Ricardo Cañuelo Navarro
December 14, 2020
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Linux Kernel 5.10 has just been released, just as 2020 is about to reach its end. As Linus himself commented, this was a bigger release than expected. This underlines the enormous driving force that open software has: even amidst the chaos and the uncertainty that this year brought, Linux Kernel development keeps moving forward at a constant and relentless pace, which is reassuring and a way of keeping us grounded and mindful that the world keeps spinning.
This version will be the next LTS release, you can find an overview of the significant changes it contains at LWN: part 1 and part 2.
As with every release, Collabora has contributed a good number of patches and remains active developing, maintaining, documenting and testing many parts of the kernel. Here are some of our contributions.
Collabora has a long history of contributions to Rockchip's media drivers, among them is the continuing support to the RK3399 ISP. Since it was upstreamed in v5.6 as a staging driver we have worked intensively on solving bugs and other issues to make it more capable and stable. As a result it will finally be moved out of staging in v5.11.
Dafna Hirschfeld has been working on some bug fixes and improvements for the driver 1 2 3.
The Linux uAPI is the API that the Linux kernel exposes to userspace. The V4L2 uAPI, for example, contains all the definitions that a userspace program could need in order to communicate with the V4L2 framework and perform any operation on a device such as a video capture card or a codec.
v5.10 has seen some additional work by Ezequiel García on the ongoing cleanup of the V4L2 H.264 staging uAPI with the goal of stabilizing it and promoting it as a first class public uAPI.
The H.264 stateless codec is probably the most commonly used video codec and the API is now considered stable, which is a great step forward. The pull request for destaging the uAPI was sent on November and it will by finally destaged in the next kernel release (v5.11).
Collabora continues working steadily on Panfrost, the free and open source driver for Mali Midgard and Bifrost GPUs. Development has hit another milestone with Linux 5.10, as it now supports Bifrost GPUs officially.
Thanks to Alyssa Rosenzweig, Tomeu Vizoso, Rohan Garg, Boris Brezillon and Italo Nicola for making it possible.
Cedrus is an open source driver for the Video Engine hardware encoder/decoder in Allwinner sunxi SoCs, used in devices such as the PinePhone.
GStreamer caused a reproductible kernel oops when used with Cedrus, and Nicolas Dufresne fixed it by setting the CAPTURE resolution automatically based on the OUTPUT resolution preventing userspace from selecting a CAPTURE resolution that is too small.
Direct I/O is a way of working with disk-backed data bypassing the page cache and has been traditionally used in some applications that manage their own caches, such as database management systems. This kernel release includes a patch series by Gabriel Krisman Bertazi to consolidate the error handling and solve disparities between filesystems. It also adds a small optimization to avoid unnecessary page writebacks when the user reads past the end of file.
Enric Balletbò has updated the PS8640 DSI to eDP bridge driver and fixed an error scenario by reworking the power handling code. He also continued working of converting the Mediatek DRM drivers to the drm_bridge API.
The 'Magic SysRq key'is a key combination that allows a user to send a predefined command to the kernel at any time and it's normally used for debugging purposes. The key combination includes one 'command' key, which specifies the command to send to the kernel. Andrzej Pietrasiewicz has submitted a patch that allows capital letters as commands (thus extending the command table) and is already in v5.10.
Patches do not always need to fix functional problems in order to be useful, sometimes simply getting rid of unnecessary noise in the system log can make a positive impact in systems that rely on such logs, for example Kernel CI.
Guillaume Tucker submitted a patch series that eliminates a kernel error message appearing in Exynos SoCs with the goal of making the Kernel CI results clearer and new errors more easily detected.
Users always expect that everything keeps working no matter what happens and graphic devices are no exception. The machine should stay stable even if the user unplugs one of these devices, which requires proper handling and support throughout the whole graphics stack.
Following previous comments and discussions in IRC, Pekka Paalanen documented the initial design plan about what hot-unplugging a DRM device should look like for userspace. This is now part of the kernel documentation, which will help set clear guidelines for a future implementation.
Collabora keeps growing and improving the existing Device Tree definitions as well as their bindings. This results in an easier and better documented way of describing hardware and a more standardized way of retrieving this information in the drivers.
In this release, Ricardo Cañuelo added fixes to the Chromebook EC bindings and Sebastial Reichel worked on documentation additions and new features for the gpio-based battery chargers bindings and updated to the OMAPs and Exynos device trees.
As in every kernel release, the Collabora team has done a lot of work testing and reviewing kernel code for v5.10. Many Collabora engineers are also subsystem maintainers, taking care of the evolution of Panfrost, Chromebook drivers and power supply drivers among other things.
Thanks to all of them for their work and for keeping pushing Open Source forward.
Andrzej Pietrasiewicz (1):
André Almeida (1):
Boris Brezillon (7):
Dafna Hirschfeld (48):
Enric Balletbo i Serra (11):
Ezequiel Garcia (20):
Gabriel Krisman Bertazi (8):
Guillaume Tucker (3):
Helen Koike (2):
Nicolas Dufresne (1):
Pekka Paalanen (1):
Ricardo Cañuelo (3):
Sebastian Reichel (9):
Tomeu Vizoso (2):
Boris Brezillon (4):
Enric Balletbo i Serra (17):
Sebastian Reichel (77):
Ezequiel Garcia (2):
Sebastian Reichel (31):
Alex Dewar (1):
Artur Rojek (2):
Colin Ian King (3):
Dan Murphy (4):
David Heidelberg (1):
Dmitry Osipenko (1):
Harley A.W. Lorenzo (1):
Ikjoon Jang (1):
Iskren Chernev (2):
Jernej Skrabec (1):
Jonathan Bakker (3):
Jonghwa Lee (3):
Krzysztof Kozlowski (1):
Lars Povlsen (2):
Michał Mirosław (2):
Philipp Zabel (1):
Subbaraman Narayanamurthy (1):
Wang Qing (2):
Xiongfeng Wang (1):
Alyssa Rosenzweig (14):
Boris Brezillon (7):
Emil Velikov (5):
Enric Balletbo i Serra (5):
Ezequiel Garcia (3):
Gabriel Krisman Bertazi (2):
Nicolas Dufresne (4):
Sebastian Reichel (1):
Tomeu Vizoso (1):
Alyssa Rosenzweig (1):
Dafna Hirschfeld (2):
Helen Koike (37):
Adrian Ratiu (1):
Christopher Obbard (1):
Enric Balletbo i Serra (2):
Guillaume Tucker (1):
Adrian Ratiu (1):
Dafna Hirschfeld (1):
Ezequiel Garcia (4):
Guillaume Tucker (1):
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