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It might be smaller then the last few kernels, but with well above 10,000 non-merge changes, the latest Linux kernel release still packs a punch. Released on October 31, kernel 5.15 brings lots of exciting new features. Here's a look at contributions made by Collaborans for this release.

Today marks a very exciting day as Fedora 35 has now been released, and with it comes WirePlumber as the default session manager for PipeWire! Under development by Collabora since 2019, WirePlumber has now entered the linux desktop space.

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.

Put simply, libcamera is a library that handles acquiring, configuring and capturing frames from a camera. Camera pipelines have become increasingly complex, and traditionally this complexity has been exposed by the kernel through the V4L2 APIs, for applications to deal with directly. libcamera is the layer in-between V4L2 and the application so that camera handling can become simple. Here's a look at recent work to improve testing in libcamera and automating it through KernelCI.

Over the past few years, the LLVM toolchain has seen increasing development and adoption alongside the older, more established GNU toolchain. The emergence of this new two major toolchain world is bringing challenges and questions for projects that need to support both, in particular the GNU C library (glibc), which only supports GCC.

Is it worth it to fix glibc (and other projects which support only GCC) to build with LLVM? Is it better to just replace them with alternatives already supporting LLVM? Is it best to use both GCC and LLVM, each for their respective supported projects?

This summer, xrdesktop, the Open Source project bringing the Linux desktop to VR on Valve's SteamVR & Monado, took part for the first time in Google Summer of Code (GSoC). Here's a recap of what accomplished, which saw both students, Remco and Manas, successfully complete their projects and submit merge requests, implementing all new features to xrdesktop.

After a month of reverse-engineering the Arm Mali G78, Collabora has released documentation on the Valhall instruction set, as well as a Valhall assembler and disassembler to be used as a reverse-engineering aid.

Earlier this month, Collabora took part in the very first KernelCI hackfest, initiated as a joint effort with the Google Chrome OS team. Here's a look at what was accomplished, including new tests added, coverage extended, and more.

In our previous post, we presented a project backed by INVEST-AI which introduces a multi-stage neural network-based solution. Now let's dive into the machine learning details of our innovative, open source hand-tracking pipeline.

Earlier this month, the very first KernelCI sprint or "hackfest" was held virtually, with more than a dozen engineers & developers from different communities in attendance. Initiated as a joint effort by the Google Chrome OS team and Collabora, the sprint's main objective was to extend KernelCI's coverage, including adding new tests such as the ability to detect regressions on the Linux kernel that can directly affect cameras.

It's been a busy 18 months in the world of Zink (OpenGL-On-Vulkan) since the last update. Here's a review of where things stand, including upstream development, OpenGL 4.6 & GLES 3.1 support & more.

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, G76) GPUs. OpenGL ES 3.1 adds a number of features on top of OpenGL ES 3.0, notably including compute shaders. While Panfrost has had limited support for compute shaders on Midgard for use in TensorFlow Lite, the latest work extends the support to more GPUs and adds complementary features required by the OpenGL ES 3.1 specification, like indirect draws and no-attachment framebuffers.

Simplifying AGL's existing Wayland-based graphical stack and avoiding the use of modules that aren't maintained upstream has lead to the creation of a new compositor based on libweston, bringing more reliable and fine-grained system control.

Two months ago, Collabora announced a first proposal for a Wayland driver for Wine. Here's an update on this effort, with support for new features including copy/paste, drag-and-drop and for changing the display mode!

After several months of work, Collabor has announced a first proposal for a Wayland driver for Wine. At this point the proposal is in the form of an RFC (Request For Comment), in order to explore how to best move forward with the upstreaming and further development of the driver. The Wayland driver currently supports GDI and OpenGL/DirectX applications, with resize and window state handling (except minimizing), mouse and QWERTY keyboard input, and a single monitor, giving us access to a large pool of apps and allowing some Windows games natively under Wayland.

Linux kernel 5.10 is out, and with it comes a number of exciting updates, including key improvements to Rockchip's RK3399 ISP, H.264 uAPI cleanup & destaging, Panfrost support for Arm Mali Bifrost GPUs & more!

Wayland is still lacking proper consideration for color management & support for high dynamic range (HDR) imagery. However, a group of devs has begun an effort to fix this situation. This is their story.

Part 2 of this blog series on Linux kernel initcalls. Read on as we go deeper into implementation, with a look at the colorful __device_initcall() macro, the rootfs initcall, and how modules can be executed.

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.

How the Linux graphics stack is used within ChromeOS, and the work done to improve software rendering (while simultaneously improving the GPU rendering by reducing the boilerplate needed in applications).