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After waiting in the Linux-next integration tree for about 18 months, the basic Rust infrastructure will finally land in the mainline Linux kernel with the imminent release of v6.1. During the 2022 Linux Maintainers Summit in Dublin, Linus Torvalds asked CI systems to start testing the new Rust infrastructure. So, with that in mind, we are excited to announce that as of today, Rust testing has now been added to KernelCI. Here's the latest on this ongoing work.

Although there are many excellent tracing tools, the new v4l2-tracer utility traces V4L2 stateless decoding more comprehensively, adding the ability to replay (i.e. "retrace") the traced activity, portably, between different userspace environments.

Some big changes happening for PipeWire's session manager! With the upcoming 0.5 release, WirePlumber's configuration system will be moving to a JSON syntax to define settings, bringing a more unified configuration approach across the PipeWire ecosystem.

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

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. Here's how!

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

After fighting with the divide between implicit and explicit synchronization with Vulkan on Linux for over seven years, we may finally have some closure: a new kernel API landing in 5.19 will increase performance and reduce latency for Vulkan applications as well as improve consistency between drivers.

The open source Panfrost driver for Mali GPUs now supports the new Valhall architecture with fully-conformant OpenGL ES 3.1 on Mali-G57, a Valhall GPU. The final Mesa patches are landing today, and the required kernel patches are queued for merge upstream. Mali-G57 features in new MediaTek Chromebooks with the MT8192 and MT8195 system-on-chips. With Mesa 22.2 and an appropriate kernel, accelerated graphics will work out of the box on Linux on these laptops.

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.

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.

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

The PipeWire project has made major strides over the past few years, bringing shiny new features, and paving the way for new possibilities in the Linux multimedia scene. With 2021 seeing significant progress made on all fronts, let's take a moment to look back at what was accomplished, and what lies ahead for 2022.

Valve's new Steam Deck comes with a new release of SteamOS, a specialized Linux distribution for gaming devices, which Valve and Collabora have been working on together for several years. Based on Arch Linux, a rolling-release distribution which includes the latest Mesa release for open-source accelerated graphics support, SteamOS 3 also comes with a brand new A/B design for seamless system updates.

Released earlier this month, GStreamer 1.20 is the fruitful result of 17 months of hard work from the entire community. Over 250 developers contributed to make this release happen, and once again, Collabora had more contributors than any other organization. Our team's work focused on two areas in which we believe GStreamer shines the brightest: embedded systems, and network streaming, in particular WebRTC. Here's a recap of where Collabora made its mark.

Over the past 18 months, Collabora has been on a roller-coaster ride developing futex2, a new set of system calls. As part of this prolonged effort, the futex_waitv() syscall has now successfully landed in Linux 5.16. A followup of the initial futex syscall, this new interface aims to overcome long term issues that have been limiting the way applications use the Linux kernel. But what exactly is futex? This series of posts will help answer that and other questions around this tricky function.

Until now, no Valhall devices (Mali-G57, Mali-G78) ran mainline Linux - whilst this made driver development obviously difficult, there’s no better time to write drivers than before the devices even get into the hands of end users. Here's a tale from Alyssa Rosenzweig, on how she wrote an open source GPU driver – without the hardware.

Working on Wayland and Weston color management and HDR support has been full of learning new concepts and terms. Many of them crucial for understanding how color works, and what the values in a pixel actually mean. With color knowledge being surprisingly scarce, Pekka Paalanen has written "A Pixel's Color", an introduction to people who are already familiar with computer graphics in general, images in memory, and maybe window systems, but never really thought what the values in a pixel actually mean or what they are doing wrong with them.

Just over a year ago, Collabora announced our effort to implement a Wayland driver for Wine. Since then a lot of work has been done to improve the functionality and stability of the driver, and to provide a cleaner and more upstreamable patchset. This work continues as we expand our testing and receive valuable feedback from the community. Here's the latest, along with a new demo showcasing accelerated WebGL rendering in Chrome, GOG GALAXY 2.0 & more.

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

Running graphics applications on a virtual machine can be annoying as they are generally greedy of computing resources, and that can slow you down or give you a bad experience in terms of graphics performance. Being able to accelerate all this by offloading the workload to the hardware can be a great deal. The VirtIO-GPU virtual GPU device comes into play here, allowing a Guest OS to send graphics commands to it through OpenGL or Vulkan. While we are already there with OpenGL, we can not say the same for Vulkan. Well, until now.