SBC News

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

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

This past May, we met with the community at the GStreamer Spring Hackfest in Nice, France, and were able to make great strides, including the integration of AI/ML workflows in GStreamer. View the full article

The Tyr prototype has now progressed from basic GPU job execution to running GNOME, Weston, and full-screen 3D games like SuperTuxKart, demonstrating a functional, high-performance Rust driver that matches C-driver performance! View the full article

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. View the full article

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. View the full article

Our commitment to open source extends beyond contributing code. We are dedicated to upholding the highest standards of license compliance throughout our development processes. View the full article

It is no great secret that my colleagues at Collabora have been doing work with the Raspberry Pi Foundation. View the full article

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. View the full article

Working closely with Google, we built the first RDK-based Chrobalt reference platform for third-party devices, enabling Chromium-based YouTube support, certification, and automation on embedded TVs and set-top boxes. View the full article

Working closely with Google, we built the first RDK-based Chrobalt reference platform for third-party devices, enabling Chromium-based YouTube support, certification, and automation on embedded TVs and set-top boxes. View the full article

PanVK’s new framebuffer abstraction for Mali GPUs removes OpenGL-specific constraints, unlocking more flexible tiled rendering features in Vulkan. View the full article

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. View the full article

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

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. View the full article

Next week we'll be at electronica in Munich! In partnership with Renesas, Collabora will showcase real-time, low-latency ML video analytics on Renesas RZ/G2L and RZ/V2H platforms, using GStreamer for integrated video processing and on-device AI inference. View the full article

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

libnice upstream improvements done at Collabora View the full article

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

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? View the full article

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. View the full article

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

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. View the full article

Support for Rockchip’s VDPU381 and VDPU383 decoders is now upstream in Linux, bringing mainline H.264/HEVC decode support, robust IOMMU-reset recovery, and new HEVC V4L2 UAPI controls aligned with Vulkan Video. View the full article

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. View the full article

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. View the full article

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. View the full article

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

With openwrt-one-debian, you can now install and run a full Debian system leveraging the OpenWrt One’s NVMe storage, enabling everything from custom services and containers to development tools and lightweight server workloads, all on open hardware. View the full article

Get the recap of Nicolas Frattaroli's FOSDEM talk detailing Rockchip’s mainline progress, including Vulkan 1.4 and NPU support as a vital path to sustainable, affordable hardware. View the full article

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

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. View the full article

At this year's edition of FOSDEM Collabora will be present with 6 talks! Join us to get the latest on video capture on Rockchip SoCs, Tyr, machine learning in GStreamer, and more! View the full article

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! View the full article

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. View the full article

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

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 View the full article

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. View the full article

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

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. View the full article

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. View the full article

New upstream BlueZ documentation helps simplify Bluetooth qualification for Linux-based products by mapping supported profiles, test requirements, software versions, and manual steps in one place. View the full article

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. View the full article

With adversity comes the need to rise to the challenge. As the tech climate continues to shift, our talented new joiners have readily jumped in to advance the open source mission. View the full article

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. View the full article

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. View the full article

Collabora presents "Bringing BitNet to ExecuTorch via Vulkan" at PyTorch Conference Europe in Paris (April 7-8) and attends ICLR in Rio de Janeiro (April 23-27). Connect with our team to discuss machine learning and open source innovation! View the full article

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

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

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. View the full article

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. View the full article

Collabora’s long-term leadership in KernelCI has delivered a completely revamped architecture, new tooling, stronger infrastructure, and deeper integrations—modernizing the entire ecosystem and enabling reliable, scalable upstream kernel testing. View the full article

An AI-assisted side project turned a missing KDE tablet feature into a working handwriting mode, combining open source recognition, stylus input, and human-led debugging across an unfamiliar software stack. View the full article

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

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! View the full article

The Panthor kernel driver and Mesa Panfrost driver have passed numerous test cases to achieve official conformance for OpenGL ES 3.1 on the Mali-G610 chip, ensuring reliable performance for users on Mesa version 24.1.1. View the full article

Addressing the need for reliable hardware testing for RISC-V adoption, the RISE Project and Collabora added two RISC-V boards to Collabora's LAVA testing lab. View the full article

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. View the full article

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. View the full article

In addition to Collabora's work to add support in mainline Linux kernel for several Chromebooks, these platforms are now being continuously tested as part of kernelci.org. Here's how to set them up for kernel development & automated testing with LAVA. View the full article

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. View the full article

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. View the full article

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. View the full article

Like all software, Open Source software isn't without it's bugs and issues. However, thanks to the nature of Open Source, resolving or mitigating the issue you encountered can be quite the satisfying adventure when it comes to scratching the itch. View the full article

Last week, a new version of docker.io, the Docker package provided by Debian, was uploaded to Debian Unstable. Quickly afterwards, the package moved to Debian Testing, the first time in two years that docker.io has migrated to "testing". View the full article

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. View the full article

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. View the full article

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. View the full article

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. View the full article

AI development is shifting from implementing models from scratch to composing powerful capabilities via APIs, enabling developers to integrate speech recognition, language models, and tool execution into useful applications with far less effort. View the full article

With VirGL, Venus, and vDRM, virglrenderer offers three different approaches to obtain access to accelerated GFX in a virtual machine. Here are the latest updates around each of these approaches. View the full article

I have recently been involved in reviewing some large feature patchsets for a project at work, and thought it might be interesting to discuss some of the principles we have been trying to stick to when going about these reviews. View the full article

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. View the full article

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. View the full article

Over the next few days, Collabora is very excited to be taking part in three events where we'll be exhibiting as well as giving talks: Augmented World Expo, Automotive Linux Summit and Open Source Summit Japan. View the full article

Kmemleak allows you to track possible memory leaks inside the Linux kernel. Basically, it tracks dynamically allocated memory blocks in the kernel and reports those without any reference left and that are therefore impossible to free. View the full article

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. View the full article

Like the bug that no one can solve, many issues occur on the interface between the user application and the operating system. But even in the good Open Source world, understanding what is happening at these interfaces is not always easy. View the full article

Debugging GStreamer View the full article

Collabora will be at Embedded Software Engineering Kongress! Catch our talk as we share our expertise in training large open source models. View the full article

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. View the full article

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. View the full article

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. View the full article

Over the next two weeks, Collaborans will be present at four different events across the globe. If you plan on attending at any of these conferences, please reach out and say hello! View the full article

Join us next week in Utrecht for RustWeek! We'll be running a SuperTuxKart tournament to showcase Tyr, the Rust driver for Arm Mali GPUs. Come and see if you've got what it takes! View the full article

Today we all read the announcement of Ubuntu's decision to refocus on cloud and IoT activities, dropping Unity 8 to move back to a GNOME-based desktop for the 17.04 LTS. View the full article

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. View the full article

Powerful video analytics pipelines are easy to make when you're well-equipped. Combining GStreamer and Machine Learning frameworks are the perfect duo to run complex models across multiple streams. View the full article

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. View the full article

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

Over the next few days, Collaborans will be getting back on the road and attending two events, one in Manchester and one in Los Angeles. We're also very pleased to be sponsoring one of these events! View the full article

Collaborans are once again hitting the road and will be attending three separate events over the next new two weeks, in London, Las Vegas and Amsterdam View the full article

For the very first time, the GStreamer Conference will be taking place in North America, and we're prepped and ready with no less than 9 talks to share! Catch the latest developments and AI advancements for this multimedia framework. View the full article

The i.MX 6 platform has for the past few years enjoyed a large effort to add upstream support to Linux and surrounding projects. The newly introduced i.MX 8 is seeing lots of work being done, despite hardware being still difficult to get access to. View the full article

The Rockchip RK3588 upstream support has progressed a lot over the last few years. As 2024 comes to a close, it is a great time to have a look at the recent changes, work in progress, and the current state in general. View the full article

Tyr has reached a major milestone by booting the Arm Mali-G610 GPU’s MCU using upstream Rust DRM memory-management abstractions, while helping shape the kernel infrastructure future Rust GPU drivers will rely on. View the full article

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. View the full article

A look at the USB-PD, PHY, hotplug, and DRM changes involved in making USB-C DisplayPort Alternate Mode work on RK3588/RK3576, and where they stand on the way to mainline Linux. View the full article

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. View the full article

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. View the full article