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Kernel 5.18: Milestones for the road ahead

Dmitry Osipenko avatar

Dmitry Osipenko
June 02, 2022

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Released by Linus Torvalds on May 22 after a busy two-month development cycle, Linux kernel 5.18 brings new features and lights up new hardware. As usual, for a general overview, please head to LWN.net to read more about the merge window for 5.18 (part 1 & part 2). And now, without further ado, let's take a look at the contributions made by our engineering team!

Graphics

A couple of months ago, Alyssa Rosenzweig wrote a blog post about how the driver for the new generation of Arm Mali GPUs codenamed "Valhall" was made. In that post, Alyssa indicated that one of the obstacles to enabling Valhall GPU on MediaTek 8192 SoC was the Accelerator Coherence Port (ACP), which is enabled by default on some devices and needs to be disabled. The 5.18 kernel contains a patch from Alyssa that disables the offending ACP. There is still more work to be done on Valhall GPUs in the mainline kernel, but one of the milestones has been achieved already!

SoC support

AngeloGioacchino Del Regno continued his relentless work on MediaTek SoCs that are powering numerous gadgets like Android smartphones and Chromebooks. This time he fixed a UART driver bug, the suspension order of the display drivers (that caused trouble for MT8173-based laptops), and performed regular maintenance of the MediaTek drivers all over the kernel.

Ariel D'Alessandro enabled audio on iMX8MN BSH SystemMaster (SMM) S2 PRO board. This is a reference board supported by the Apertis project. Apertis is a versatile open source Linux distribution developed by Collabora, with servicing and support for targeting embedded/industrial applications.

Video CODECs

Benjamin Gaignard fixed the regression of the MediaTek video CODEC drivers; now encoder and decoder drivers can be registered in any order. Benjamin also made improvements to the V4L2 HEVC UAPI, aligning it with the ITU-T H.265/HEVC specification, preparing the UAPI for stabilization and further de-staging. The HEVC decoding support for the Rockchip RKVDEC driver is in the works at Collabora. Stay tuned for new kernel releases in the future!

Nicolas Dufresne fixed the decoding of baseline-profile H264 videos using a MediaTek VCODEC stateless video decoder V4L2 driver and GStreamer multimedia framework. The MediaTek driver didn't set the default scaling matrix as it should have, thus it did not conform to the V4L2 specification. Drivers supported by Collabora are regularly tested and media drivers are no exception. Collabora is a member of the KernelCI project, which is a community-driven open-source distributed test automation system for the mainline Linux kernel. At Collabora, we are working on enabling integration tests for the multimedia Linux drivers in the KernelCI to ensure consistent quality of the drivers.

Here, there, and everywhere

André Almeida and Shreeya Patel worked on upstreaming patches for the new version of the AMD SPI controller used by the Steam Deck, the handheld gaming computer developed by Valve. These patches are essential for the correct functionality of the audio stack of this console. The upstream support is not yet complete, but we are actively working on getting every bit of it in the common kernel. Soon enough, the community kernel will be able to explore the full potential of this gaming platform masterpiece.

Muhammad Usama Anjum fixed a long-standing bug in the kselftest build framework. He enabled the kselftests to be built in separate output directories in any combination. This made it possible to build kselftests out of tree.

Below is a full list of contributions made by Collaborans for the 5.18 release, as recorded in the git commit history:

Authored (88):

Adrian Ratiu (1):

Alyssa Rosenzweig (5):

André Almeida (4):

AngeloGioacchino Del Regno (27):

Ariel D'Alessandro (6):

Benjamin Gaignard (4):

Dafna Hirschfeld (5):

Frédéric Danis (1):

Guillaume Tucker (1):

Muhammad Usama Anjum (26):

Nicolas Dufresne (3):

Nícolas F. R. A. Prado (2):

Robert Beckett (1):

Sebastian Reichel (1):

Shreeya Patel (1):

Maintainer Committed (96):

Sebastian Reichel (96):

Signed-off-by (38):

Dafna Hirschfeld (3):

Detlev Casanova (9):

Robert Beckett (4):

Sebastian Reichel (22):

Reviewed-by (141):

Andrzej Pietrasiewicz (1):

AngeloGioacchino Del Regno (107):

Benjamin Gaignard (1):

Boris Brezillon (10):

Dafna Hirschfeld (7):

Daniel Stone (1):

Dmitry Osipenko (1):

Gabriel Krisman Bertazi (1):

Muhammad Usama Anjum (1):

Nicolas Dufresne (1):

Nícolas F. R. A. Prado (8):

Pekka Paalanen (1):

Shreeya Patel (1):

Acked-by (22):

AngeloGioacchino Del Regno (16):

Nicolas Dufresne (2):

Pekka Paalanen (2):

Sebastian Reichel (2):

Tested-by (14):

AngeloGioacchino Del Regno (4):

Dmitry Osipenko (1):

Gabriel Krisman Bertazi (1):

Nicolas Dufresne (8):

Reported-by (4):

Dmitry Osipenko (1):

Muhammad Usama Anjum (2):

Robert Beckett (1):

 

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