Collabora Brings Flicker-Free Multi GPU Boot and Rockchip H.264 Decoder to Linux 5.15

Collabora Linux 5.15

Open Source consulting firm Collabora have shared with 9to5Linux details about their contributions to the recently released Linux 5.15 kernel series.

Linux kernel 5.15 arrived on Halloween with many great new features, such as a brand new NTFS file system implementation contributed by Parangon Software to finally provide Linux users with fully functional NTFS support, realtime preemption locking, in-kernel SMB3 server, as well as DAMON (Data Access MONitor).

Linux 5.15 also brings fs-verity file integrity support to the Btrfs file system, scheduling support for asymmetric ARM systems, out-of-band data support for Unix-domain sockets, support for the year 2038 to the XFS file systems, support for Nintendo Wii consoles, and many other goodies.

On top of all that, Linux 5.15 is an LTS (Long-Term Support) kernel branch, which will be supported for at least a couple of years. As usual, Collabora have made some important contributions themselves to the Linux 5.15 LTS kernel series.

These include support for updating the firmware of a connected NXP K20 microcontroller through an EzPort interface, support for 1080p video decoding at 100 FPS in Rockchip SoCs (e.g. RK3326, PX30, and RK3328) via a new H.264 decoder, as well as flicker-free boot on multi-GPU systems with an integrated Intel GPU.

“There is more work to be done, but this avoids the flicker if your display is connected to the non Intel GPU – the typical case where a dual-GPU laptop is connected to an external monitor,” said Collabora software engineer Sebastian Reichel.

On top of that, Collabora’s engineers improved their Panfrost graphics driver by implementing support for submitting a second job to the hardware during the execution of the first job and fixing some incorrect locking code causing undefined behaviour, fixed a buffer overflow in the U2F Zero HID device driver, and updated documentation.

In numbers, Collabora’s Linux kernel developers authored 50 patches, committed 53 patches, signed off 26 patches, added 26 patches on behalf of others, reviewed 23 patches, acked 9 patches, tested 3 patches, and reported 1 patch. For more details on Collabora’s contributions to Linux kernel 5.15, check out their blog post.

Image credits: Collabora

Last updated 2 years ago

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