, Netflix, Living Optics, and ChromeOS, Collabora once again came in first place with the most contributors for this release, with 16 developers taking part.

Automatic regression handling and reporting for the Linux Kernel

Ricardo Cañuelo Navarro — Thu, 14 Mar 2024 19:33:02 +0000

In continuation with our series about Kernel Integration we'll go into more detail about how regression detection, processing, and tracking can be improved to provide a better service to developers and maintainers.

Kernel 6.8: MediaTek community flourishes

Muhammad Usama Anjum — Mon, 11 Mar 2024 19:31:00 +0000

The latest Linux Kernel 6.8 release brings thousands of new lines of code, improving the core kernel, architecture support, networking, file systems, and more.

Release the panthor!

Boris Brezillon — Mon, 04 Mar 2024 16:06:00 +0000

Late last week, the long-awaited kernel driver supporting 10th-generation Arm Mali GPUs was merged into drm-misc. The existing Gallium driver support has also been extended, effectively enabling GPUs on Rockchip's RK3588 platforms.

Patch submitted to introduce GitLab-CI pipeline for Linux kernel testing

Helen Koike — Fri, 01 Mar 2024 12:00:00 +0000

This initial version includes static checks (checkpatch and smatch for now) and build tests across various architectures and configurations, and introduces a flexible 'scenarios' mechanism for subsystem-specific extensions.

NVK is now ready for prime time

Faith Ekstrand — Wed, 28 Feb 2024 15:36:00 +0000

The merge request has landed, the non-conformant implementation warnings are gone, and NVK's Meson configuration now reads "nouveau" instead of "nouveau-experimental". It's now time to start shipping NVK to users!

Smells like team spirit: Meet our newest Collaborans!

Kara Bembridge — Mon, 26 Feb 2024 19:38:00 +0000

We've recently had some new faces join the team and we are delighted that our talented new joiners have readily jumped in to advance the open source mission.

Almost a fully open-source boot chain for Rockchip's RK3588!

Eugen Hristev — Wed, 21 Feb 2024 14:15:00 +0000

Now included in our Debian images & available via our GitLab, you can build a complete, working BL31 (Boot Loader stage 3.1), and replace the closed binary blob with an open-source binary that anyone can compile.

What's the latest with WirePlumber?

George Kiagiadakis — Mon, 19 Feb 2024 21:14:00 +0000

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 now? And what's next? Let's dive in!

FOSDEM 2024 - Recorded presentations (videos) now available

Mark Filion — Thu, 15 Feb 2024 16:13:00 +0000

Collabora's engineers presented six talks over the course of the weekend, with topics including a review of recent improvements to GStreamer, a look at the state of video offloading on the Linux desktop, and more.

A framework to share analytics data in GStreamer

Daniel Morin — Tue, 13 Feb 2024 10:40:00 +0000

Engineers have widely adopted GStreamer to build video analytics pipelines, and while many companies have indeed built their machine learning analysis framework around GStreamer, no one had made the effort to contribute upstream, until now.

DRM-CI: A GitLab-CI pipeline for Linux kernel testing

Helen Koike — Thu, 08 Feb 2024 14:59:00 +0000

Continuing our Kernel Integration series, we're excited to introduce DRM-CI, a groundbreaking solution that enables developers to test their graphics subsystem patches across numerous devices within the community's shared infrastructure.

Wine on Wayland: A year in review (and a look ahead)

Alexandros Frantzis — Tue, 30 Jan 2024 14:17:00 +0000

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!

WhisperFusion: Ultra-low latency conversations with an AI chatbot

Marcus Edel — Thu, 25 Jan 2024 09:47:00 +0000

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.

Persian Rug, Part 4 - The limitations of proxies

Edmund Smith — Tue, 23 Jan 2024 09:52:00 +0000

This is the fourth and final part in a series on persian-rug, a Rust crate for interconnected objects. We've touched on the two big limitations: lack of deletion and lack of enforced matching between proxies and containers. Let's look at other solutions.

First in line for FOSDEM 2024: GStreamer, LAVA workloads & more!

Kara Bembridge — Thu, 18 Jan 2024 16:08:00 +0000

With many dedicated souls willing to endure a FOSDEM queue, Collabora's engineers will be giving 6 talks spread out amongst multiple devrooms including Open Media and Testing & Continuous delivery.

How to share code between Vulkan and Gallium

Faith Ekstrand — Tue, 16 Jan 2024 13:41:00 +0000

One of the key high-level challenges of building Mesa drivers these days is figuring out how to best share code between a Vulkan driver and a Gallium driver when Gallium isn't really capable of implementing Vulkan. Here's how.

Kernel 6.7: New year, new Linux!

Eugen Hristev — Thu, 11 Jan 2024 14:52:00 +0000

Collabora's kernel team made a number of key contributions including a new kselftest for verifying driver probe of Devicetree-based platforms, multiple improvements to further improve support for MediaTek SoCs found in Chromebooks, and more.

Weston 13.0 release: Backends consolidation

Marius Vlad — Thu, 21 Dec 2023 18:33:43 +0000

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.

NVK holiday update: What we've achieved, and where we're headed

Faith Ekstrand — Wed, 20 Dec 2023 09:11:00 +0000

As 2023 draws to a close, I wanted to give a quick update on NVK, what's happened this year, and where we'll be headed in 2024. While previous posts have focused primarily on the technical details, this post will be more geared towards users.

Google Open Source Peer Bonus 2023

Mark Filion — Tue, 19 Dec 2023 12:42:00 +0000

Google Open Source have chosen their second group of winners for the 2023 Google Open Source Peer Bonus Program, and Arnaud Ferraris, Senior Software Engineer at Collabora and Mobian project lead, is among the recipients!

A new kselftest for verifying driver probe of Devicetree-based platforms

Nícolas F. R. A. Prado — Mon, 11 Dec 2023 14:23:00 +0000

As we continue working to improve the kernel integration landscape on multiple fronts, this also means making better tests available for all. Working closely with the community, we have now landed a new, ready-to-use, kselftest in mainline Linux.

WhisperSpeech makes its way to AI.dev

Mark Filion — Thu, 07 Dec 2023 15:51:00 +0000

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

Thoughts on PipeWire 1.0 and beyond

George Kiagiadakis — Wed, 06 Dec 2023 14:08:00 +0000

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.

Persian Rug, Part 3 - The warp and the weft

Edmund Smith — Tue, 05 Dec 2023 16:02:00 +0000

Our look at the Rust crate for interconnected objects continues, as we examine how persian-rug really does tie the room together by providing a convenient container solution with a safety net to go along with it.

Advocating a better Kernel Integration for all

Gustavo Padovan — Fri, 01 Dec 2023 13:07:00 +0000

The testing ecosystem in the Linux kernel has been steadily growing, but are efforts sufficiently coordinated? How can we help developers and maintainers integrate code more efficiently? How can we mitigate maintainer burnout?

Ready for embedded: PipeWire 1.0 released

George Kiagiadakis — Mon, 27 Nov 2023 11:24:00 +0000

It is with the utmost excitement that we witness the release of PipeWire 1.0, the first officially stable release of this noteworthy inter-process multimedia streaming framework after many years of development.

MiniDebConf Cambridge 2023

Kara Bembridge — Tue, 21 Nov 2023 20:35:00 +0000

This week, the Debian project takes over Cambridge as MiniDebConf kicks off right in our own British backyard! Organized by Debian project members, MiniDebConfs aim to achieve similar objectives to those of the annual Debian conference, DebConf.

NVK reaches Vulkan 1.0 conformance

Faith Ekstrand — Mon, 20 Nov 2023 12:19:00 +0000

As of today, NVK is now an officially conformant implementation of the Vulkan 1.0 API on NVIDIA Turing hardware. This is the first time any Nouveau driver has gotten the Khronos conformance badge on any API.

Patch Ready for Linux Plumbers 2023

Kara Bembridge — Thu, 09 Nov 2023 21:26:00 +0000

To ensure the Linux kernel is running smoothly, it requires maintenance from a variety of levels. Those working on the lower levels, or the plumber layers, of the kernel will have a chance to convene next week at the annual Linux Plumbers Conference.

Benchmarking machine learning frameworks

Vineet Suryan — Thu, 02 Nov 2023 15:12:00 +0000

MLBench enables developers and maintainers to effortlessly gauge how their frameworks perform compared to other implementations, prior code versions, or across different boards, with respect to both runtime performance and other metrics.

Kernel 6.6: Long-awaited features and enhanced hardware support

Laura Nao — Tue, 31 Oct 2023 19:16:00 +0000

Linux Kernel 6.6 has arrived, bringing a significant amount of new features and performance enhancements. Collabora has actively contributed many patches, including work on MediaTek and Rockchip.

WirePlumber: Exploring Lua scripts with Event Dispatcher

Ashok Sidipotu — Mon, 30 Oct 2023 13:35:00 +0000

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.

X.Org Developer's Conference 2023

Kara Bembridge — Thu, 12 Oct 2023 20:21:00 +0000

The fall conference season continues next week with the X.Org Developer's Conference, taking place from October 17 to 19 in A Coruna, Spain. Sponsored by Collabora, this event brings together developers with an interest in open graphics.

A roadmap for VirtIO Video on ChromeOS: part 2

Daniel Almeida — Mon, 02 Oct 2023 13:14:00 +0000

This second installment explores the Rust libraries Collabora developed to decode video and how these libraries are used within ARCVM to eventually remove CrosVM's dependency on the Chrome codec stack.

Persian Rug, Part 2 - Other ways to make object soups in Rust

Edmund Smith — Wed, 27 Sep 2023 10:43:43 +0000

Why is creating object graphs hard in Rust? In part 1, we looked at a basic pattern, where two types of objects refer to one another. In this part we'll follow up in more detail and examine the different approaches that can be applied.

Pressing play on GStreamer Conference 2023

Kara Bembridge — Thu, 21 Sep 2023 18:11:00 +0000

Sunny Spain will have multimedia developers on speed dial next week for the 11th edition of the GStreamer Conference, taking place at the Palexco Convention Centre in A Coruña from September 25 to 26.

Perfecting Open Source Recipes in Paris

Kara Bembridge — Tue, 19 Sep 2023 19:18:00 +0000

The world-renowned culinary scene in The City of Light will be getting a pack of different types of chefs next week for Kernel Recipes and Embedded Recipes. Kernel Recipes kicks off on September 25, then Embedded Recipes from September 28 to 29.

WhisperSpeech: Exploring new horizons in text-to-speech tech

Jakub Piotr Clapa — Wed, 13 Sep 2023 13:44:00 +0000

Text-to-speech (TTS) models are playing a transformative role, from enriching audiobooks to enhancing podcasts and even improving interactions with chatbots. Meet WhisperSpeech, an Open Source text-to-speech model developed by Collabora.

Empowering Open Source at IBC 2023

Kara Bembridge — Mon, 11 Sep 2023 14:58:00 +0000

Collabora is headed to Amsterdam! This year, we will be showcasing some of our recent work on the DAB protocol, as well as the software integration of LCEVC, MPEG's novel enhancement codec, into the GStreamer multimedia framework.

Monado SLAM datasets now available

Mateo de Mayo — Mon, 11 Sep 2023 10:28:00 +0000

The Monado SLAM datasets (MSD) are egocentric visual-inertial SLAM datasets recorded to improve the Basalt-based inside-out tracking component of the Monado project.

Video codecs: Adding AV1 stateless video decoder support to Linux

Benjamin Gaignard — Thu, 07 Sep 2023 11:33:00 +0000

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.

Linux kernel 6.5: USB4v2 and Wifi7 have arrived

Adrian Larumbe — Wed, 30 Aug 2023 08:57:00 +0000

The 6.5 release is here and it comes with many changes. As is often the case, Collabora has been actively involved in the submission of patches, mostly in the task of hardware enablement for Mediatek and Rockchip SoCs.

Ready to All Systems Go!

Kara Bembridge — Wed, 23 Aug 2023 10:56:00 +0000

Set in the captivating city of Berlin, All Systems Go! is ready to explore foundational user-space Linux technologies after a 4-year hiatus.

Bridging IIO and Input in Linux

Eugen Hristev — Mon, 21 Aug 2023 14:53:01 +0000

In Linux, the Industrial Input/Output subsystem manages devices like Analog to Digital Converters, Light sensors, accelerometers, etc. On the other hand, the Input subsystem handles keyboards, mice, touchscreens, and any device that has a human interface.

Pushing testing laboratory performance limits by benchmarking LAVA - Part 1

Paweł Wieczorek — Thu, 10 Aug 2023 12:30:00 +0000

Collabora's main testing laboratory has grown to automate testing on over 150 devices of about 30 different types. The lab receives job submissions from several CI systems, e.g. KernelCI, MesaCI, and Apertis QA.

Persian Rug - It really ties the Rust room together

Edmund Smith — Wed, 09 Aug 2023 09:37:10 +0000

Rust is a modern language known for its memory safety, efficiency, and wide range of high-level features. But many beginners also run into something else in Rust: how surprisingly difficult it is to represent some common designs.

NVK Has landed!

Faith Ekstrand — Fri, 04 Aug 2023 17:16:00 +0000

As of today, NVK, the new Vulkan driver for Nvidia GPUs, has landed in the main Mesa branch and will be included as an experimental driver in the 23.3 release of Mesa.

Triple Threat: The Power of Transcription, Summary, and Translation

Marcus Edel — Thu, 03 Aug 2023 09:08:00 +0000

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.

Booting on Radxa's Rock-5B without any media used

Eugen Hristev — Mon, 31 Jul 2023 10:02:00 +0000

I have been working on getting U-boot upstream up to speed for the Radxa Rock-5B Rockchip RK3588 board. One of the cool features that I recently published upstream is the ability to boot the board without any kind of non-volatile media (NVM) used.

EOSS - Recorded presentations (videos) now available

Mark Filion — Thu, 27 Jul 2023 15:36:00 +0000

If you weren't able to attend Embedded Open Source Summit in Prague last month, you're in luck as all presentations were recorded and are now available on YouTube.

The next step for NVK: Merging into Mesa!

Kara Bembridge — Wed, 26 Jul 2023 15:09:35 +0000

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.

A helping Arm for Panfrost

Daniel Stone — Thu, 20 Jul 2023 08:15:00 +0000

Collabora continues to relentlessly shift the needle to make high-quality open-source software not just an aspiration, but an expectation. We're pleased to announce an extension of our collaboration with Arm, providing more surety and capability for Panfrost.

Radxa's Rock 5A one step closer to U-boot mainline

Eugen Hristev — Tue, 18 Jul 2023 14:36:00 +0000

I previously talked about getting the bigger brother Rock 5B into mainline U-boot; this time I worked on the Rock 5A, an even tinier SBC based on Rockchip's RK3588S SoC that is one step closer to getting accepted.

A weekend for developers

Kara Bembridge — Thu, 13 Jul 2023 11:01:00 +0000

With Black Valley in Norway, and Akademy in Greece, this weekend's plans are all set or computer enthusiasts! Collabora is proud to sponsor both of these events as a chance for communities to come together and strengthen their bonds.

Zink brings conformant OpenGL on Imagination GPUs

Erik Faye-Lund — Thu, 06 Jul 2023 13:52:00 +0000

Today, Imagination Technologies announced they are now using Zink for full OpenGL 4.6 support. This is the first time we've seen a hardware vendor trust Zink enough to completely side-step a native OpenGL driver and use it in a shipping product.

Kernel 6.4: More work on MediaTek, Rockchip, and power supply

Rogerio Alves Cardoso — Wed, 05 Jul 2023 08:22:00 +0000

Released last week, Linux kernel 6.4 brings new features such as support for Intel LAM, user events for tracing, and the ability for the machine keyrings used for Machine Owner Keys to store only CA-enforced keys.

NVK update: Enabling new extensions, conformance status & more

Faith Ekstrand — Mon, 26 Jun 2023 11:17:00 +0000

Looking back, it's amazing how much has happened in NVK in just the last 7 months. If development continues at this crazy pace, we may be looking at a pretty decent driver before too much longer.

Ready to embark for Embedded Open Source Summit

Kara Bembridge — Thu, 22 Jun 2023 08:28:00 +0000

Taking place at the Prague Congress Centre from June 27 to 30, this new 4-day umbrella event brings multiple conferences, including Automotive Linux Summit (ALS) and Embedded Linux Conference (ELC), all under one roof.

A roadmap for VirtIO Video on Chrome OS, part 1

Daniel Almeida — Tue, 20 Jun 2023 11:11:00 +0000

Powered by Rust, the video codec stack on ARCVM is now bringing faster and more reliable video decoding on Chrome OS. Here's how Collabora has been helping shape video virtualization for Chromebooks, and what it means for end users.

WirePlumber's Event Dispatcher: a new, simplified way of handling PipeWire events

Ashok Sidipotu — Thu, 15 Jun 2023 13:30:00 +0000

Event Dispatcher, part of the upcoming WirePlumber 0.5 release, is a custom PipeWire event scheduling mechanism designed to address many of the fundamental issues in WirePlumber.

MLfix to quickly fix datasets

Vineet Suryan — Thu, 08 Jun 2023 14:08:00 +0000

Contrary to traditional software development, data is more important than code in machine learning. Building a high-performing model requires using reliable, precisely labelled data but poor-quality data is not always obvious.

USB 3.0 preliminary support in U-boot for Radxa Rock-5B

Eugen Hristev — Wed, 31 May 2023 15:38:00 +0000

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.

Making new strides at AWE

Kara Bembridge — Mon, 29 May 2023 15:22:14 +0000

Set in the heart of Silicon Valley, XR enthusiasts are eagerly awaiting to see the latest advancements on display at Augmented World Expo (AWE) 2023.

Weston 12.0: Highlights and changes for Wayland's reference compositor

Marius Vlad — Thu, 25 May 2023 12:18:00 +0000

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.

Radxa Rock-5B PCIe and RTL8125B networking in U-boot

Eugen Hristev — Thu, 18 May 2023 13:36:00 +0000

Work continues on the Radxa ROCK5B RK388, as PCIe and RTL8125B networking support in U-boot have now been added. Publishing code as Open Source can benefit many different other projects, and allows anyone to benefit.

Introducing Multiview for NVK

Rebecca Mckeever — Wed, 03 May 2023 09:01:00 +0000

NVK, an open-source Vulkan driver for NVIDIA hardware that is part of Mesa, now supports the Vulkan extension VK_KHR_multiview.

Adding bootloader support for USB 2.0 Host for Radxa ROCK 5B RK3588

Eugen Hristev — Thu, 27 Apr 2023 15:09:00 +0000

The beauty of Open Source is that we can reuse code written by many other people, keep their authorship, and credit them for their work, without needing to reinvent anything!

Kernel 6.3: MediaTek, Rockchip RK3588 & more

Muhammad Usama Anjum — Tue, 25 Apr 2023 20:12:00 +0000

Released earlier this week, Linux Kernel 6.3 brings thousands of new lines of code to improve the core kernel, architectural support, networking and filesystems.

April brings tech events aplenty

Kara Bembridge — Thu, 20 Apr 2023 09:21:00 +0000

Spring is in bloom in the northern hemisphere, and with it comes three tech events we'll be attending - PyCon US, Shell & Display Next Hackfest, and Linaro Connect!

Meson & VSCode: Develop your project in a modern IDE

Xavier Claessens — Tue, 18 Apr 2023 10:42:00 +0000

Want to develop your Meson project in a modern IDE? Make sure to install Meson VSCode extension which is now fully functional with the recent release of Meson 1.1.0!

Carlafox: Towards reliable open-source 3D perception

Vineet Suryan — Wed, 05 Apr 2023 13:17:00 +0000

Labeling errors are common in present open-source 3D perception datasets, which could have impactful consequences. To tackle this issue, we used Carlafox to automatically generate an error-free synthetic dataset for 3D perception.

Moving forward with more hands on deck

Kara Bembridge — Mon, 27 Mar 2023 16:51:35 +0000

It’s no secret that Tech has faced some setbacks lately, namely on the headcount front. Despite these uncertainties, Collabora has had the privilege of increasing our roster with new teammates.

Monado accepted for XROS 2023!

Frédéric Plourde — Tue, 14 Mar 2023 22:18:00 +0000

We're proud to announce that Monado, the free and open source XR platform, has been accepted as a mentoring organization for XROS, the XR Open Source Fellowship Program.

Showcasing the STM32MP1 at Embedded World

Mark Filion — Mon, 13 Mar 2023 16:09:00 +0000

As a recent new member of STMicroelectronics' Partner Program, we're excited to be showcasing the STM32MP1 at Embedded World this week, our first demo featuring the STM32 platform.

Implementing Vulkan extensions for NVK

Rebecca McKeever — Fri, 10 Mar 2023 14:08:00 +0000

Since joining the graphics team at Collabora as a Software Engineering Intern last November, I have implemented several Vulkan API extensions for NVK, an open-source Vulkan driver for NVIDIA hardware in Mesa.

Connecting at Embedded World 2023

Kara Bembridge — Thu, 09 Mar 2023 12:51:00 +0000

Nestled in the historic city of Nuremberg, the annual Embedded World conference will be taking place from March 14 to 16. Collabora will be set up in Hall 4, Booth 4-404, with plenty of space to connect and multiple demos to showcase

Oxidizing bmap-tools: rewriting a Python project in Rust

Rafael Garcia Ruiz — Fri, 03 Mar 2023 14:22:46 +0000

Rewriting bmaptool in Rust to remove Python dependencies, create statically linked binary, and allow the bmap sparse file format to be used in other Rust projects.

Monado's "Mercury" hand tracking now ready for use!

Moses Turner — Fri, 24 Feb 2023 14:18:00 +0000

Work on this new tracking method started around January 2022. Now, after a little over a year of development, Monado's "Mercury" hand tracking is finally ready for the public to use!

PanCSF: A new DRM driver for Mali CSF-based GPUs

Boris Brezillon — Thu, 23 Feb 2023 14:08:00 +0000

A look into the new job-scheduling model with Mali GPUs, their support in the new PanCSF DRM driver, and what it means as the rest of the ecosystem also moves to firmware-assisted scheduling.

Kernel 6.2: More Rust support for drivers

Daniel Almeida — Tue, 21 Feb 2023 14:07:00 +0000

With more SoC support, a new V4L2 driver and a new dma-buf locking convention among its contributions, Collabora was one of the most active employers for this latest kernel development cycle.

The futex_waitv() syscall and gaming on Linux

Muhammad Usama Anjum — Fri, 17 Feb 2023 15:24:00 +0000

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.

GStreamer 1.22: Bigger and better!

Olivier Crête — Wed, 08 Feb 2023 14:14:00 +0000

Improved support for hardware accelerated video decoders, new GTK+ integration for Wayland rendering, and further Meson enhancements to make GStreamer shine on embedded, Collabora's multimedia team made a number of key contributions for this latest release.

Exploring Rust for Vulkan drivers, part 1

Faith Ekstrand — Thu, 02 Feb 2023 10:16:00 +0000

Over the course of the last decade, Rust has emerged as a new programming language for writing safe low-level code. This blog post is the first in a series exploring the area of using Rust to write Mesa Vulkan drivers.

FOSDEM back in full force for 2023

Kara Bembridge — Fri, 20 Jan 2023 11:27:00 +0000

After two years of hosting the event virtually, Brussels will once again welcome attendees on February 4 & 5 on the old stomping grounds of the ULB Solbosch Campus. Collabora will be presenting 8 different talks, in 7 devrooms as well as on the main track!

Labeling tools are great, but what about quality checks?

Jakub Piotr Cłapa — Tue, 17 Jan 2023 15:53:00 +0000

MLfix is an open-source tool that combines novel unsupervised machine-learning pipelines with a new user interface concept that, together, help annotators and machine-learning engineers identify and filter out label errors.

A brave new world: building glibc with LLVM

Adrian Ratiu — Tue, 17 Jan 2023 09:53:00 +0000

Times are changing: LLVM has become more than a spare to GCC, such that glibc - the last big GCC bastion, is now working towards supporting LLVM as a first-class citizen.

Kicking off 2023 with the MIT Reality Hack!

Jakob Bornecrantz — Wed, 11 Jan 2023 13:24:00 +0000

It's with excitement and nervousness that I'm writing this post, sitting on a plane heading to Boston where I will attend the MIT Reality Hack as a mentor.

Always growing, always evolving

Kara Bembridge — Thu, 29 Dec 2022 14:06:00 +0000

With only a few months passing since our last new joiner update, it should come as no surprise that the Collabora crowd has expanded yet again. Our flexible disposition affords us an exceptional bunch to onboard when opportunity knocks.

State of Monado's visual-inertial tracking

Mateo de Mayo — Tue, 20 Dec 2022 16:04:00 +0000

The development of Monado's inside-out tracking solution keeps improving and more devices are now supported. Here's an overview of where things stand, as presented at the FOSS XR conference in October.

Faith Ekstrand is a 2022 Khronie Award recipient!

Kara Bembridge — Mon, 19 Dec 2022 15:09:00 +0000

Contributing to the Vulkan Working Group since 2015, Faith has continues to make a significant impact. Her expertise and diligence has helped to shape the group and we're proud to see his hard work see some well earned spotlight.

Machine Learning with Etnaviv and OpenCL

Italo Nicola — Thu, 15 Dec 2022 09:59:00 +0000

Machine learning is increasingly seeing more applications and it's important to have FOSS options to accelerate such workloads. With that in mind, we began an effort earlier this year to get a TFLite model running on a VIM3 NPU using Etnaviv and OpenCL.

Kernel 6.1: Multi-generational improvements

AngeloGioacchino Del Regno — Tue, 13 Dec 2022 14:43:00 +0000

Collabora's contributions include ongoing upstreaming of the RockChip RK3588 and MediaTek Helio X10 (MT6795) SoCs, numerous bug fixes and improvements for Cedrus and Hantro IPs, and memory shrinker support for the VirtIO-GPU driver.

Wine on Wayland 2022 update: more games, more apps, more fun!

Alexandros Frantzis — Mon, 12 Dec 2022 12:50:00 +0000

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.

KernelCI now testing Linux Rust code

Adrian Ratiu — Tue, 06 Dec 2022 08:38:00 +0000

After waiting in the Linux-next integration tree for about 18 months, the basic Rust infrastructure finally landed in the mainline Linux kernel with the imminent release of v6.1.

Tracing stateless video hardware decoding in V4L2

Deborah Brouwer — Fri, 02 Dec 2022 16:32:00 +0000

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.

Shifting to open gears for the Automotive Linux Summit

Kara Bembridge — Thu, 01 Dec 2022 10:08:00 +0000

Coming up next week at the Automotive Linux Summit in Yokohama and virtually, Marius Vlad and Daniel Stone will present the latest on the AGL Wayland compositor, and the current state of graphics virtualization upstream.

Seizing knowledge at Capitole du Libre

Kara Bembridge — Wed, 16 Nov 2022 15:00:00 +0000

Clear your schedules, this weekend's Capitole du Libre is calling your name for all things open source! Gathering in the "Pink City" of Toulouse, participants are welcome to attend with free admission from November 19 to 20 at the INP-ENSEEIHT.

Fully charged for electronica 2022

Kara Bembridge — Thu, 10 Nov 2022 11:55:00 +0000

Making our grand debut, Collabora will be attending electronica in Munich for the first time! Diving into the world of electronics alongside the leading examples of the industry, we're excited to partake on all fronts.

From Lua to JSON: refactoring WirePlumber's configuration system

Ashok Sidipotu — Thu, 27 Oct 2022 09:52:00 +0000

With the upcoming 0.5 release, WirePlumber's configuration system will be moving to a JSON syntax to define settings, bringing a more unified configuration approach across the PipeWire ecosystem.

A look at Vulkan extensions in Venus

Igor Torrente — Wed, 19 Oct 2022 13:18:28 +0000

Venus is a virtual Vulkan driver based on the Virtio-GPU protocol, which defines the serialization of Vulkan commands between guest and host. Here's a closer look at Venus, its components, and their relations in the context of extensions.

Kernel 6.0: Start of a new series and dawn of Rust

Shreeya Patel — Fri, 14 Oct 2022 10:49:00 +0000

Collabora's contributions include mainlining the HEVC uAPI, adding VirtIO documentation, upstreaming MediaTek smartphones, and adding support for two new Chromebooks and for the Mali-G57 GPU in the Panfrost kernel driver.

Carlafox, an open-source web-based CARLA visualizer

Vineet Suryan — Tue, 11 Oct 2022 14:10:00 +0000

Taking one step towards democratizing the daunting task of dataset generation by making image synthesis and automatic ground truth data generation maintainable, cheaper, and more repeatable.

HEVC uAPI mainlined

Benjamin Gaignard — Thu, 06 Oct 2022 11:24:00 +0000

The release of Linux 6.0 earlier this week brought a significant milestone: the H.265/HEVC user-space API was mainlined, the result of more than two years of efforts by our engineering team.

Introducing NVK

Faith Ekstrand — Tue, 04 Oct 2022 10:11:00 +0000

Say hello to a brand new, open-source Vulkan driver for NVIDIA hardware in Mesa, written almost entirely from scratch using the new official headers from NVIDIA.

Weston 11.0: what's new, what's next

Marius Vlad — Thu, 29 Sep 2022 13:49:00 +0000

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.

Three conferences for the price of none!

Kara Bembridge — Thu, 29 Sep 2022 08:53:00 +0000

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.

A team that grows together, builds together

Kara Bembridge — Tue, 27 Sep 2022 14:38:00 +0000

Adding a variety of expertise from across the globe, the departments of Core, Multimedia, Kernel, XR, People Operations, and DevOps now have more hands on deck. Discover a snapshot of our newest teammates!

Open source machine learning for video compression

Marcus Edel — Wed, 14 Sep 2022 16:49:00 +0000

Using open source software, Collabora has developed an efficient compression pipeline that enables a face video broadcasting system that achieves the same visual quality as the H.264 standard while only using one-tenth of the bandwidth.

A busy, open source week in Dublin!

Mark Filion — Mon, 12 Sep 2022 11:54:00 +0000

Mere weeks after the debut of Open Source Summit Latin America, Dublin continues the collaborative momentum with the 2022 hybrid editions of Linux Plumbers Conference and Open Source Summit Europe!

Improving Vulkan graphics state tracking in Mesa

Faith Ekstrand — Wed, 07 Sep 2022 17:22:00 +0000

Introducing new common code for Mesa Vulkan drivers to support a new Vulkan extension, making it easier for app and game authors to manage Vulkan state - and easier for our drivers too.

Open source machine learning at IBC 2022

Kara Bembridge — Tue, 06 Sep 2022 11:31:41 +0000

Showcasing two new software demonstrations featuring machine learning, including backend video compression that runs on Panfrost, and a data quality assurance tool designed to integrate into the annotation pipeline.

Using a Raspberry Pi as a Bluetooth speaker with PipeWire

Frederic Danis — Fri, 02 Sep 2022 09:49:00 +0000

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.

Last chance to submit to FOSS XR!

Frédéric Plourde — Tue, 30 Aug 2022 14:20:00 +0000

Be part of the FOSSXR lineup by submitting your talk by September 5th, 2022. That means there's one week left for all you AR and VR enthusiasts and industry movers to share your exciting XR projects/news/demos with the world.

Fostering connections at Open Source Summit Latin America

Kara Bembridge — Tue, 16 Aug 2022 15:30:00 +0000

A magnet for open source supporters, the very first edition of Open Source Summit Latin America is opening its virtual doors. This new annual conference takes place online from August 23 to 24 with 5 talks from Collabora's very own!

Kernel 5.19: Probably the final release of the 5.x series

Cristian Ciocaltea — Tue, 02 Aug 2022 14:34:00 +0000

As usual, there are quite a few changes merged into the mainline kernel. Let's take a look at some of the contributions by Collabora's kernel team!

Introducing the r600/NIR back-end

Gert Wollny — Thu, 07 Jul 2022 15:11:00 +0000

Adventures in NIR-land: the past, the present, and what's lies ahead for the native NIR back-end for Mesa's R600 driver.

Weston 10.0.1 - a bug-fix release

Marius Vlad — Tue, 05 Jul 2022 14:34:06 +0000

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.

Adding even more heads for the group picture

Kara Bembridge — Tue, 21 Jun 2022 14:41:00 +0000

Part steadfast approach - part welcoming spirirt; Collabora continues to successfully expand with new talent amply on deck. Well ahead of the remote work curve, our new joiners have settled into their roles from their respective corners of the planet.

Emerging ideas at Open Source Summit North America

Kara Bembridge — Thu, 16 Jun 2022 11:26:00 +0000

Big events draw in an array of individuals to learn and connect, and the Open Source Summit North America is no exception. Jam-packed with sessions to uncover from June 21 to 24, this year's event features three talks by Collabora's very own!

Adding secondary command buffers to PanVk

Manas Chaudhary — Wed, 15 Jun 2022 13:30:53 +0000

Getting PanVk, an open source driver for Arm Mali Midgard and Bifrost GPUs, closer to conformancy by implementing one of the core Vulkan features: support for secondary command buffers.

Bridging the synchronization gap on Linux

Faith Ekstrand — Thu, 09 Jun 2022 14:28:00 +0000

After fighting with the divide between implicit and explicit synchronization with Vulkan on Linux for over seven years, we may finally have some closure. We're not to synchronization nirvana quite yet, but this is an important step along the way.

Conformant open source support for Mali-G57

Alyssa Rosenzweig — Mon, 06 Jun 2022 10:44:00 +0000

Mali-G57 features in new MediaTek Chromebooks with the MT8192 and MT8195 system-on-chips. With Mesa 22.2 and an appropriate kernel, accelerated graphics will work out of the box on Linux on these laptops.

Kernel 5.18: Milestones for the road ahead

Dmitry Osipenko — Thu, 02 Jun 2022 15:24:00 +0000

Released by Linus Torvalds on May 22 after a busy two-month development cycle, Linux kernel 5.18 brings new features and lights up new hardware. Let's take a look at the contributions made by our engineering team.

Monado's hand tracking: hand-waving our way towards a first attempt

Moses Turner — Tue, 31 May 2022 14:19:00 +0000

Optical hand tracking for XR has a bit of a reputation - getting training data, training neural nets, and deploying them in real-time, low-latency environments such as XR is every bit as hard as they say it is.

Finding the secret ingredient at Embedded and Kernel Recipes

Kara Bembridge — Thu, 26 May 2022 13:35:00 +0000

After a two-year hiatus, the City of Lights is shinning brightly again to welcome the community for a full week of engaging talks at Embedded Recipes and Kernel Recipes conferences.

Talks of the town: Software engineering edition

Kara Bembridge — Tue, 17 May 2022 10:40:00 +0000

Less than a day away, May 18th looks to be a very busy time. With Live Embedded Event and Embedded Vision Summit taking place almost simultaneously, Collabora will be presenting four different talks!

PipeWire: Bluetooth support status update

Frederic Danis — Fri, 29 Apr 2022 11:23:00 +0000

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

SocketCAN x Kubernetes

Jakub Piotr Cłapa — Wed, 27 Apr 2022 15:41:00 +0000

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

Monado accepted in GSoC 2022!

Frédéric Plourde — Wed, 06 Apr 2022 14:52:00 +0000

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

Visual-inertial tracking for Monado

Mateo de Mayo — Tue, 05 Apr 2022 14:16:00 +0000

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.

Kernel 5.17: Solid & steady

Sebastian Fricke — Thu, 31 Mar 2022 14:35:00 +0000

While eastern Europe has experienced ghastly events that have shaken the world, the latest Linux kernel release could aptly be named "Solid & Steady." Here's a look at some of the contributions made by Collabora's kernel team.

Spotlight on Meson's full-featured developer environment

Xavier Claessens — Wed, 30 Mar 2022 13:28:00 +0000

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

School's back in session at Open Source 101

Kara Bembridge — Thu, 24 Mar 2022 14:59:00 +0000

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

How to write a Vulkan driver in 2022

Faith Ekstrand — Wed, 23 Mar 2022 14:53:00 +0000

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

Improving the reliability of file system monitoring tools

Gabriel Krisman Bertazi — Mon, 14 Mar 2022 14:59:00 +0000

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

PipeWire: A year in review & a look ahead

George Kiagiadakis — Tue, 08 Mar 2022 12:29:00 +0000

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

Portable Linux gaming with the Steam Deck

Simon McVittie — Tue, 01 Mar 2022 13:03:00 +0000

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

New faces for new challenges

Kara Bembrirdge — Mon, 28 Feb 2022 17:29:00 +0000

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

GStreamer 1.20: Embedded & WebRTC lead the way

Olivier Crête — Fri, 18 Feb 2022 12:08:00 +0000

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

Landing a new syscall: What is futex?

André Almeida — Tue, 08 Feb 2022 15:06:00 +0000

Over the past 18 months, we have been on a roller-coaster ride developing futex2, a new set of system calls. As part of this effort, the futex_waitv() syscall has now landed in Linux 5.16. But what exactly is futex?

FOSDEM 2022

Kara Bembridge — Tue, 01 Feb 2022 14:10:00 +0000

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

Writing an open source GPU driver - without the hardware

Alyssa Rosenzweig — Thu, 27 Jan 2022 16:25:00 +0000

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

A Pixel's Color & new documentation repository

Pekka Paalanen — Tue, 25 Jan 2022 11:55:51 +0000

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

Kernel 5.16: A new release for a new year

André Almeida — Thu, 20 Jan 2022 12:19:00 +0000

With kernel 5.16, the community has once again produced a release full of great features, including two projects that had been in development for some time by our kernel team: the new futex syscall and the new fanotify event.

First up in 2022: linux.conf.au!

Mark Filion — Tue, 11 Jan 2022 06:44:00 +0000

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

Wine on Wayland year-end update: improved functionality & stability

Alexandros Frantzis — Wed, 22 Dec 2021 11:55:00 +0000

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.

A growth year for upstream kernel contributions

Gustavo Padovan — Wed, 22 Dec 2021 08:22:00 +0000

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

Meet wxrd, a standalone Wayland compositor for xrdesktop

Christoph Haag — Mon, 20 Dec 2021 10:19:00 +0000

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

Open Source in Japan, virtually

Mark Filion — Wed, 08 Dec 2021 22:16:00 +0000

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

Venus on QEMU: Enabling the new virtual Vulkan driver

Antonio Caggiano — Fri, 26 Nov 2021 10:21:00 +0000

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.

Kernel 5.15: A small but mighty Halloween release

Sebastian Reichel — Wed, 10 Nov 2021 13:49:00 +0000

It might be smaller than the last few kernels, but with well above 10,000 non-merge changes, the latest Linux kernel release still packs a punch. Released on October 31, kernel 5.15 brings lots of exciting new features.

WirePlumber in Fedora 35

George Kiagiadakis — Tue, 02 Nov 2021 13:45:00 +0000

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.

Run your own CI pipeline with GStreamer's new monorepo

Xavier Claessens — Tue, 26 Oct 2021 13:15:00 +0000

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

Improving test coverage for cameras in KernelCI

Nícolas F. R. A. Prado — Fri, 08 Oct 2021 10:25:00 +0000

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

A tale of two toolchains and glibc

Adrian Ratiu — Thu, 30 Sep 2021 09:21:00 +0000

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

Open Source Summit + Embedded Linux Conference 2021

Mark Filion — Fri, 24 Sep 2021 10:44:00 +0000

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

Panfrost achieves OpenGL ES 3.1 conformance on Mali-G52

Alyssa Rosenzweig — Tue, 21 Sep 2021 12:48:00 +0000

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

Generate a minimal GStreamer build, tailored to your needs

Stéphane Cerveau — Thu, 16 Sep 2021 13:11:00 +0000

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

An xrdesktop summer of code

Lubosz Sarnecki — Fri, 10 Sep 2021 10:11:00 +0000

This summer, Christoph Haag and I had the pleasure of taking part in Google Summer of Code as mentors for xrdesktop, the Open Source project bringing the Linux desktop to VR on Valve's SteamVR & Monado. Here's what was accomplished.

Kernel 5.14: 30 years in the making and still improving

Nícolas F. R. A. Prado — Tue, 07 Sep 2021 14:39:00 +0000

With an ever-increasing interest in more modern hardware support, and a more reliable kernel that is thoroughly tested, contributions by Collabora's developers continue to help make this a reality for the Linux kernel.

Linaro Virtual Connect - Fall 2021

Mark Filion — Wed, 01 Sep 2021 12:54:00 +0000

September's busy conference schedule kicks off next week with the Fall edition of Linaro Virtual Connect. Join us as we look at how to master your PipeWire streams with WirePlumber, and de-mystify GFX virtualization with VirGL!

Reverse-engineering the Mali G78

Alyssa Rosenzweig — Tue, 20 Jul 2021 13:44:00 +0000

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

Kernel 5.13: Growing team and KernelCI hackfest

Gabriel Krisman Bertazi — Thu, 08 Jul 2021 07:00:00 +0000

Collabora's team working directly on the Linux kernel is growing. Collaborans continue to expand on their efforts to close the gap between hardware support on vendor trees and mainline.

Adding VP9 and MPEG2 stateless support in v4l2codecs for GStreamer

Daniel Almeida — Wed, 23 Jun 2021 12:57:00 +0000

Earlier this year, from January to April 2021, I worked on adding support for stateless decoders for GStreamer as part of a multimedia internship at Collabora. Here's a recap of this completed work.

A very successful first KernelCI hackfest

Shreeya Patel — Mon, 21 Jun 2021 15:12:00 +0000

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

Growing for the road ahead

Erica Ryoo — Mon, 21 Jun 2021 11:00:00 +0000

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

Bag of Freebies for XR Hand Tracking: Machine Learning & OpenXR

Marcus Edel — Thu, 17 Jun 2021 11:35:00 +0000

In our previous post, we presented a project backed by INVEST-AI which introduces a multi-stage neural network-based solution. Now let's dive into the machine learning details of our innovative, open source hand-tracking pipeline.

Testing cameras with lc-compliance on KernelCI

Nícolas F. R. A. Prado — Tue, 15 Jun 2021 11:47:00 +0000

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.

Zink: Summer 2021 update

Erik Faye-Lund — Mon, 14 Jun 2021 13:45:00 +0000

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

Open Source OpenGL ES 3.1 on Mali GPUs with Panfrost

Alyssa Rosenzweig — Fri, 11 Jun 2021 09:41:00 +0000

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

Wine on Wayland meets Vulkan, multi-monitor support & more

Alexandros Frantzis — Mon, 07 Jun 2021 12:11:00 +0000

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.

A libweston-based compositor for Automotive Grade Linux

Marius Vlad — Wed, 02 Jun 2021 13:08:00 +0000

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

Bridging the OpenGL and Vulkan divide

Rohan Garg — Thu, 27 May 2021 08:48:00 +0000

Thanks to a new, low overhead extension in Mesa, OpenGL and Vulkan applications can now talk to each other, bringing more flexibility to application developers while easing the transition path between the industry-standard Khronos® APIs.

Optimizing 3D performance with virglrenderer

Gert Wollny — Mon, 17 May 2021 11:31:00 +0000

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

Mainline Linux gains accelerated video decoding for Microchip's SAMA5D4

Emil Velikov — Tue, 11 May 2021 10:16:00 +0000

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

Quick hack: Patching kernel modules using DKMS

Frederic Danis — Wed, 05 May 2021 14:06:00 +0000

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

Kernel 5.12: Working to close the gap

Ariel D'Alessandro — Tue, 04 May 2021 08:18:48 +0000

With their latest contributions all around the kernel, notably to the Video4Linux APIs and hardware enablement, Collaborans continue to expand on their efforts to close the gap between hardware support on vendor trees and mainline.

Build your own application with GTK 4 as a Meson subproject!

Xavier Claessens — Thu, 29 Apr 2021 13:04:00 +0000

Building GTK 4 as a Meson subproject for your own application is not only useful for Windows builds, but also for many Linux distributions that do not yet package a recent enough version of GTK 4 and/or its dependencies.

Profiling virtualized GPU acceleration with Perfetto

Antonio Caggiano — Thu, 22 Apr 2021 10:15:00 +0000

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

Continuous 3D Hand Pose Tracking using Machine Learning & Monado

Marcus Edel — Tue, 20 Apr 2021 10:12:00 +0000

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

An easy to use MTP implementation for your next embedded Linux project

Andrzej Pietrasiewicz — Tue, 13 Apr 2021 11:40:00 +0000

Did you know you could run a permissively-licensed MTP implementation with minimal dependencies on an embedded device? Here's a step-by-step guide on how to easily run cmtp-responder on a Rock Pi 4 or any other board equipped with a UDC.

PanVk: An Open Source Vulkan driver for Arm Mali Midgard and Bifrost GPUs

Boris Brezillon — Thu, 25 Mar 2021 11:01:00 +0000

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

Rust: integrating LLVM source-base code coverage with GitLab

Guillaume Desmottes — Wed, 24 Mar 2021 11:51:00 +0000

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

Linaro Virtual Connect - Spring 2021

Mark Filion — Mon, 22 Mar 2021 14:14:00 +0000

Join us this week at the Spring edition of Linaro Virtual Connect, as we discuss bringing stateless video decoding support to Linux, and take a look at where we are, and what's to come, for open drivers for Arm GPUs.

Build and run GTK 4 applications with Visual Studio

Xavier Claessens — Thu, 18 Mar 2021 09:46:00 +0000

Over the past few months, I've been working on a side project to improve Meson sub-project support. The best stress test is to build projects on Windows, without msys2, because it has no dependencies or tools installed (e.g. pkg-config).

OpenGL on DirectX: Conformance & upstreaming of the D3D12 driver

Erik Faye-Lund — Wed, 10 Mar 2021 18:35:18 +0000

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

New features, changes & improvements to KernelCI's UI

Alexandra Pereira — Thu, 04 Mar 2021 19:26:00 +0000

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

Asymmetric Multi Processing with Linux & Zephyr on the STM32MP1

Arnaud Ferraris — Wed, 03 Mar 2021 10:17:00 +0000

In the embedded world, many modern SoCs such as the ST Microelectronics STM32MP1 now include coprocessor cores which can be used for a wide range of tasks and can offload some of the work from the main processor.

Wine on Wayland: An exciting first update

Alexandros Frantzis — Fri, 19 Feb 2021 10:17:00 +0000

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.

New year, new kernel: Collabora's contributions to Linux 5.11

Ezequiel Garcia — Wed, 17 Feb 2021 15:13:00 +0000

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

Adding HEVC/H.265 support for NXP's i.MX 8M

Benjamin Gaignard — Wed, 17 Feb 2021 11:54:00 +0000

Our recent efforts on the Hantro kernel driver have resulted in the addition of H.264 decoding support and multiple performance improvements. We are now introducing High Efficiency Video Coding, also known as H.265, decoding support on NXP's i.MX8 M.

Monado 21.0.0, an officially conformant OpenXR implementation!

Jakob Bornecrantz — Mon, 15 Feb 2021 14:12:00 +0000

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

Network adaptive streaming with Hwangsaeul

Jakub Adam — Mon, 08 Feb 2021 13:34:00 +0000

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

Trimming apitrace workload captures for better Mesa testing

Gert Wollny — Mon, 01 Feb 2021 15:16:00 +0000

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.

GStreamer on Windows: adding WebRTC support to a gst-build install

Aaron Boxer — Thu, 28 Jan 2021 13:05:00 +0000

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

Implementing a performance boosting algorithm in Coccinelle

Jaskaran Singh — Thu, 21 Jan 2021 11:39:00 +0000

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

One weekend, two conferences

Mark Filion — Tue, 19 Jan 2021 15:28:00 +0000

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

Desktop OpenGL 3.1 on Mali GPUs with Panfrost

Alyssa Rosenzweig — Wed, 13 Jan 2021 12:54:00 +0000

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

A Wayland driver for Wine

Alexandros Frantzis — Tue, 15 Dec 2020 12:14:00 +0000

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

Kernel 5.10: Rockchip, H.264, Bifrost & more!

Ricardo Cañuelo Navarro — Mon, 14 Dec 2020 10:45:00 +0000

Even amidst the chaos and uncertainty that 2020 brought, Linux Kernel development keeps moving forward at a constant and relentless pace. Collabora remains active, developing, maintaining, documenting and testing many parts of the kernel.

Empathy first: Driving growth through people leadership

Eleni Katsoula — Mon, 30 Nov 2020 19:32:35 +0000

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

Developing Wayland Color Management and High Dynamic Range

Pekka Paalanen — Thu, 19 Nov 2020 13:48:00 +0000

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

Linux App Summit 2020

Mark Filion — Thu, 12 Nov 2020 11:58:00 +0000

Starting today, and running until Saturday, join us at Linux App Summit for a look at Linux graphics, PipeWire, our work with Valve, and a virtual office hour with our Engineering Manager!

A summer sprint: bringing near-native performance to Zink

Mike Blumenkrantz — Fri, 06 Nov 2020 14:08:00 +0000

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

From Panfrost to production, a tale of Open Source graphics

Alyssa Rosenzweig — Tue, 03 Nov 2020 13:47:00 +0000

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

Monado update: Passing conformance, Android support & more

Jakob Bornecrantz — Mon, 02 Nov 2020 14:51:00 +0000

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

Open Source Summit Europe & ELCE 2020

Mark Filion — Thu, 22 Oct 2020 15:10:00 +0000

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

Kernel 5.9: Onwards and upwards

Mylène Josserand — Thu, 22 Oct 2020 12:53:00 +0000

Collaborans continue to be very active in the Linux kernel, authoring over 150 commits in this release. Here's a look at the improvements, and new features, contributed by our team, notably in hardware support, multimedia, graphics and testing.

Engaging in an "Open First" remote internship at Collabora

Gustavo Noronha — Tue, 20 Oct 2020 09:21:00 +0000

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

Collabora & GStreamer 1.18

Stéphane Cerveau — Tue, 06 Oct 2020 18:46:00 +0000

A move to GitLab. A switch to the powerful Meson build system. A fast and reliable CI system implemented. The GStreamer community has been busy, bringing a bevy of enhancements to 1.18. Here's a look at the key contributions by Collaborans.

Building GStreamer text rendering and overlays on Windows with gst-build

Aaron Boxer — Mon, 28 Sep 2020 14:19:00 +0000

GStreamer relies on various 2D font rendering and layout libraries such as Pango and Cairo to generate text for the Pango plugin, which contains elements such as textoverlay. Here's how to add the Pango plugin to a gst-build installation on Windows.

Initcalls, part 2: Digging into implementation

Mylène Josserand — Fri, 25 Sep 2020 08:23:00 +0000

In this second part of this blog post series on Linux kernel initcalls, we'll go deeper into implementation, with a look at the colorful __device_initcall() macro, the rootfs initcall, and how modules can be executed.

Open Source meets Super Resolution, part 1

Marcus Edel — Mon, 21 Sep 2020 10:30:00 +0000

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

X.Org Developer's Conference 2020

Mark Filion — Tue, 15 Sep 2020 12:39:00 +0000

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

Integrating libcamera into PipeWire

Raghavendra Rao — Fri, 11 Sep 2020 13:25:00 +0000

PipeWire continues to evolve with the recent integration of libcamera, a library to support complex cameras. In this blog post, I'll explain why libcamera exists, what it does, and how we integrated it in PipeWire.

Pushing pixels to your Chromebook

Emil Velikov — Mon, 31 Aug 2020 13:07:00 +0000

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

Using the Linux kernel's Case-insensitive feature in Ext4

Gabriel Krisman Bertazi — Thu, 27 Aug 2020 15:09:00 +0000

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.

One week, two events: DebConf20 & Linux Plumbers Conference

Mark Filion — Mon, 24 Aug 2020 08:37:00 +0000

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.

Panfrost performance counters with Perfetto

Antonio Caggiano — Fri, 21 Aug 2020 14:01:00 +0000

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!

High bitrate video streaming with GStreamer's RTP elements

Antonio Ospite — Thu, 20 Aug 2020 12:45:00 +0000

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.

Understanding computer vision & AI, part 1

Marcus Edel — Thu, 13 Aug 2020 10:00:00 +0000

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.

Testing Weston DRM/KMS backends with virtme and VKMS

Leandro Ribeiro — Fri, 07 Aug 2020 08:50:00 +0000

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.

Kernel 5.8: Collabora's biggest & most significant contributions yet!

Dafna Hirschfeld — Wed, 05 Aug 2020 09:44:00 +0000

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.

Lighthouse positional tracking in Monado with libsurvive

Christoph Haag — Fri, 17 Jul 2020 11:02:00 +0000

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.

WirePlumber 0.3 released, now ready for the desktop

George Kiagiadakis — Thu, 16 Jul 2020 09:05:00 +0000

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.

An introduction to Linux kernel initcalls

Mylène Josserand — Tue, 14 Jul 2020 12:09:00 +0000

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.

Deep dive into OpenGL over DirectX layering

Louis-Francis Ratté-Boulianne — Thu, 09 Jul 2020 14:07:00 +0000

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.

Welcoming five new Collaborans!

Erica Ryoo — Thu, 09 Jul 2020 11:21:00 +0000

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!

Monado: Multi-application support with XR_EXTX_overlay

Lubosz Sarnecki — Tue, 30 Jun 2020 14:17:00 +0000

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.

Using syzkaller, part 4: Driver fuzzing

Ricardo Cañuelo Navarro — Fri, 26 Jun 2020 07:08:00 +0000

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.

Cross building Rust GStreamer plugins for the Raspberry Pi

Guillaume Desmottes — Tue, 23 Jun 2020 09:57:00 +0000

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.

Embedded Linux & Open Source take the virtual stage

Mark Filion — Thu, 18 Jun 2020 08:06:00 +0000

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.

Generating MPEG-DASH streams for Open Source adaptive streaming with GStreamer

Stéphane Cerveau — Fri, 12 Jun 2020 11:30:00 +0000

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.

Bifrost meets GNOME: Onward & upward to zero graphics blobs

Alyssa Rosenzweig — Fri, 05 Jun 2020 11:44:00 +0000

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.

Kernel 5.7: Forging ahead, despite COVID-19

Andrzej Pietrasiewicz — Thu, 04 Jun 2020 11:21:06 +0000

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.

Google Summer of Code 2020

Mark Filion — Mon, 01 Jun 2020 13:56:00 +0000

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.

Monado OpenXR runtime development gaining momentum: version 0.2, multi-layer support & more!

Jakob Bornecrantz — Fri, 29 May 2020 11:47:19 +0000

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!

Using regmaps to make Linux drivers more generic

Adrian Ratiu — Wed, 27 May 2020 08:18:00 +0000

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.

Laval Virtual: OpenXR master class in VR!

Mark Filion — Mon, 18 May 2020 16:22:00 +0000

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.

Cross-compiling with gst-build and GStreamer

Stéphane Cerveau — Fri, 15 May 2020 13:50:00 +0000

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.

Using syzkaller, part 3: Fuzzing your changes

Andre Almeida — Tue, 12 May 2020 08:44:00 +0000

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.

xrdesktop 0.14 with OpenXR support is here!

Lubosz Sarnecki — Fri, 08 May 2020 14:52:00 +0000

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.

WirePlumber, the PipeWire session manager

George Kiagiadakis — Thu, 07 May 2020 06:41:00 +0000

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.

Service process and out of process compositing in Monado

Lubosz Sarnecki — Thu, 30 Apr 2020 09:11:00 +0000

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.

Reducing the size of a Rust GStreamer plugin

Guillaume Desmottes — Tue, 28 Apr 2020 10:48:00 +0000

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?

From Bifrost to Panfrost - deep dive into the first render

Alyssa Rosenzweig — Thu, 23 Apr 2020 07:35:00 +0000

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)!

Say hello to the newest Collaborans!

Erica Ryoo — Tue, 21 Apr 2020 12:44:00 +0000

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!

Alyssa Rosenzweig receives Google Open Source Peer Bonus

Mark Filion — Mon, 20 Apr 2020 08:02:00 +0000

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!

Using syzkaller, part 2: Detecting programming bugs in the Linux kernel

Andre Almeida — Fri, 17 Apr 2020 09:40:00 +0000

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.

Open Source software releases: Q1 2020 recap

Mark Filion — Tue, 14 Apr 2020 12:31:00 +0000

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

Clean, reliable setup for dependency installation

Pekka Paalanen — Fri, 10 Apr 2020 07:09:00 +0000

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.

Adding mainline Arm Frame Buffer Compression support for Rockchip

Andrzej Pietrasiewicz — Wed, 08 Apr 2020 09:25:00 +0000

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).

Projects and progress in Linux kernel 5.6

Helen Koike — Tue, 31 Mar 2020 11:40:00 +0000

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.

Linaro Tech Days: Wayland, Weston & Open Source GPU drivers

Mark Filion — Mon, 30 Mar 2020 15:04:00 +0000

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!

Using syzkaller, part 1: Fuzzing the Linux kernel

Andre Almeida — Thu, 26 Mar 2020 11:12:00 +0000

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.

Introducing OpenCL and OpenGL on DirectX

Erik Faye-Lund — Tue, 24 Mar 2020 11:32:00 +0000

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.

Getting started with GStreamer's gst-build

Stéphane Cerveau — Thu, 19 Mar 2020 11:56:00 +0000

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.

Why remote working can be good for people, business and environment

Olivier Potin — Tue, 10 Mar 2020 12:40:00 +0000

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.

PipeWire, the media service transforming the Linux multimedia landscape

Julian Bouzas — Thu, 05 Mar 2020 14:57:00 +0000

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.

Experimental Panfrost GLES 3.0 support has landed in Mesa

Alyssa Rosenzweig — Thu, 27 Feb 2020 10:55:00 +0000

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.

Monado OpenXR runtime developer update

Jakob Bornecrantz — Tue, 25 Feb 2020 10:48:00 +0000

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!

Using gcc sanitisers to get a nasty bug fixed

Andrej Shadura — Tue, 18 Feb 2020 10:00:00 +0000

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.

Low latency streaming of security video feeds with SRT and GStreamer

Jakub Adam — Wed, 12 Feb 2020 12:08:00 +0000

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.

FOSDEM 2020 - Recorded presentations (videos)

Mark Filion — Wed, 05 Feb 2020 09:53:00 +0000

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.

Linux Kernel 5.5

Sebastian Reichel — Thu, 30 Jan 2020 11:53:00 +0000

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.

FOSDEM 2020

Mark Filion — Thu, 23 Jan 2020 16:18:00 +0000

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!

Meet the newest Collaborans!

Erica Ryoo — Thu, 16 Jan 2020 15:20:00 +0000

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!

Opening up Mali T720

Alyssa Rosenzweig — Fri, 20 Dec 2019 11:08:00 +0000

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!

New graphing tool for PipeWire debugging

Julian Bouzas — Mon, 09 Dec 2019 11:31:00 +0000

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.

Linux Kernel 5.4

Enric Balletbò i Serra — Mon, 02 Dec 2019 10:46:00 +0000

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.

Building GStreamer on Windows

Aaron Boxer — Tue, 26 Nov 2019 15:11:00 +0000

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.

And the Collabora family keeps growing!

Jassie Badion — Wed, 20 Nov 2019 11:00:00 +0000

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!

GStreamer & automated testing in Lyon

Mark Filion — Wed, 30 Oct 2019 14:17:00 +0000

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.

A new home for KernelCI

Guillaume Tucker — Mon, 28 Oct 2019 07:07:00 +0000

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.

Embedded Linux Conference Europe 2019

Mark Filion — Fri, 25 Oct 2019 14:15:00 +0000

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.

Zink: Fall Update

Erik Faye-Lund — Thu, 24 Oct 2019 14:22:00 +0000

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.

Adding stateless support to vicodec

Dafna Hirschfeld — Wed, 09 Oct 2019 11:03:00 +0000

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.

Why HDCP support in Weston is a good thing

Pekka Paalanen — Thu, 03 Oct 2019 16:22:00 +0000

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

Open graphics in Montreal

Mark Filion — Mon, 30 Sep 2019 12:49:00 +0000

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.

All the right ingredients in Paris

Mark Filion — Fri, 20 Sep 2019 06:35:00 +0000

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

Linux Kernel 5.3

Boris Brezillon — Thu, 19 Sep 2019 12:42:00 +0000

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.

Open Source at IBC 2019

Mark Filion — Thu, 12 Sep 2019 18:22:00 +0000

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

Bringing the FOSS XR community together

Joey Ferwerda — Fri, 06 Sep 2019 11:28:00 +0000

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.

Virglrenderer and the state of virtualized virtual worlds

Gert Wollny — Wed, 28 Aug 2019 12:33:00 +0000

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.

Embedded in San Diego

Mark Filion — Tue, 20 Aug 2019 13:41:00 +0000

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.

Panfrost & Wayland on a Rockchip board

Rohan Garg — Tue, 06 Aug 2019 13:25:00 +0000

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.

What's new in OpenXR 1.0 & Monado?

Ryan Pavlik — Fri, 02 Aug 2019 10:06:00 +0000

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.

Linux Developer Conference Brazil 2019

Mark Filion — Fri, 02 Aug 2019 08:34:00 +0000

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.

Moving the Linux desktop to another reality

Lubosz Sarnecki — Tue, 30 Jul 2019 10:16:00 +0000

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.

Zink: Summer Update & SIGGRAPH 2019

Erik Faye-Lund — Thu, 25 Jul 2019 14:39:00 +0000

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!

Collabora & Debian 10 (Buster)

Andrej Shadura — Thu, 25 Jul 2019 10:28:00 +0000

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!

GStreamer in Oslo

Nicolas Dufresne — Thu, 18 Jul 2019 15:01:00 +0000

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.

Linux Kernel 5.2

Gabriel Krisman Bertazi — Wed, 17 Jul 2019 12:08:00 +0000

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.

GNOME meets Panfrost

Alyssa Rosenzweig — Wed, 26 Jun 2019 12:58:00 +0000

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.

Using dummy-hcd to play with USB gadgets

Andrzej Pietrasiewicz — Mon, 24 Jun 2019 15:11:00 +0000

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.

Welcoming the newest Collaborans!

Jassie Badion — Fri, 21 Jun 2019 12:43:00 +0000

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!

Building Debian images for Le Potato and OrangePi with debos

Frédéric Danis — Tue, 18 Jun 2019 12:35:00 +0000

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.

Joining Collabora for a summer of Panfrost

Alyssa Rosenzweig — Wed, 05 Jun 2019 15:05:00 +0000

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.

Google Summer of Code 2019

Mark Filion — Thu, 30 May 2019 16:07:00 +0000

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.

Testing Video4Linux2 drivers like a boss

Ezequiel Garcia — Thu, 23 May 2019 14:46:00 +0000

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.

Permissively-licensed MTP device implementation

Andrzej Pietrasiewicz — Thu, 16 May 2019 12:14:00 +0000

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.

An eBPF overview, part 5: Tracing user processes

Adrian Ratiu — Tue, 14 May 2019 10:16:00 +0000

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.

Linux Kernel 5.1

André Almeida — Thu, 09 May 2019 13:47:00 +0000

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.

CEF on Wayland upstreamed

Santosh Mahto — Wed, 08 May 2019 11:58:00 +0000

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.

Collabora & GStreamer 1.16

Aaron Boxer — Mon, 06 May 2019 14:12:00 +0000

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.

An eBPF overview, part 4: Working with embedded systems

Adrian Ratiu — Mon, 06 May 2019 12:20:00 +0000

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.

Running Android and Wayland on embedded devices

Robert Foss — Thu, 02 May 2019 14:31:00 +0000

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.

An eBPF overview, part 3: Walking up the software stack

Adrian Ratiu — Fri, 26 Apr 2019 13:50:00 +0000

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.

GStreamer buffer flow analyzer

Guillaume Desmottes — Thu, 25 Apr 2019 16:08:00 +0000

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.

Weston debugging and tracing on-the-fly

Marius Vlad — Wed, 24 Apr 2019 12:54:26 +0000

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.

Quick hack: git-pw

Ezequiel Garcia — Thu, 18 Apr 2019 14:06:00 +0000

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.

An eBPF overview, part 2: Machine & bytecode

Adrian Ratiu — Mon, 15 Apr 2019 14:50:00 +0000

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.

GStreamer support for the RIST Specification

Nicolas Dufresne — Tue, 09 Apr 2019 16:29:00 +0000

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.

An eBPF overview, part 1: Introduction

Adrian Ratiu — Fri, 05 Apr 2019 11:28:00 +0000

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.

Running Android next to Wayland

Robert Foss — Mon, 01 Apr 2019 14:28:00 +0000

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.

Linaro Connect meets Panfrost

Mark Filion — Fri, 29 Mar 2019 14:19:00 +0000

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.

Modern USB gadget on Linux & how to integrate it with systemd (Part 2)

Andrzej Pietrasiewicz — Wed, 27 Mar 2019 12:45:00 +0000

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.

Bootstraping a minimal Arch Linux image

André Almeida — Wed, 20 Mar 2019 14:59:00 +0000

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.

Introducing: Monado

Jakob Bornecrantz — Mon, 18 Mar 2019 09:02:00 +0000

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.

European R-Car Consortium Forum 2019

Mark Filion — Wed, 13 Mar 2019 21:00:16 +0000

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!

An overview of the Panfrost driver

Robert Foss — Wed, 13 Mar 2019 14:54:00 +0000

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.

Quick hack: Raspberry Pi meets Linux kernel mainline

Helen Koike — Tue, 12 Mar 2019 14:07:00 +0000

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

Linux Kernel 5.0

Gaël Portay — Wed, 06 Mar 2019 12:40:00 +0000

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!

News from the Debian Cloud Team

Lucas Kanashiro — Tue, 05 Mar 2019 16:22:00 +0000

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!

Automotive Linux in Tokyo

Mark Filion — Mon, 04 Mar 2019 16:09:00 +0000

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.

Panfrost update: A new kernel driver

Tomeu Vizoso — Mon, 04 Mar 2019 11:15:00 +0000

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.

Embedded World 2019

Mark Filion — Wed, 20 Feb 2019 16:03:00 +0000

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!

Modern USB gadget on Linux & how to integrate it with systemd (Part 1)

Andrzej Pietrasiewicz — Mon, 18 Feb 2019 12:02:00 +0000

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.

FOSDEM 2019 - Recorded presentations (videos)

Mark Filion — Fri, 15 Feb 2019 10:15:00 +0000

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.

FOSDEM 2019

Mark Filion — Wed, 23 Jan 2019 15:54:00 +0000

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!

Linux Kernel 4.20

Fabien Lahoudere — Mon, 07 Jan 2019 16:45:00 +0000

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.

A Panfrost milestone

Tomeu Vizoso — Mon, 07 Jan 2019 11:05:00 +0000

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.

Outreachy - Round 17

Mark Filion — Thu, 20 Dec 2018 15:12:00 +0000

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.

A dream come true: Android is finally using DRM/KMS

Gustavo Padovan — Mon, 17 Dec 2018 11:06:00 +0000

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.

ESE Kongress

Mark Filion — Tue, 04 Dec 2018 17:25:00 +0000

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

Convincing your manager that upstreaming is in their best interest

Martyn Welch — Wed, 28 Nov 2018 16:04:04 +0000

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.

Metrics for test suite comprehensiveness

Alexandros Frantzis — Fri, 23 Nov 2018 14:11:00 +0000

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.

Gaining eBPF vision: A new way to trace Linux filesystem disk requests

Gabriel Krisman Bertazi — Wed, 21 Nov 2018 12:09:00 +0000

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

FOSS in Toulouse

Mark Filion — Fri, 16 Nov 2018 13:46:00 +0000

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!

Linux Plumbers in Vancouver

Mark Filion — Mon, 12 Nov 2018 11:37:00 +0000

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.

Daniel Stone featured in Linux Format!

Mark Filion — Wed, 07 Nov 2018 12:28:00 +0000

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!

Quick hack: Speed up your GitLab CI

Xavier Claessens — Tue, 06 Nov 2018 14:37:00 +0000

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!

Introducing Zink, an OpenGL implementation on top of Vulkan

Erik Faye-Lund — Wed, 31 Oct 2018 12:40:00 +0000

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.

Edinburgh, continued!

Mark Filion — Thu, 25 Oct 2018 07:46:00 +0000

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.

Linux Kernel 4.19

Helen Koike — Mon, 22 Oct 2018 10:53:00 +0000

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.

On the low adoption of automated testing in FOSS

Alexandros Frantzis — Thu, 18 Oct 2018 14:41:00 +0000

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?

Embedded Linux in Edinburgh

Mark Filion — Thu, 18 Oct 2018 12:13:00 +0000

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.

Automotive Grade Linux AMM

Mark Filion — Mon, 15 Oct 2018 15:15:00 +0000

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.

Recently in Geoclue

Zeeshan Ali — Fri, 12 Oct 2018 14:54:00 +0000

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.

FOSSCOMM

Mark Filion — Fri, 12 Oct 2018 11:32:00 +0000

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!

The beauty of Open Source

Martyn Welch — Wed, 10 Oct 2018 15:55:00 +0000

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.

MicroDebConf Brasilia

Lucas Kanashiro — Tue, 02 Oct 2018 12:18:00 +0000

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.

Paris, A Coruna & Berlin

Mark Filion — Thu, 20 Sep 2018 15:00:00 +0000

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?

Virtme: The kernel developers' best friend

Ezequiel Garcia — Tue, 18 Sep 2018 10:56:00 +0000

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.

Open Source at IBC

Mark Filion — Mon, 10 Sep 2018 11:18:00 +0000

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!

Cambridge XMPP Sprint

Maxime Buquet — Thu, 30 Aug 2018 14:12:00 +0000

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.

Testing Chromebooks with LAVA on kernelci.org

Guillaume Tucker — Wed, 29 Aug 2018 18:35:00 +0000

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.

Open Source Summit

Mark Filion — Tue, 28 Aug 2018 15:24:00 +0000

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!

Quick hack: git reset upstream

Robert Foss — Mon, 27 Aug 2018 11:59:00 +0000

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.

En route to a robust GPU device selection in GL

Emil Velikov — Tue, 21 Aug 2018 12:28:00 +0000

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.

Linux Kernel 4.18

Ezequiel Garcia — Mon, 13 Aug 2018 07:17:00 +0000

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.

Cross-compilation made easy for GNOME Builder

Corentin Noël — Fri, 03 Aug 2018 17:49:00 +0000

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.

kms_swrast: A hardware-backed graphics driver

Robert Foss — Wed, 01 Aug 2018 18:36:00 +0000

Presenting a new, hardware-backed, software graphics driver, built upon the Mesa gallium driver framework, which uses kernel kms drm nodes for memory allocation.

Collabora continues to grow

Jassie Badion — Tue, 31 Jul 2018 14:13:17 +0000

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!

DebConf18

Mark Filion — Thu, 26 Jul 2018 11:01:00 +0000

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.

The docker.io Debian package is back to life

Arnaud Rebillout — Wed, 04 Jul 2018 12:05:00 +0000

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".

GUADEC 2018

Mark Filion — Fri, 29 Jun 2018 00:17:00 +0000

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!

Introducing debos, a versatile images generator

Ana Guerrero López — Wed, 27 Jun 2018 14:00:00 +0000

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.

Secure video comes of age

Olivier Crête — Mon, 25 Jun 2018 16:58:00 +0000

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.

GStreamer CI support for embedded devices

Omar Akkila — Mon, 11 Jun 2018 15:06:00 +0000

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.

Happy 20th, Open Source

Mark Filion — Tue, 05 Jun 2018 10:48:00 +0000

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.

Linux Kernel 4.17

Enric Balletbò i Serra — Mon, 04 Jun 2018 10:56:00 +0000

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.

Four open months at Collabora

Omar Akkila — Tue, 29 May 2018 09:55:00 +0000

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.

GStreamer spring in Sweden

Zeeshan Ali — Fri, 18 May 2018 09:55:00 +0000

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.

GPU virtualization update

Elie Tournier — Wed, 09 May 2018 14:15:00 +0000

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.

GStreamer Spring Hackfest

Olivier Crête — Tue, 01 May 2018 14:33:00 +0000

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.

foss-north

Mark Filion — Fri, 20 Apr 2018 15:00:00 +0000

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!

Upstream Linux support for new NXP i.MX 8

Robert Foss — Tue, 17 Apr 2018 09:57:00 +0000

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.

Open Source at NAB

Mark Filion — Fri, 06 Apr 2018 08:44:00 +0000

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!

Welcoming 9 new Collaborans!

Jassie Badion — Tue, 03 Apr 2018 14:23:00 +0000

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

Linux Kernel 4.16

Gustavo Padovan — Mon, 02 Apr 2018 13:17:00 +0000

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.

A new era for Linux's low-level graphics - Part 2

Daniel Stone — Fri, 23 Mar 2018 11:10:00 +0000

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.

Collabora & GStreamer 1.14

Olivier Crête — Thu, 22 Mar 2018 16:40:00 +0000

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.

FOSSASIA Summit 2018

Mark Filion — Thu, 22 Mar 2018 09:18:00 +0000

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.

A new era for Linux's low-level graphics - Part 1

Daniel Stone — Tue, 20 Mar 2018 14:39:00 +0000

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.

Linux isn't immune

Gustavo Padovan — Wed, 14 Mar 2018 14:11:00 +0000

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.

Embedded Linux Conference 2018

Mark Filion — Fri, 09 Mar 2018 11:09:00 +0000

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!

Google Open Source Peer Bonus

Mark Filion — Thu, 01 Mar 2018 21:53:00 +0000

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

Embedded World 2018

Mark Filion — Mon, 26 Feb 2018 07:45:00 +0000

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!

FOSDEM - Links to recorded presentations (videos)

Mark Filion — Wed, 21 Feb 2018 16:29:00 +0000

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.

SRT, typical examples

Justin Kim — Tue, 20 Feb 2018 11:47:00 +0000

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.

SRT in GStreamer

Olivier Crête — Fri, 16 Feb 2018 14:10:00 +0000

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.

LVEE Winter Edition 2018

Mark Filion — Tue, 13 Feb 2018 16:56:00 +0000

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.

Virtualizing GPU Access

Robert Foss — Mon, 12 Feb 2018 10:37:00 +0000

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.

Collabora & Linux Kernel 4.15

Gustavo Padovan — Mon, 29 Jan 2018 11:53:00 +0000

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.

FOSDEM: Two days, a dozen talks!

Mark Filion — Fri, 26 Jan 2018 10:09:00 +0000

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!

Kernelci.org automated bisection

Guillaume Tucker — Tue, 16 Jan 2018 14:32:00 +0000

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.

More to it than beer

Guy Lunardi — Wed, 10 Jan 2018 10:45:00 +0000

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.

CEF on Wayland

Gustavo Noronha — Fri, 22 Dec 2017 11:56:00 +0000

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.

Outreachy - Round 15

Mark Filion — Tue, 19 Dec 2017 16:16:00 +0000

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.

12 reasons to join Collabora

Jassie Badion — Thu, 14 Dec 2017 14:18:00 +0000

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!

Why Linux HDCP isn't the end of the world

Daniel Stone — Mon, 11 Dec 2017 11:19:00 +0000

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.

Quick hack: Building ChromiumOS for QEMU

Robert Foss — Fri, 01 Dec 2017 14:55:00 +0000

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.

Your partner in adopting SRT

Mark Filion — Tue, 28 Nov 2017 13:46:00 +0000

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.

Running Chromium with Ozone-GBM on a GNU/Linux desktop

Alexandros Frantzis — Mon, 27 Nov 2017 14:12:00 +0000

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.

ipcpipeline: Splitting a GStreamer pipeline into multiple processes

George Kiagiadakis — Fri, 17 Nov 2017 11:16:00 +0000

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.

Capitole du Libre

Mark Filion — Thu, 16 Nov 2017 21:40:00 +0000

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!

Collabora & Linux Kernel 4.14

Gabriel Krisman Bertazi — Mon, 13 Nov 2017 11:38:00 +0000

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!

Linux Developer Conference Brazil

Mark Filion — Fri, 10 Nov 2017 15:49:00 +0000

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!

Quick hack: Experiments with crosvm

Tomeu Vizoso — Thu, 09 Nov 2017 16:42:00 +0000

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.

European R-Car Consortium Forum

Mark Filion — Wed, 08 Nov 2017 15:53:00 +0000

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.

Tracing memory leaks in the NFC Digital Protocol stack

Thierry Escande — Mon, 06 Nov 2017 13:43:00 +0000

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.

Embedded Linux Conference Europe

Mark Filion — Fri, 20 Oct 2017 17:30:00 +0000

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.

GStreamer Conference 2017

Mark Filion — Thu, 19 Oct 2017 14:15:00 +0000

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!

Who knew we still had low-hanging fruit?

Gustavo Noronha — Tue, 17 Oct 2017 11:00:00 +0000

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.

Performance analysis in Linux (continued)

Gabriel Krisman Bertazi — Fri, 06 Oct 2017 10:06:00 +0000

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.

Embedded & Kernel Recipes

Mark Filion — Mon, 25 Sep 2017 14:48:00 +0000

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!

XDC 2017 - Links to recorded presentations (videos)

Guy Lunardi — Sat, 23 Sep 2017 11:00:00 +0000

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.

XDC comes to Mountain View

Mark Filion — Wed, 20 Sep 2017 15:54:00 +0000

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!

Open Source Summit North America

Mark Filion — Mon, 11 Sep 2017 15:03:00 +0000

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

Collabora & Linux Kernel 4.13

Sebastian Reichel — Wed, 06 Sep 2017 14:46:00 +0000

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!

DebConf 17: Flatpak and Debian

Simon McVittie — Thu, 17 Aug 2017 10:20:00 +0000

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!

DebConf comes to Montreal!

Mark Filion — Fri, 04 Aug 2017 11:20:00 +0000

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!

Upcoming events: GUADEC & SIGGRAPH

Mark Filion — Thu, 27 Jul 2017 14:36:00 +0000

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!

Android: NXP i.MX6 on Etnaviv Update

Robert Foss — Mon, 24 Jul 2017 11:39:00 +0000

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.

vkmark: more than a Vulkan benchmark

Alexandros Frantzis — Tue, 18 Jul 2017 11:17:00 +0000

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.

Collabora & Linux Kernel 4.12

Martyn Welch — Tue, 04 Jul 2017 16:15:00 +0000

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!

Quick hack: Performance debugging Linux graphics on Mesa

Robert Foss — Thu, 29 Jun 2017 11:00:00 +0000

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.

Growing our Core, Graphics & Web teams

Mark Filion — Tue, 27 Jun 2017 16:09:00 +0000

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!

Debian armhf VM on arm64 server

Sjoerd Simons — Tue, 20 Jun 2017 16:15:00 +0000

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.

NVMe: Officially faster for emulated controllers!

Helen Koike — Tue, 13 Jun 2017 11:03:00 +0000

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!

Android: NXP i.MX6 Buffer Modifier Support

Robert Foss — Mon, 05 Jun 2017 12:09:00 +0000

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.

Outreachy 2017

Mark Filion — Fri, 02 Jun 2017 14:57:00 +0000

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.

Three days, two exhibits, three talks

Mark Filion — Tue, 30 May 2017 14:06:00 +0000

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.

VR World, GStreamer, OSS, Vulkanised!

Mark Filion — Tue, 16 May 2017 14:01:00 +0000

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?

Collabora at GENIVI AMM

Mark Filion — Mon, 08 May 2017 16:34:00 +0000

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!

Collabora contributions to GStreamer 1.12

Olivier Crête — Thu, 04 May 2017 15:26:00 +0000

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.

Collabora & Linux Kernel 4.11

Helen Fornazier — Mon, 01 May 2017 15:13:00 +0000

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

Android: Getting up and running on the iMX6

Robert Foss — Thu, 27 Apr 2017 13:57:00 +0000

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.

Receiving an AES67 stream with GStreamer

Olivier Crête — Tue, 25 Apr 2017 15:24:00 +0000

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.

Quick hack: Changing the Android boot animation

Robert Foss — Fri, 21 Apr 2017 14:10:00 +0000

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.

GStreamer 1.12: Intel Media SDK support and more

Olivier Crête — Wed, 19 Apr 2017 16:45:00 +0000

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.

Upcoming events: VR, NAB & Khronos

Mark Filion — Tue, 18 Apr 2017 19:43:00 +0000

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

Tracing user space and OS interactions

Gabriel Krisman Bertazi — Mon, 10 Apr 2017 15:03:00 +0000

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.

Ubuntu rejoins the GNOME fold

Daniel Stone — Wed, 05 Apr 2017 18:38:00 +0000

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.

Release: libnice 0.1.14

Mark Filion — Mon, 03 Apr 2017 20:10:00 +0000

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).

Android: Enabling mainline graphics

Robert Foss — Wed, 29 Mar 2017 11:03:00 +0000

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.

Linux block I/O tracing

Gabriel Krisman Bertazi — Tue, 28 Mar 2017 11:32:00 +0000

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.

GTK+ Hackfest 2017: D-Bus communication with containers

Simon McVittie — Fri, 24 Mar 2017 09:43:00 +0000

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.

Collabora in Linux Format

Mark Filion — Wed, 22 Mar 2017 20:38:00 +0000

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!

Performance analysis in Linux

Gabriel Krisman Bertazi — Tue, 21 Mar 2017 00:14:00 +0000

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.

Kernel debugging with QEMU: An overview of tools available

Frédéric Dalleau — Mon, 13 Mar 2017 10:33:00 +0000

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.

Quick hack: Removing the Chromebook Write-Protect screw

Robert Foss — Wed, 08 Mar 2017 11:20:00 +0000

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

Two weeks, four events!

Mark Filion — Tue, 07 Mar 2017 13:54:00 +0000

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!

A flurry of open source graphics milestones

Daniel Stone — Wed, 01 Mar 2017 19:40:00 +0000

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.

Quick hack: Precompiling APK files during Android AOSP build

Robert Foss — Thu, 23 Feb 2017 19:47:00 +0000

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

Embedded Linux Conference 2017

Mark Filion — Tue, 21 Feb 2017 15:45:00 +0000

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".

Collabora & Linux Kernel 4.10

Gustavo Padovan — Mon, 20 Feb 2017 21:49:00 +0000

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

Quick hack: Setting up a ChromiumOS dev environment

Robert Foss — Thu, 16 Feb 2017 21:13:00 +0000

How to set up a fully functional ChromiumOS development environment on actual Chromebook hardware.

Optimizing graphics memory bandwidth with compression and tiling: Notes on DRM format modifiers

Varad Gautam — Thu, 09 Feb 2017 19:26:00 +0000

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.

Hello Amsterdam!

Mark Filion — Wed, 08 Feb 2017 16:39:00 +0000

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.

Collabora at FOSDEM 2017

Mark Filion — Tue, 31 Jan 2017 21:59:00 +0000

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.

Mainline Explicit Fencing - Part 3

Gustavo Padovan — Thu, 26 Jan 2017 20:03:00 +0000

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.

A look at the Chamelium board

Tomeu Vizoso — Tue, 24 Jan 2017 16:45:00 +0000

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.

Setting up QEMU-KVM for kernel development

Frédéric Dalleau — Mon, 16 Jan 2017 19:50:00 +0000

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.

Collabora Contributions to Linux Kernel 4.9

Gustavo Padovan — Wed, 14 Dec 2016 17:16:00 +0000

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.

GStreamer meets HotDoc

Mark Filion — Tue, 29 Nov 2016 17:09:00 +0000

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!

A tale of cylinders and shadows

Gustavo Noronha — Tue, 22 Nov 2016 15:48:00 +0000

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.

How continuous integration can help you keep pace with the Linux kernel

Tomeu Vizoso — Tue, 08 Nov 2016 15:10:00 +0000

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.

Collabora contributions to GStreamer 1.10 - Part 2

Olivier Crête — Thu, 03 Nov 2016 11:56:00 +0000

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.

Collabora contributions to GStreamer 1.10

Olivier Crête — Wed, 02 Nov 2016 09:46:00 +0000

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.

Linux Plumbers Conference 2016

Mark Filion — Wed, 26 Oct 2016 12:37:00 +0000

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.

Open Build Service in Debian - Part 2

Héctor Orón Martínez — Tue, 25 Oct 2016 17:53:00 +0000

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.

Open Build Service in Debian - Part 1

Héctor Orón Martínez — Mon, 24 Oct 2016 15:17:00 +0000

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.

Mainline Explicit Fencing - Part 2

Gustavo Padovan — Tue, 18 Oct 2016 18:28:00 +0000

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.

Making Viewer UIs for Pitivi

Lubosz Sarnecki — Thu, 13 Oct 2016 11:03:00 +0000

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.

GStreamer Conference 2016

Mark Filion — Fri, 07 Oct 2016 16:25:00 +0000

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!

Web Engines Hackfest 2016

Gustavo Noronha — Thu, 06 Oct 2016 11:29:00 +0000

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.

Collabora contributions to Linux Kernel 4.8

Gustavo Padovan — Mon, 03 Oct 2016 11:07:00 +0000

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!

WebKitGTK+ 2.14 and the Web Engines Hackfest

Gustavo Noronha — Thu, 22 Sep 2016 15:01:00 +0000

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!

Upcoming events - Fall 2016

Mark Filion — Mon, 19 Sep 2016 18:30:00 +0000

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

Mainline Explicit Fencing - Part 1

Gustavo Padovan — Tue, 13 Sep 2016 22:25:00 +0000

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.

Event: IBC 2016

Mark Filion — Mon, 05 Sep 2016 10:28:00 +0000

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.

Building Android for Qemu: A Step-by-Step Guide

Robert Foss — Fri, 02 Sep 2016 13:58:00 +0000

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.

Increased performance of emulated NVMe devices

Helen Fornazier — Tue, 23 Aug 2016 20:00:00 +0000

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.

Thoughts about reviewing large patchsets

Philip Withnall — Fri, 12 Aug 2016 12:24:00 +0000

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.

OpenGL 4.4 for Intel Linux Drivers

Timothy Arceri — Fri, 05 Aug 2016 13:20:00 +0000

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.

Collabora contributions to Linux Kernel 4.7

Gustavo Padovan — Tue, 26 Jul 2016 07:00:00 +0000

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.

GStreamer Echo Canceller

Nicolas Dufresne — Fri, 08 Jul 2016 13:31:00 +0000

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.

Introducing GStreamer VR Plug-ins and SPHVR

Lubosz Sarnecki — Mon, 04 Jul 2016 15:18:00 +0000

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.

Event: DebConf16

Mark Filion — Thu, 30 Jun 2016 10:28:00 +0000

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.

SVVR 2016: Virtual reality in the Valley

Frédéric Plourde — Mon, 27 Jun 2016 19:47:00 +0000

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.

GTK Hackfest 2016

Simon McVittie — Wed, 22 Jun 2016 13:15:00 +0000

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.

News: GStreamer leaks tracer

Mark Filion — Wed, 22 Jun 2016 13:00:00 +0000

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.

GStreamer leaks tracer

Guillaume Desmottes — Sun, 19 Jun 2016 23:00:00 +0000

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.

Linux Kernel: memory corruption - debug tricks

Helen Fornazier — Fri, 10 Jun 2016 17:51:00 +0000

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.

Event: InfoComm 2016

Mark Filion — Tue, 07 Jun 2016 10:28:00 +0000

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.

Flatpak on Debian

Simon McVittie — Mon, 06 Jun 2016 13:23:00 +0000

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.

Running Weston on a Raspbian

Robert Foss — Fri, 03 Jun 2016 17:21:00 +0000

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.

GStreamer Spring Hackfest 2016

Olivier Crête — Wed, 25 May 2016 20:04:00 +0000

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.

News: Linux Kernel 4.6

Mark Filion — Wed, 18 May 2016 13:00:00 +0000

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!

Linux Kernel 4.6: More active Collabora contributors than ever before

Gustavo Padovan — Tue, 17 May 2016 19:28:00 +0000

Event: GStreamer Spring Hackfest 2016

Mark Filion — Fri, 13 May 2016 13:00:00 +0000

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

Validating changes to KMS drivers with IGT

Tomeu Vizoso — Thu, 21 Apr 2016 12:36:00 +0000

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.

Yocto and OpenEmbedded at Collabora

Andrew Shadura — Fri, 15 Apr 2016 13:12:00 +0000

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

Event: Apertis hands-on session, April 28

Mark Filion — Mon, 11 Apr 2016 13:00:00 +0000

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.

Collabora contributions to Linux Kernel 4.5

Gustavo Padovan — Thu, 17 Mar 2016 15:38:00 +0000

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.

A programmer's view on digital images: the essentials

Pekka Paalanen — Tue, 16 Feb 2016 22:56:00 +0000

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.

Vulkan 1.0 specification released with day-one support for Wayland

Daniel Stone — Tue, 16 Feb 2016 16:06:00 +0000

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.

News: Vulkan 1.0 specification released

Mark Filion — Tue, 16 Feb 2016 14:00:00 +0000

Community time at Collabora

Andrew Shadura — Fri, 12 Feb 2016 10:20:00 +0000

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.

GNOME DX Hackfest: xdg-app + Debian

Simon McVittie — Mon, 01 Feb 2016 15:51:00 +0000

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.

Checking JSON files for correctness

Philip Withnall — Wed, 27 Jan 2016 21:36:00 +0000

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.

Collabora contributions to Linux Kernel 4.4

Gustavo Padovan — Tue, 12 Jan 2016 10:50:00 +0000

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!

Event: ISE 2016

Mark Filion — Thu, 17 Dec 2015 11:28:00 +0000

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

Collabora contributions to Linux Kernel 4.3

Gustavo Padovan — Thu, 12 Nov 2015 12:45:00 +0000

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

Event: systemd.conf 2015

Mark Filion — Wed, 28 Oct 2015 11:36:00 +0000

Berlin, Germany - from 05/11/2015 to 07/11/2015: The systemd.conf is the first conference devoted to the systemd project. It aims to bring developers, distribution packagers and devops professionals together to present, discuss, and work on that topics that will shape the future of the systemd project.

Event: Web Engines Hackfest 2015

Mark Filion — Wed, 28 Oct 2015 11:32:00 +0000

A Coruña, Spain - from 07/12/2015 to 09/12/2015: The Web Engines Hackfest is a hacking oriented invitation-only event involving members from all parts of the Web Platform community, including those who work on Blink, WebKit, Gecko, and Servo.

Event: GENIVI AMM Seoul 2015

Guy Lunardi — Tue, 13 Oct 2015 16:21:00 +0000

Seoul, South Korea - From 20/10/2015 to 23/10/2015: We will be exhibiting at the GENIVI Showcase during the All Member Meeting.

GLib now has a datagram interface

Philip Withnall — Tue, 13 Oct 2015 15:52:00 +0000

For those who like their I/O packetised, GLib now has a companion for its GIOStream class — the GDatagramBasedinterface, which we’ve implemented as part of R&D work at Collabora.

Event: GStreamer Conference 2015

Guy Lunardi — Mon, 28 Sep 2015 17:30:00 +0000

Dublin, Ireland - from 08/10/2015 to 09/10/2015: The GStreamer Conference is a conference for anyone interested in the GStreamer multimedia framework or Open Source and cross-platform multimedia.

Celebrating 30 years. Happy 30th anniversary GNU

Guy Lunardi — Tue, 15 Sep 2015 16:21:00 +0000

Standing on the shoulders of giants. As Collabora turns 10 years this month, we are forced to stop and marvel at the accomplishments of GNU in its 30 years of existence. Happy 30th anniversary GNU

Event: IBC 2015

Guy Lunardi — Sat, 05 Sep 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Amsterdam, The Netherlands - from 10/09/2015 to 15/09/2015: we are thrilled to be joining ARM to demonstrate our latest technology showcases together at their booth at IBC 2015. Booth Hall 4.C61

Collabora contributions to Linux Kernel 4.2

Gustavo Padovan — Tue, 25 Aug 2015 14:12:00 +0000

Kernel.org Collabora contributions

Collabora contributions to Linux kernel 4.1

Javier Martinez Canillas — Mon, 24 Aug 2015 14:39:00 +0000

Kernel.org Collabora contributions

Event: LPC 2015

Guy Lunardi — Fri, 14 Aug 2015 17:31:00 +0000

Seattle, USA - from 19/08/2015 to 21/08/2015: The Linux Plumbers Conference (LPC) is a developer conference for those working on the “plumbing” of Linux.

Event: DebConf 2015

Guy Lunardi — Fri, 14 Aug 2015 17:09:00 +0000

Heidelberg, Germany - from 15/08/2015 to 22/08/2015: The 16th annual Debian developers meeting.

Event: GStreamer Hackfest 2015

Guy Lunardi — Fri, 14 Aug 2015 16:54:00 +0000

Montpellier, France - from 14/08/2015 to 16/08/2015: GStreamer developers are meeting up to work on the project.

Alex's work experience at Collabora

Alex Shtyrov — Thu, 06 Aug 2015 13:50:00 +0000

A student intership experience at Collabora

Why polkit (or, how to mount a disk on modern Linux)

Simon McVittie — Mon, 08 Jun 2015 09:05:00 +0000

Why udisks2 and polkit are the way they are

Checking D-Bus API stability

Philip Withnall — Tue, 02 Jun 2015 14:26:00 +0000

D-Bus API features

Collabora contributions to Linux kernel 4.0

Javier Martinez Canillas — Mon, 11 May 2015 15:34:00 +0000

Collabora upstream work on Linux kernel

Lucid sleep in the free desktop

Tomeu Vizoso — Fri, 01 May 2015 13:39:00 +0000

Describes ability of performing work while the machine is in a low power state such as suspend.

Tracking the reference count of a GstMiniObject using gdb

Guillaume Desmottes — Mon, 13 Apr 2015 08:48:00 +0000

Debugging GStreamer

Blink started supporting font-size-adjust css property

ChangSeok Oh — Thu, 26 Mar 2015 17:34:00 +0000

Blink font-size-adjust via CSS properties

JPEG-XR support on blink

ChangSeok Oh — Sat, 21 Mar 2015 11:10:00 +0000

JPEG-XR support on browsing technologies

Event: InfoComm 2015

Guy Lunardi — Fri, 20 Mar 2015 14:59:00 +0000

Orlando, USA - from 17/06/2015 to 19/06/2015: we'll be exhibiting at InfoComm 2015, the largest event for professional AV in the world. Collabora booth 5469

Event: GENIVI AMM Stuttgart 2015

Guy Lunardi — Wed, 18 Mar 2015 11:38:00 +0000

Stuttgart, Germany - From 22/04/2015 to 22/04/2015: We will be exhibiting at the GENIVI Demonstration Showcase during the All Member Meeting.

Weston repaint scheduling

Pekka Paalanen — Wed, 11 Feb 2015 19:45:00 +0000

Latest Weston features

GNOME programming guidelines: the rise of gnome-devel-docs

Philip Withnall — Wed, 11 Feb 2015 12:48:00 +0000

Check out the new GNOME Programming Guidelines and file bugs in Bugzilla.

Crosswalk and its JS, JAVA and Native Extensions performance

Danilo Cesar — Thu, 05 Feb 2015 19:53:00 +0000

A brief discussion about Crosswalk’s JS, JAVA and Native Extensions performance

Debian Jessie on Raspberry Pi 2

Sjoerd Simons — Tue, 03 Feb 2015 12:49:00 +0000

Debian Jessie running on Raspberry Pi 2

WebKit on the new Raspberry Pi 2

Marco Barisione — Mon, 02 Feb 2015 15:23:00 +0000

Raspberry PI 2 release announcement!

Event: ISE 2015

Guy Lunardi — Thu, 15 Jan 2015 06:30:00 +0000

Amsterdam, The Netherlands February 10-12, 2015: the world’s largest tradeshow dedicated to professional AV and electronic systems integration. Collabora booth #11-E61

Event: CES 2015

Guy Lunardi — Wed, 17 Dec 2014 15:48:00 +0000

Las Vegas, USA - January 6th - 9th, 2015: Collabora will be participating with key partners at CES 2015, the world’s gathering place for all who thrive on the business of consumer technologies.

Event: Developer Experience Hackfest 2015

Guy Lunardi — Tue, 16 Dec 2014 09:47:00 +0000

Cambridge, UK January 25-29, 2015: Hosted at Collabora's UK headquarters, the Event Developer Hackfest 2015 aims to continue the tradition of pushing forward roadmaps for the toolkit and developer experience.

A checklist for writing pkg-config files

Philip Withnall — Tue, 09 Dec 2014 17:17:00 +0000

Differences between pkg-config variables, the use of AX_PKG_CHECK_MODULES, and what to include in custom variables. automake and autoconf snippets are provided

Event: Web Engines Hackfest 2014

Guy Lunardi — Mon, 24 Nov 2014 18:33:00 +0000

A Coruña, Spain - December 7-10, 2014: Collabora are pleased to be sponsoring and attending the upcoming Web Engines Hackfest, which will bring together members from all parts of the Web Platform community.

Recent improvements in libnice

Philip Withnall — Fri, 31 Oct 2014 16:20:00 +0000

libnice upstream improvements done at Collabora

Introduction to ICE and libnice

Philip Withnall — Fri, 31 Oct 2014 16:17:00 +0000

Introductory talk on libnice (done as part of Collabora's tea time training)

News: We are hiring!

Guy Lunardi — Tue, 21 Oct 2014 08:00:00 +0000

Software engineering, quality assurance, project management, and Finance are all looking for great and talented people. Please check us out. https://www.collabora.com/about-us/careers.html

Collabora contributions to the Linux kernel 3.17

Javier Canillas — Sat, 11 Oct 2014 23:49:00 +0000

Collabora contributions to the Linux kernel 3.17

Improving the security of D-Bus

Alban Crequy — Mon, 06 Oct 2014 10:51:00 +0000

Eight security issues were discovered, fixed and attributed a CVE.

Dynamic relocs, runtime overflows and -fPIC

Philip Withnall — Wed, 01 Oct 2014 16:56:00 +0000

A discussion of dynamic relocation, position independent code, the -fPIC flag and how it affects generated assembly. The focus would be on the practical implications of it all, including when to (and when not to) use -fPIC.

Event: GStreamer Conference 2014

Guy Lunardi — Mon, 29 Sep 2014 16:14:00 +0000

Düsseldorf, Germany October 16-17, 2014: the GStreamer Conference is a conference for developers, decision-makers, community members, industry partners, and anyone else interested in the GStreamer multimedia framework or Open Source and cross-platform multimedia.

A web browser for the Raspberry Pi

Marco Barisione — Mon, 01 Sep 2014 11:02:00 +0000

Collabora has been working with the Raspberry Pi Foundation on various projects including a web browser optimised for the Raspberry Pi. Since the first beta release we have made huge improvements; now the browser is more responsive, it’s faster, and videos work much better (the first beta could play 640×360 videos at 0.5fps, now we can play 25fps 1280×720 videos smoothly).

GStreamer gains V4L2 Mem-2-Mem support

Nicolas Dufresne — Wed, 27 Aug 2014 17:18:00 +0000

A team at Samsung (and many core Linux contributors) started adding new type of drivers to the Linux Media Infrastructure API (also known as Video4Linux 2).

Event: IBC 2014

Guy Lunardi — Wed, 13 Aug 2014 23:15:00 +0000

Amsterdam, The Netherlands September 12-16, 2014: the essential global meeting place for everyone engaged in creating, managing and delivering the future of electronic media and entertainment technology and content. Collabora booth #8.B38c

Wayland on MALI

Daniel Stone — Wed, 13 Aug 2014 17:49:00 +0000

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

Event: SIGGRAPH 2014

Guy Lunardi — Mon, 11 Aug 2014 06:00:00 +0000

Vancouver, Canada August 12-14, 2014: SIGGRAPH, visit ARM at Booth #933 in the Mobile Pavilion to meet with Collabora. SIGGRAPH attracts 20,000 international attendees from across the globe and many creative and technical disciplines. It is the only conference and exhibition that draws the leaders from the world in this exciting and innovative industry.

News: In Cambridge, England 2014

Guy Lunardi — Tue, 05 Aug 2014 08:00:00 +0000

Cambridge, England August 5-8, 2014: With so many silicon vendors and OEMs visiting Cambridge England, August 5-8 transforms the univeristy town into the world's center of innovation for one week. Cambridge in August attracts international leaders in the semiconductor space from across the globe. Collabora is delighted to be headquartered here with so many of its great partners. Should you be in town, don't hesitate to contact us.

News: Raspberry Pi Today Interview

Guy Lunardi — Thu, 17 Jul 2014 15:54:00 +0000

Raspberry Pi Today interviews Collabora's Daniel Stone about Collabora and the Raspberry Pi Foundation's work on Wayland and WebKit.

Raspberry Pi custom box design.

Vince Sanders — Wed, 16 Jul 2014 11:04:00 +0000

It is no great secret that my colleagues at Collabora have been doing work with the Raspberry Pi Foundation.

Event: Automotive Linux Summit

Guy Lunardi — Thu, 19 Jun 2014 16:00:00 +0000

Tokyo, Japan July 1-2, 2014: The Automotive Linux Summit will bring together the most innovative minds from automotive expertise and open-source excellence.

News: New Collabora website launches

Guy Lunardi — Thu, 19 Jun 2014 15:00:00 +0000

Collabora introduces our new brand and logo

NetSurf Developer Workshop Redux

Vince Sanders — Mon, 06 Jan 2014 17:00:00 +0000

Once again the NetSurf developers congregated in Cambridge at the Collabora offices where we were made welcome in a nice environment for the event.

2D graphics Wayland/Weston optimizations on the Raspberry Pi

Collabora — Thu, 23 May 2013 07:00:00 +0000

Enhancing the graphic software stack for the Raspberry Pi.

Press release: Collabora Brings Wayland...

Guy Lunardi — Thu, 23 May 2013 07:00:00 +0000

Collabora Brings Wayland and X11 Graphics Performance to Raspberry Pi

Ability to run X11 and Wayland clients on Raspberry Pi effectively with low CPU and memory consumption.

CAMBRIDGE, ENGLAND - (May 23, 2013) - The Raspberry Pi Foundation and Collabora today announce that they have been working together in order to improve the graphics software capabilities of the Raspberry Pi. The collaboration between the Raspberry Pi Foundation and Collabora enables graphically intensive applications to run with low CPU and memory consumption.

The Raspberry Pi has…

Collabora custom ARM hardware build farm

Vince Sanders — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 21:20:00 +0000

Collabora recently had a problem with a project's ARM build farm. In a nice change of pace it was not that the kernel was crashing, nor indeed any of the software or hardware.

Another NetSurf Developer Workshop

Vince Sanders — Mon, 05 Nov 2012 13:22:00 +0000

The weekend saw some of the NetSurf developers gather once again to do battle against the Red Queen...no, wait. I mean plan and write code.

Linux kernel presentation

Vince Sanders — Thu, 24 May 2012 10:41:00 +0000

Recently I was asked to present a short introduction to the Linux kernel for our project managers. I put together a short slide deck for the presentation which I have decided to share.