SBC News

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

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! 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 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

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

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. 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

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. 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

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

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 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. 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

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. 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

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! View the full article

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. 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

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! View the full article

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. View the full article

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. 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

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. View the full article

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. 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

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. View the full article

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. View the full article

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. View the full article

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. View the full article

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! 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

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

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

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. View the full article

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. View the full article

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. View the full article

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. 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

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! View the full article

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

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! View the full article

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. 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

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

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

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. View the full article

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. View the full article

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! 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

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

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. 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

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! View the full article

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. 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

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. 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

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. View the full article

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! View the full article

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! 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

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

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. 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

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. View the full article

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! View the full article

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. 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ever since Vulkan was announced a few years ago, the idea of creating a Vulkan benchmarking tool in the spirit of glmark2 had been floating in my mind. Recently, thanks to my employer, Collabora, this idea has materialized! The result is the vkmark Vulkan benchmark, hosted on github. View the full article

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On the road again! Collaborans are heading to London, A Coruña & Buenos Aires to attend a VR event, a hackfest, a conference on Open Source systems, and a day of technical sessions on Vulkan! See you there? View the full article

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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