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With the release of the Linux 5.6, Collabora has outlined their contributions to the new kernel series and the various projects they’ve been involved in.
The development cycle of Linux kernel 5.6 has not been affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, which has changed the way we live and work. The final release arrived on schedule at the end of March and was ready for mass adoption a couple of days later.
Collabora is well known for their great contributions to the Linux kernel, and this cycle was no different, despite the coronavirus outbreak. In fact, I think they made more contributions than in the previous releases, and that’s probably because most of its developers work remotely for years.
“Long before video conferencing became the new normal, kernel developers were collaborating remotely, using tools like IRC and mailing lists to successfully work together. It comes to no surprise, then, that despite the challenges presented by COVID-19, kernel development has continued,” said Collabora’s Helen Koike.
Back to Collabora’s contributions to Linux kernel 5.6, the team was very active contributing with upstreaming Rockchip’s graphics drivers to improve the Image Signal Processing Unit for RK3399 SoCs, which are used in Pinebook Pro laptops, Scarlet Chromebooks, and RockPi boards.
They also contributed to the libcamera project by updating support for the rkisp1 driver, added color conversion support to the Hantro VPU video driver, added support for bus format negotiation in DRM bridges, and improved DRM authentication handling.
In their continued pursuit of brining the mainline kernel to Chromebooks, Collabora also improved upstream support for the Cros EC (Embedded Controller) component in Chromebook devices.
Also worth mentioning are the several improvements they added to iSCSI support, the implementation of a new timeout mechanism in Device Mapper multipath feature, as well as the conversion of Device Tree bindings from txt format to YAML schemas.
Of course, Collabora’s development team was also involved in improving several other parts of the Linux kernel, including the i3c, media, power supply and many others. For a full list of all of their contributions to the Linux 5.6 kernel, check out this blog post.
Image: Collabora
Last updated 4 years ago
