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Linux Kernel 5.3

Boris Brezillon avatar

Boris Brezillon
September 19, 2019

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Linux 5.3 was released over the weekend, which means it's time for our usual "where does Collabora stand in this picture?" tour.

As has been the case for several years now, Collabora keeps being an active contributor to the Linux project, with 77 commits authored by Collaborans merged in this release.

On the media subsystem front, André Almeida and Helen Koike kept working on the Virtual Media Controller (VIMC) driver. The most notable change in this release being the addition of a VIMC entry to the media subsystem doc, centralizing all information about this virtual driver.

Ezequiel Garcia worked on the CODA VPU driver. The driver previously supported CODA 960, along with other variants, but was broken for CODA 980 variants. Ezequiel fixed several issues uncovered by testing on CODA 980. However, more work is still needed for the driver to work out-of-the-box on CODA 980.

Ezequiel Garcia and Boris Brezillon lead our work on the Hantro VPU driver. An important milestone has been reached on this project: addition of MPEG2 decoding. One might think that adding MPEG-2 decoding support is not in itself a particularly interesting feature (who uses MPEG2 these days?!), but, by doing that we introduced the common building blocks that will allow us to support other codecs like H.264 or VP8.

One important thing to note here, while kernel support for MPEG-2 decoding has been merged, we currently have no userspace library officially supporting the stateless codec APIs, which is anyway marked unstable and subject to incompatible changes.

On the DRM front, Boris Brezillon worked on exposing performance counters available on Mali Midgard GPUs. Our primary goal was to allow profiling the Panfrost mesa driver, but those performance counters might also be useful to profile OpenGL apps at some point.

To achieve that we'll have to find some standard way for exposing GPU counters (those counters are currently exposed through a driver-specific ioctl), and then plug this GPU counter infrastructure to existing profiling tools.

Tomeu Vizoso added the Panfrost driver to the default ARMv7 and ARM64 defconfigs, so from now on Panfrost will be built by default for ARM. That is a great achievement for Open Source GPU drivers.

Sebastian Reichel fixed support for self-refreshing DSI panels on OMAP towards the goal of getting Motorola Droid 4 properly running with mainline. It's worth mentioning that this is the result of multiple years of work.

On the cros_ec front, Enric Balletbo i Serra kept improving support for various chrome platforms.

And finally, on the filesystem front, Gabriel Krisman Bertazi optimized ext4 case-insensitive lookups. In case you haven't been following Gabriel's work on case-insensitive lookup, here is the LWN article.

We are very proud of these contributions of course, but being part of an open source community is not only about contributing changes. Reviewing, testing and merging patches (for those who maintain a subsystem) is at least as important, some people consider it even more important! With a total of 68 Reviewed-by, 35 Acked-by, 5 Tested-by and 50 non-authored Signed-off-by we can say that Collabora is fully dedicated to this often less rewarding task.

That's all for this release, we hope you enjoyed the tour and are looking forward to seeing you back in approximately 2 months, for Linux 5.4. In the meantine, if you want detailed stats, you can check out this LWN article.

Here is the complete list of Collabora contributions:

Andrzej Pietrasiewicz (1):

André Almeida (9):

Boris Brezillon (17):

Emil Velikov (3):

Enric Balletbo i Serra (11):

Ezequiel Garcia (20):

Fabien Lahoudere (1):

Gabriel Krisman Bertazi (2):

Helen Koike (3):

Robert Foss (1):

Sebastian Reichel (5):

Tomeu Vizoso (2):

Reviewed-by:

Boris Brezillon (14):

Daniel Stone (1):

Emil Velikov (14):

Enric Balletbo i Serra (4):

Ezequiel Garcia (1):

Fabien Lahoudere (30):

Gustavo Padovan (1):

Pekka Paalanen (2):

Tomeu Vizoso (1):

Acked-by:

Boris Brezillon (1):

Emil Velikov (1):

Enric Balletbo i Serra (31):

Helen Koike (1):

Sebastian Reichel (1):

Signed-off-by:

Boris Brezillon (19):

Enric Balletbo i Serra (21):

Fabien Lahoudere (1):

Sebastian Reichel (19):

Tested-by:

Boris Brezillon (1):

Enric Balletbo i Serra (3):

Ezequiel Garcia (1):

Suggested-by:

Boris Brezillon (2):

Emil Velikov (2):

Ezequiel Garcia (2):

Helen Koike (3):

 

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