SBC News

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. View the full article

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. View the full article

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. View the full article

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. View the full article

Linux kernel 7.1 brings improvements across filesystems, networking, scheduling, graphics, Rust, and hardware enablement, with Collabora contributing 65 patches from 16 engineers across Panthor, DRM, Rockchip, MediaTek, and driver fixes across the kernel. View the full article

Linux kernel 7.2 adds broad core, Rust, and hardware-support updates, with Collabora contributing 102 patches across graphics, media, virtualization, networking, power management, and SoC enablement. View the full article

Linux kernel 7.2 adds broad core, Rust, and hardware-support updates, with Collabora contributing 102 patches across graphics, media, virtualization, networking, power management, and SoC enablement. View the full article

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

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. View the full article

The kernelci.org project aims at continuously testing the mainline Linux kernel, from stable branches to linux-next on a variety of platforms. When a revision fails to build or boot, kernel developers get informed via email reports. View the full article

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. View the full article

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

Kraid, the new compiler for the Panfrost driver stack, now passes all 800,000 Vulkan CTS compute shader tests. This marks a major milestone, with work continuing on additional shader stages, code quality, and performance optimization. View the full article

Kraid is a new Rust-based compiler for Panfrost that replaces the aging Bifrost-rooted compiler stack with a cleaner, more flexible design for modern Mali GPUs, improving IR structure, register allocation, hardware testing, and long-term maintainability. View the full article

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. View the full article

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? View the full article

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. View the full article

A few weeks ago, Ryan Pavlik presented "Unifying Reality: Building Experiences with OpenXR", a master class on OpenXR, the open standard API for building VR and AR experiences that work across devices, now and into the future. View the full article

HTC Vive (Pro) and Valve Index hardware users can now experiment with positional tracking in Monado, thanks to the implementation of a libsurvive driver using the libsurvive library developed by Charles Lohr, David Berger and many contributors. View the full article

Next week, Collaborans will be in Bangkok, Thailand, to participate in the 25th edition of Linaro Connect, a gathering of the world's leading open source engineers working on Arm. Tomeu Vizoso and Gustavo Padovan will be in attendance to present Panfrost. View the full article

This week, Daniel Stone and Tomeu Vizoso will be taking part in Linaro Tech Days, a series of technical sessions presented live online via Zoom webinar and streamed on YouTube. These sessions are free to attend and open to the public! View the full article

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! View the full article

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. View the full article

Collabora authored 111 patches for Linux 7.3, spanning DRM core, Rust, MediaTek, Rockchip, and more. Highlights include a new color format property, per-connector hotplug events, sparse mappings in Panthor, and continued progress on Tyr. View the full article

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! View the full article

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

We're very excited to be sponsoring and speaking at the very first Linux Developer Conference Brazil, taking place on November 11 at the Instituto de Computação in Campinas! View the full article

This weekend, Collaborans are in São Paulo, Brazil, to take part in the third edition of Linux Developer Conference Brazil, a conference which aims to take the Brazilian Linux development community to the international level. View the full article

The recent disclosure of Meltdown and Spectre hardware vulnerabilities were unprecedented in the history of computing. They affect a substantial portion of chips powering most of the infrastructure used by our society today. View the full article

Linux Kernel 4.16 was released over the weekend, and with it came 33 patches contributed by 8 different Collabora developers, including the addition of usb3 and extcon support for Rockchip RK3399 devices, and display support for the Nokia N9. View the full article

Linus Torvalds has now released the official Linux 4.17, so it’s time for our traditional blog post summing up our contributions to the latest version of the Linux kernel, which include a number of patches to the DRM subsystem. View the full article

Another two months and a half have passed, Linux Kernel v4.18 has been released, which means it's time to stop along the way and make a little retrospective. This time around, seven Collaborans have contributed to the kernel, authoring 61 commits. View the full article

As the curtains rose on opening day of Embedded Linux Conference Europe & Open Source Summit Europe in Edinburgh, the latest release of the Linux Kernel, 4.19, was made available by Greg Kroah-Hartman. Collaborans were once again very active. View the full article

A few weeks ago, in the final days leading up to Christmas, Linus Torvalds released Linux Kernel 4.20. Collaborans were once again active during this development cycle, contributing 22 patches, 112 reviews & 55 sign-offs. Here's a look at their contributions. View the full article

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

The first major release of Linux for the year 2019 was made available earlier this week, and with it came a new version number: 5.0. Here's a look at contributions made by Collaborans! View the full article

Earlier this week, Linux Kernel 5.1 was released, and with it came over 13,000 commits from developers all around the world, including Collaborans. This time around, no less than 12 different developers contributed commits (64), sign-offs (111) & more. View the full article

With 11 engineers authoring, reviewing and testing nearly 170 patches for this latest release, Collabora ranked 8th in the list of most active employers by lines changed, sharing ranks with some of the prominent employers in Linux kernel development. View the full article

Linux 5.3 was released over the weekend, which means it's time for our usual "where does Collabora stand in this picture?" tour. As has been the case for several years now, Collabora continues being an active contributor to the Linux kernel. View the full article

Linus has released the 5.4 kernel and Collabora was once again a very active contributor with 12 Collaborans authoring 95 commits while also helping the kernel maintainers by contributing 124 Reviewed-by tags. View the full article

With the 5.5 kernel released earlier this week, here's a detailed look at Collabora’s contributions, including work to improve upstream support of peripherals used together with the i.MX 6 family of processors. View the full article

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. View the full article

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. View the full article

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. View the full article

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

Last month in Nice, active media developers came together for the annual Linux Media Summit to exchange insights and tackle ongoing challenges in the media subsystem. Here’s a brief summary of the key discussions and upcoming areas of focus. View the full article

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

Widely recognized as the premier event for developers working at all levels of the Linux kernel's plumbing layer and beyond, this year's edition of LPC is jam-packed with microconferences, a refereed track, a Kernel Summit track, multiple BoFs, and more. View the full article

With the advent of 5G networks, it's now possible to stream high quality video in real-time with a very low latency that wasn't possible with the past generations of mobile networks. View the full article

Describes ability of performing work while the machine is in a low power state such as suspend. View the full article

Following a great weekend in Brussels for FOSDEM, Collaborans headed east to Belarus to attend & speak at the winter session of the international conference for free/libre open source software developers and users, LVEE. View the full article

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. View the full article

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

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

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

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. View the full article

After over five years of development and collaboration across the Open Source community, mainline Linux support for Rockchip RK3588's video capture hardware has finally landed. View the full article

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. View the full article

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. View the full article

Next week we'll be in Long Beach, California for AWE USA 2026. Catch our talk exploring OpenXR, from its practical foundation for cross-platform XR interoperability, to its extension support across devices, and more! View the full article

Using our XR expertise, Collabora created a standalone XR experience for our 1% for the Planet partner, SOMAR, to showcase the direct impact of underwater noise pollution on marine life. View the full article

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

Gustavo Noronha helps break down C++ and shows how that knowledge can open up new possibilities with Rust. View the full article

Towards the end of 2024, MediaTek and Collabora started on a journey to improve upstream support for MediaTek Genio devices. Here's where things stand. View the full article

Collabora and MediaTek continue expanding upstream support across the Genio IoT family, with HDMI 2.0 now enabled for existing boards, Genio 520 and 720 support progressing in Linux, and Genio Pro 5100 enablement extending into U-Boot and Trusted Firmware-A. View the full article

Collabora's deep involvement with the MediaTek community continued to shine this week with the release of Linux 6.13, which saw multiple improvements land for MediaTek SoCs. View the full article

Improving access, flexibility, and CI integration for development boards, making it easier for developers to work with embedded hardware, no matter where they are. View the full article

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

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

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. View the full article

The first release candidate of Mesa 25.0 has recently shipped, bringing with it multiple updates to Panfrost, and most notably to PanVK, the open source Vulkan driver for Arm Mali GPUs. View the full article

Starting with Mesa 25.2, NVK will now advertise support for Blackwell (RTX 50xx series) and Kepler (most GT and GTX 600 series, most GTX 700 series, and some GTX 800 series) GPUs. View the full article

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

Turnip is the first Mesa driver to achieve official Vulkan conformance on Android, with stronger Android integration, shared Vulkan runtime improvements, and real-device CI testing on Qualcomm Adreno hardware. View the full article

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! View the full article

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

Last month, the first "MicroDebConf" took place at the Gama campus of the University of Brasilia. Here's a look at how this one day event came to be, and what was accomplished during that day. View the full article

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. View the full article

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. View the full article

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

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

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! View the full article

Released as UnitedXR wraps up in Brussels, this latest update to the cross-platform Open-Source OpenXR runtime delivers major improvements across hand tracking, device support, and the core runtime infrastructure. View the full article

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. View the full article

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. View the full article

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

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

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

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. View the full article

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. View the full article

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. View the full article

Monado's first stable of release of 2025 is here. From enhanced Android support and driver updates to improved runtime stability and tooling, Collabora's XR team delivered a wide array of improvements for the cross-platform, open source OpenXR runtime. View the full article

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

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! View the full article

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. View the full article

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

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. View the full article

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

Once again the NetSurf developers congregated in Cambridge at the Collabora offices where we were made welcome in a nice environment for the event. View the full article

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. View the full article