Sebastian Reichel
July 18, 2024
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Continuing the usual pattern a new kernel has been released 9 weeks after the previous one. The 6.10 kernel brings a couple of interesting core changes. First off, it introduces a new subsystem for memory allocation profiling, allowing a much better understanding of dynamically allocated kernel memory. Secondly, with some updates to BH workqueues, it should now be possible to convert tasklets to workqueues, a plan which was documented over 15 years ago. To get a general overview of all 6.10 changes, LWN's articles are a good source: part 1 and part 2.
As you might have guessed, Collabora has continued to actively contribute to the kernel, so let's have a look.
Apart from the well-known CPU cores, ARM also offers a GPU design called Mali. Collabora has long been active in the development of Panfrost, the open source driver taking care of the Bifrost and the first Valhall generations of ARM GPU. In v6.10 Adrián Larumbe improved profiling support for this driver. In addition to Panfrost, Boris Brezillon landed a series adding a new driver named Panthor, which will handle the more recent Valhall generation of GPUs. The Mesa driver for that has landed in the 24.1 release, the details of which can be found in this previous blog post. This driver will be used by recent ARM SoCs released, by Rockchip or MediaTek for example.
On top of reviewing and merging patches as a maintainer of the MediaTek SoCs, Angelo Gioacchino Del Regno also landed a nice cleanup series for sound card devices for these platforms. For the MT8188 SoC, he also prepared the groundwork to upstream the Media Data Path 3 (MDP3) IP (a block offering hardware offload for color space conversion) and the addition of MDP3-specific Mute-X tables for the Video Processing Pipe System (VPPSYS) (ARM FBC (AFBC) decompression, Hybrid FBC (HFBC) decompression, as well as other video frame manipulations). Additionally, he improved support for the new MT8395 generation of SoCs, also known as Genio 1200, by exposing its machine information to sysfs.
Our work has continued on the RK3588. With the Panthor driver having been merged, Sebastian Reichel made sure all the bits required to enable it for RK3588 also landed, bringing us accelerated graphics support. Unfortunately, the platform does not yet have any display output support to fully enjoy this new feature. On that front, Detlev Casanova landed a fix for YUV support in Rockchip's video output code.
Partly related, Sebastian Reichel landed the RK3588 USB-C PHY driver, which allowed enabling the missing USB3 controllers. The PHY also supports DisplayPort Alt-Mode, but that part is not yet working because of the missing controller support. While this finally allows supporting all of RK3588's USB ports with an upstream kernel, the Rock 5B's USB-C port has not yet been enabled. The reason for that is complex and will be covered by a dedicated blog post in the future.
Last but not least, Shreeya Patel landed the first required bits for the HDMI receiver's functionality—the missing reset lines. The driver itself is still being reviewed and reworked, though.
On the video codecs side, Sebastian Fricke has fixed documentation errors and continued to tidy up the MediaTek video decoder driver. After a large clean-up in the V4L2 core in the previous release, Benjamin Gaignard's quest to create an IOCTL to remove buffers from a V4L2 queue has been merged, allowing new use cases in V4L2 like VP9 dynamic resolution change and memory usage optimizations. The first driver to make use of this evolution is VeriSilicon's Hantro decoder.
On the testing side Laura Nao documented how the Rust kselftest code can be used. She also fixed a regression found by Kernel CI demonstrating how useful it can be.
Muhammad Usama Anjum updated multiple self-tests to conform with the TAP (test anything protocol) format output, enabling the results to be easily parsed by CI tools. He also introduced a new helper to fail with an error message including printing of the error number.
Nícolas F. R. A. Prado went through the DSI drivers, silencing unnecessary probe defer errors by using the dev_err_probe() helper. This will instead capture the reason for the failure and log it only at the end of the boot if the dependencies can't be resolved. In addition to that, he fixed some of the self-test shell scripts to make them POSIX compliant for users not using bash.
Adrián Larumbe:
Andrzej Pietrasiewicz:
AngeloGioacchino Del Regno:
Antonino Maniscalco:
Arnaud Ferraris:
Benjamin Gaignard:
Boris Brezillon:
Detlev Casanova:
Eugen Hristev:
Laura Nao:
Muhammad Usama Anjum:
Nícolas F. R. A. Prado:
Sebastian Fricke:
Sebastian Reichel:
Shreeya Patel:
Vignesh Raman:
AngeloGioacchino Del Regno:
Boris Brezillon:
Sebastian Reichel:
Andrzej Pietrasiewicz:
AngeloGioacchino Del Regno:
Nícolas F. R. A. Prado:
Sebastian Fricke:
Andrzej Pietrasiewicz:
AngeloGioacchino Del Regno:
AngeloGioacchino Del Regno:
Boris Brezillon:
Christopher Obbard:
David Heidelberg:
Dmitry Osipenko:
Faith Ekstrand:
Julien Massot:
Muhammad Usama Anjum:
Sebastian Reichel:
Boris Brezillon:
Daniel Stone:
Helen Koike:
Muhammad Usama Anjum:
Pekka Paalanen:
Sebastian Reichel:
Christopher Obbard:
Dmitry Osipenko:
Eric Smith:
Julien Massot:
Laura Nao:
Muhammad Usama Anjum:
Nícolas F. R. A. Prado:
Adrián Larumbe:
Eric Smith:
Laura Nao:
Muhammad Usama Anjum:
Nícolas F. R. A. Prado:
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