SBC News

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. View the full article

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. View the full article

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. View the full article

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

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. View the full article

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

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

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. View the full article

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

Collabora introduces our new brand and logo View the full article

Raspberry Pi Today interviews Collabora's Daniel Stone about Collabora and the Raspberry Pi Foundation's work on Wayland and WebKit. View the full article

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

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 View the full article

As an active member of the freedesktop community, Collabora was busy at XDC 2025. Our graphics team delivered five talks, helped out in two more sessions, and ran a workshop for newcomers. View the full article

As of today, NVK is a conformant Vulkan 1.4 implementation for NVIDIA Maxwell, Pascal, and Volta GPUs, and will be enabled by default starting with Mesa 25.1. View the full article

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. View the full article

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. View the full article

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! View the full article

Today, Khronos announced the release of the Vulkan 1.4 specification, and NVK is one of the day-zero conformant Vulkan 1.4 implementations! Vulkan 1.4 support in NVK has been merged into Mesa and will be part of the Mesa 25.0 release in early 2025. View the full article

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

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

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. View the full article

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. View the full article

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

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

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. View the full article

As a trusted partner of industry leaders like CLAAS, Ag Leader, and CCI, we are delighted to exhibit for the first time at one of the world’s leading agricultural trade fairs, taking place November 9–15. Meet us at the Digital Farm Center in Hall 21! View the full article

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

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

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

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! View the full article

Next week we'll be in Prague for a packed Open Source week! We’ll speak at the Linux Plumbers Conference and GStreamer Conference, and present two demos at the ELC Technical Showcase. View the full article

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. View the full article

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. View the full article

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. View the full article

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. View the full article

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

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

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. View the full article

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! View the full article

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

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

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! View the full article

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! View the full article

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. View the full article

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. View the full article

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

A complete breakdown of Mesa’s NIR compiler detailing how it optimizes shader memory access with SSA promotion, deref analysis, copy propagation, and store elimination to reduce memory traffic and improve GPU performance. View the full article

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

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

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

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. View the full article

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. View the full article

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. View the full article

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. View the full article

Kraid is now the default Panfrost compiler for Valhall and newer Mali GPUs, delivering major reductions in shader instructions, spilling, compile time, and memory use while providing a stronger foundation for future compiler optimization. View the full article

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! View the full article

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

The annual X.Org Developer's Conference returns to Toronto September 28-30, and as a Gold Sponsor, Collabora's graphics team will present six talks and a workshop spanning Vulkan and Open Source GPU drivers. View the full article

PanVK has reached a new milestone, and is now officially conformant with the Vulkan 1.1 specification on the Arm Mali-G610 GPU! The submission was done from the Mesa 25.0.2 release, and covers both armhf as well as aarch64 architectures. View the full article

PanVK has reached another milestone and will be officially supporting Vulkan 1.4 on V10! We're up-to-date with the latest version and are well caught up for this release. View the full article

AFBC support has been merged to PanVK and will be available in the Mesa 25.3 release! This new enablement reduces memory bandwidth and boosts performance. View the full article

Just about 6 weeks after we announced Vulkan 1.1 conformance for PanVK on G610 GPUs, Vulkan 1.2 is now also checked off the list! View the full article

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! View the full article

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. View the full article

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

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. View the full article

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. View the full article

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. View the full article

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

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

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. View the full article

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. View the full article

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. View the full article

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. View the full article

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. View the full article

As part of the activities Embedded Recipes in Nice, France, Collabora hosted a PipeWire workshop/hackfest, an opportunity for attendees to meet face-to-face with PipeWire developers and participate in direct discussions about the future of PipeWire. View the full article

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. View the full article

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. View the full article

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. View the full article

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. View the full article

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… View the full article

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. View the full article

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. View the full article

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. View the full article

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). View the full article

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. View the full article

Collabora is headed to Tokyo for the Linux Plumbers Conference! Join us for our talks exploring stability for Rockchip boards, the latest Tyr Rust-based GPU, and more. View the full article

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

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

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

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

A 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. View the full article

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. View the full article

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

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

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

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