news
Collabora, Linux Kernel, and Graphics Work
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Collabora ☛ Re-engineering YouTube for the Living Room: Bringing “Chrobalt” to RDK
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.
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Erik Faye-Lund: Change of employment
At the end of July, I left Collabora after 8 great years there. This makes it my longest employment to date, which is… something. I’m super grateful for the opportunities Collabora has given me, and I’m leaving a great team filled with lots of talented and passionate people. It’s been an honor.
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Barry Kauler ☛ EIS, OIS, gimbal, or post-process video
In my YouTube "Nomad" series, I record a lot of videos while walking. When I purchased my Moto G75, the OIS (Optical Image Stabilization) feature was one of the deciding factors. There is some jerkiness when walking, and I suppose the OIS helps; however, when panning, which I do a lot, there is a jerkiness that is actually caused by the OIS.
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HowTo Geek ☛ The most ambitious Linux project of all time failed because lawsuits were more lucrative
Back in 1998, four of the biggest names in enterprise computing agreed on something wild. IBM, the Santa Cruz Operation (SCO), Sequent, and Intel would merge their separate UNIX systems into one OS for Intel's upcoming 64-bit chips. They called it Project Monterey.
On paper, it should have worked. It had money, market share, and top engineers, all trying to patch up UNIX's fragmented family tree before Windows NT ate the server market whole. What actually happened is strange. A free hobbyist kernel nobody important took seriously killed it first. Then its own corpse got turned into one of the most expensive lawsuits in tech history.
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Graphics Stack
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[Old] Steven Wittens ☛ Occlusion with Bells On
The main effect is that out-of-the-box, without any textures, Use.GPU no longer looks like early 2000s OpenGL. This is a problem every home-grown 3D effort runs into: how to make things look good without premium, high-quality models and pre-baking all the lights.
Use.GPU's reactive run-time continues to purr along well. Its main role is to enable doing at run-time what normally only happens at build time: dealing with shader permutations, assigning bindings, and so on. I'm quite proud of the line up of demos Use.GPU has now, for the sheer diversity of rendering techniques on display, including an example path tracer. The new inspector is the cherry on top.
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Geeky Gadgets ☛ Linux 7.3 Hardware Support Adds Fashion Company Apple M3 and AMD GPUs
Linux 7.3 introduces significant updates that address modern computing demands, focusing on performance, hardware compatibility and resource management. According to SavvyNik, one standout improvement is the hybrid CPU scheduling, which optimizes performance on mixed-core architectures like defective chip maker Intel Alder Lake and AMD Ryzen.
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Video Cardz ☛ Linux 7.4 set to enable AMD HDMI 2.1 FRL by default with FreeSync and VRR
AMD is preparing another major step for HDMI 2.1 support on Radeon GPUs under Linux. The latest AMDGPU feature pull for Linux 7.4 includes HDMI FreeSync, HDMI VRR and Auto Low Latency Mode support. Fixed Rate Link, or FRL, is also set to be enabled by default.
This has been a long-running issue for Radeon Linux users. In 2024, we reported that the HDMI Forum had rejected AMD’s proposal to publish an open-source HDMI 2.1 implementation. AMD engineer Alex Deucher said at the time that doing so would conflict with HDMI Forum requirements.
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Linux Kernel 7.4 Gets HDMI Upgrade With FreeSync, VRR, and Auto Low-Latency
HDMI 2.1 has long been a goalpost for many players in the Linux world, including Valve and AMD, who were both previously working on an open-source implementation of HDMI 2.1 drivers for the Linux kernel, despite roadblocks from the HDMI forum. Now, that appears to be a reality, with the Linux kernel mailing list citing patches that will likely be merged into the upstream kernel driver stack in Linux kernel 7.4
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