Blog posts are like buses sometimes...

I've spent time over the last month enabling Blackwell support on NVK, the Mesa vulkan driver for NVIDIA GPUs. Faith from Collabora, the NVK maintainer has cleaned up and merged all the major pieces of this work and landed them into mesa this week. Mesa 25.2 should ship with a functioning NVK on blackwell. The code currently in mesa main passes all tests in the Vulkan CTS.

Quick summary of the major fun points:

Ben @ NVIDIA had done the initial kernel bringup in to r570 firmware in the nouveau driver. I worked with Ben on solidifying that work and ironing out a bunch of memory leaks and regressions that snuck in.

Once the kernel was stable, there were a number of differences between Ada and Blackwell that needed to be resolved. Thanks to Faith, Mel and Mohamed for their help, and NVIDIA for providing headers and other info.

I did most of the work on a GB203 laptop and a desktop 5080.

1. Instruction encoding: a bunch of instructions changed how they were encoded. Mel helped sort out most of those early on.

2. Compute/QMD: the QMD which is used to launch compute shaders, has a new encoding. NVIDIA released the official QMD headers which made this easier in the end.

3. Texture headers: texture headers were encoded different from Hopper on, so we had to use new NVIDIA headers to encode those properly

4. Depth/Stencil: NVIDIA added support for separate d/s planes and this also has some knock on effects on surface layouts. 

5. Surface layout changes. NVIDIA attaches a memory kind to memory allocations, due to changes in Blackwell, they now use a generic kind for all allocations. You now longer know the internal bpp dependent layout of the surfaces. This means changes to the dma-copy engine to provide that info. This means we have some modifier changes to cook with NVIDIA over the next few weeks at least for 8/16 bpp surfaces. Mohamed helped get this work and host image copy support done.

6. One thing we haven't merged is bound texture support. Currently blackwell is using bindless textures which might be a little slower. Due to changes in the texture instruction encoding, you have to load texture handles to intermediate uniform registers before using them as bound handles. This causes a lot of fun with flow control and when you can spill uniform registers. I've written a few efforts at using bound textures, so we understand how to use them, just have some compiler issues to maybe get it across the line.

7. Proper instruction scheduling isn't landed yet. I have a spreadsheet with all the figures, and I started typing, so will try and get that into an MR before I take some holidays. 

 I should have mentioned this here a week ago. The Vulkan AV1 encode extension has been out for a while, and I'd done the initial work on enabling it with radv on AMD GPUs. I then left it in a branch, which Benjamin from AMD picked up and fixed a bunch of bugs, and then we both got distracted. I realised when doing VP9 that it hasn't landed, so did a bit of cleanup. Then David from AMD picked it up and carried it over the last mile and it got merged last week.

So radv on supported hw now supports all vulkan decode/encode formats currently available.  

Timelines

It’s hot out. I know this because Big Triangle allowed me a peek through my three-sided window for good behavior, and all the pixels were red. Sure am glad I’m inside.

Today’s a new day in a new month, which means it’s time to talk about new GL stuff. I’m allowed to do that once in a while, even though GL stuff is never actually new. In this post we’re going to be looking at GL_NV_timeline_semaphore, an extension everyone has definitely heard of.

Mesa has supported GL_EXT_external_objects for a long while, and it’s no exaggeration to say that this is the reference implementation: there are no proprietary drivers of which I’m aware that can pass the super-strict piglit tests we’ve accumulated over the years. Yes, that includes Green Triangle. Also Red Triangle, but we knew that already–it’s in the name.

This MR adds support for importing and using Vulkan timeline semaphores into GL, which further improves interop-reliant workflows by eliminating binary semaphore requirements. Zink supports it anywhere that additionally supports VK_KHR_timeline_semaphore, which is to say that any platform capable of supporting the base external objects spec will also support this.

For testing, we get to have even more fun with the industry-standard ping-pong test originally contributed by @gfxstrand. This verifies that timeline operations function as expected on every side of the API divide.

Next up: more optimizations. How fast is too fast?

Debian uses LDAP for storing information about users, hosts and other objects. The wrapping around this is called userdir-ldap, or ud-ldap for short. It provides a mail gateway, web UI and a couple of schemas for different object types.

Back in late 2018 and early 2019, we (DSA) removed support for ISO5218 in userdir-ldap, and removed the corresponding data. This made some people upset, since they were using that information, as imprecise as it was, to infer people’s pronouns. ISO5218 has four values for sex, unknown, male, female and N/A. This might have been acceptable when the standard was new (in 1976), but it wasn’t acceptable any longer in 2018.

A couple of days ago, I finally got around to adding support to userdir-ldap to let people specify their pronouns. As it should be, it’s a free-form text field. (We don’t have localised fields in LDAP, so it probably makes sense for people to put the English version of their pronouns there, but the software does not try to control that.)

So far, it’s only exposed through the LDAP gateway, not in the web UI.

If you’re a Debian developer, you can set your pronouns using

echo "pronouns: he/him" | gpg --clearsign | mail changes@db.debian.org

I see that four people have already done so in the time I’ve taken to write this post.

Introduction #

The DRM GPU scheduler is a shared Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) Linux Kernel level component used by a number of GPU drivers for managing job submissions from multiple rendering contexts to the hardware. Some of the basic functions it can provide are dependency resolving, timeout detection, and most importantly for this article, scheduling algorithms whose essential purpose is picking the next queued unit of work to execute once there is capacity on the GPU.

Different kernel drivers use the scheduler in slightly different ways - some simply need the dependency resolving and timeout detection part, while the actual scheduling happens in the proprietary firmware, while others rely on the scheduler’s algorithms for choosing what to run next. The latter ones is what the work described here is suggesting to improve.

More details about the other functionality provided by the scheduler, including some low level implementation details, are available in the generated kernel documentation repository^[1].

Basic concepts and terminology #

Three DRM scheduler data structures (or objects) are relevant for this topic: the scheduler, scheduling entities and jobs.

First we have a scheduler itself, which usually corresponds with some hardware unit which can execute certain types of work. For example, the render engine can often be single hardware instance in a GPU and needs arbitration for multiple clients to be able to use it simultaneously.

Then there are scheduling entities, or in short entities, which broadly speaking correspond with userspace rendering contexts. Typically when an userspace client opens a render node, one such rendering context is created. Some drivers also allow userspace to create multiple contexts per open file.

Finally there are jobs which represent units of work submitted from userspace into the kernel. These are typically created as a result of userspace doing an ioctl(2) operation, which are specific to the driver in question.

Jobs are usually associated with entities and entities are then executed by schedulers. Each scheduler instance will have a list of runnable entities (entities with least one queued job) and when the GPU is available to execute something it will need to pick one of them.

Typically every userspace client will submit at least one such job per rendered frame and the desktop compositor may issue one or more to render the final screen image. Hence, on a busy graphical desktop, we can find dozens of active entities submitting multiple GPU jobs, sixty or more times per second.

The current scheduling algorithm #

In order to select the next entity to run, the scheduler defaults to the First In First Out (FIFO) mode of operation where selection criteria is the job submit time.

The FIFO algorithm in general has some well known disadvantages around the areas of fairness and latency, and also because selection criteria is based on job submit time, it couples the selection with the CPU scheduler, which is also not desirable because it creates an artifical coupling between different schedulers, different sets of tasks (CPU processes and GPU tasks), and different hardware blocks.

This is further amplified by the lack of guarantee that clients are submitting jobs with equal pacing (not all clients may be synchronised to the display refresh rate, or not all may be able to maintain it), the fact their per frame submissions may consist of unequal number of jobs, and last but not least the lack of preemption support. The latter is true both for the DRM scheduler itself, but also for many GPUs in their hardware capabilities.

Apart from uneven GPU time distribution, the end result of the FIFO algorithm picking the sub-optimal entity can be dropped frames and choppy rendering.

Round-robin backup algorithm #

Apart from the default FIFO scheduling algorithm, the scheduler also implements the round-robin (RR) strategy, which can be selected as an alternative at kernel boot time via a kernel argument. Round-robin, however, suffers from its own set of problems.

Whereas round-robin is typically considered a fair algorithm when used in systems with preemption support and ability to assign fixed execution quanta, in the context of GPU scheduling this fairness property does not hold. Here quanta are defined by userspace job submissions and, as mentioned before, the number of submitted jobs per rendered frame can also differ between different clients.

The final result can again be unfair distribution of GPU time and missed deadlines.

In fact, round-robin was the initial and only algorithm until FIFO was added to resolve some of these issue. More can be read in the relevant kernel commit. ^[2]

Priority starvation issues #

Another issue in the current scheduler design are the priority queues and the strict priority order execution.

Priority queues serve the purpose of implementing support for entity priority, which usually maps to userspace constructs such as VK_EXT_global_priority and similar. If we look at the wording for this specific Vulkan extension, it is described like this^[3]:

The driver implementation *will attempt* to skew hardware resource allocation in favour of the higher-priority task. Therefore, higher-priority work *may retain similar* latency and throughput characteristics even if the system is congested with lower priority work.

As emphasised, the wording is giving implementations leeway to not be entirely strict, while the current scheduler implementation only executes lower priorities when the higher priority queues are all empty. This over strictness can lead to complete starvation of the lower priorities.

Fair(er) algorithm #

To solve both the issue of the weak scheduling algorithm and the issue of priority starvation we tried an algorithm inspired by the Linux kernel’s original Completely Fair Scheduler (CFS)^[4].

With this algorithm the next entity to run will be the one with least virtual GPU time spent so far, where virtual GPU time is calculated from the the real GPU time scaled by a factor based on the entity priority.

Since the scheduler already manages a rbtree^[5] of entities, sorted by the job submit timestamp, we were able to simply replace that timestamp with the calculated virtual GPU time.

When an entity has nothing more to run it gets removed from the tree and we store the delta between its virtual GPU time and the top of the queue. And when the entity re-enters the tree with a fresh submission, this delta is used to give it a new relative position considering the current head of the queue.

Because the scheduler does not currently track GPU time spent per entity this is something that we needed to add to make this possible. It however did not pose a significant challenge, apart having a slight weakness with the up to date utilisation potentially lagging slightly behind the actual numbers due some DRM scheduler internal design choices. But that is a different and wider topic which is out of the intended scope for this write-up.

The virtual GPU time selection criteria largely decouples the scheduling decisions from job submission times, to an extent from submission patterns too, and allows for more fair GPU time distribution. With a caveat that it is still not entirely fair because, as mentioned before, neither the DRM scheduler nor many GPUs support preemption, which would be required for more fairness.

Solving the priority starvation #

Because priority is now consolidated into a single entity selection criteria we were also able to remove the per priority queues and eliminate priority based starvation. All entities are now in a single run queue, sorted by the virtual GPU time, and the relative distribution of GPU time between entities of different priorities is controlled by the scaling factor which converts the real GPU time into virtual GPU time.

Code base simplification #

Another benefit of being able to remove per priority run queues is a code base simplification. Going further than that, if we are able to establish that the fair scheduling algorithm has no regressions compared to FIFO and RR, we can also remove those two which further consolidates the scheduler. So far no regressions have indeed been identified.

Real world examples #

As an first example we set up three demanding graphical clients, one of which was set to run with low priority (VK_QUEUE_GLOBAL_PRIORITY_LOW_EXT).

One client is the Unigine Heaven benchmark^[6] which is simulating a game, while the other two are two instances of the deferredmultisampling Vulkan demo from Sascha Willems^[7], modified to support running with the user specified global priority. Those two are simulating very heavy GPU load running simultaneouosly with the game.

All tests are run on a Valve Steam Deck OLED with an AMD integrated GPU.

First we try the current FIFO based scheduler and we monitor the GPU utilisation using the gputop^[8] tool. We can observe two things:

1. That the distribution of GPU time between the normal priority clients is not equal.
2. That the low priority client is not getting any GPU time.

Switching to the CFS inspired (fair) scheduler the situation changes drastically:

1. GPU time distribution between normal priority clients is much closer together.
2. Low priority client is not starved, but receiving a small share of the GPU.

Note that the absolute numbers are not static but represent a trend.

This proves that the new algorithm can make the low priority useful for running heavy GPU tasks in the background, similar to what can be done on the CPU side of things using the nice(1) process priorities.

Synthetic tests #

Apart from experimenting with real world workloads, another functionality we implemented in the scope of this work is a collection of simulated workloads implemented as kernel unit tests based on the recently merged DRM scheduler mock scheduler unit test framework^[9][10]. The idea behind those is to make it easy for developers to check for scheduling regressions when modifying the code, without the need to set up sometimes complicated testing environments.

Let us look at a few examples on how the new scheduler compares with FIFO when using those simulated workloads.

First an easy, albeit exaggerated, illustration of priority starvation improvements.

Here we have a normal priority client and a low priority client submitting many jobs asynchronously (only waiting for the submission to finish after having submitted the last job). We look at the number of outstanding jobs (queue depth - qd) on the Y axis and the passage of time on the X axis. With the FIFO scheduler (blue) we see that the low priority client is not making any progress whatsoever, all until the all submission of the normal client have been completed. Switching to the CFS inspired scheduler (red) this improves dramatically and we can see the low priority client making slow but steady progress from the start.

Second example is about fairness where two clients are of equal priority:

Here the interesting observation is that the new scheduler graphed lines are much more straight. This means that the GPU time distribution is more equal, or fair, because the selection criteria is decoupled from the job submission time but based on each client’s GPU time utilisation.

For the final set of test workloads we will look at the rate of progress (aka frames per second, or fps) between different clients.

In both cases we have one client representing a heavy graphical load, and one representing an interactive, lightweight client. They are running in parallel but we will only look at the interactive client in the graphs. Because the goal is to look at what frame rate the interactive client can achieve when competing for the GPU. In other words we use that as a proxy for assessing user experience of using the desktop while there is simultaneous heavy GPU usage from another client.

The interactive client is set up to spend 1ms of GPU time in every 10ms period, resulting in an effective GPU load of 10%.

First test is with a heavy client wanting to utilise 75% of the GPU by submitting three 2.5ms jobs back to back, repeating that cycle every 10ms.

We can see that the average frame rate the interactive client achieves with the new scheduler is much higher than under the current FIFO algorithm.

For the second test we made the heavy GPU load client even more demanding by making it want to completely monopolise the GPU. It is now submitting four 50ms jobs back to back, and only backing off for 1us before repeating the loop.

Again the new scheduler is able to give significantly more GPU time to the interactive client compared to what FIFO is able to do.

Conclusions #

From all the above it appears that the experiment was successful. We were able to simplify the code base, solve the priority starvation and improve scheduling fairness and GPU time allocation for interactive clients. No scheduling regressions have been identified to date.

The complete patch series implementing these changes is available at^[11].

Potential for further refinements #

Because this work has simplified the scheduler code base and introduced entity GPU time tracking, it also opens up the possibilities for future experimenting with other modern algorithms. One example could be an EEVDF^[12] inspired scheduler, given that algorithm has recently improved upon the kernel’s CPU scheduler and is looking potentially promising for it is combining fairness and latency in one algorithm.

Connection with the DRM scheduling cgroup controller proposal #

Another interesting angle is that, as this work implements scheduling based on virtual GPU time, which as a reminder is calculated by scaling the real time by a factor based on entity priority, it can be tied really elegantly to the previously proposed DRM scheduling cgroup controller.

There we had group weights already which can now be used when scaling the virtual time and lead to a simple but effective cgroup controller. This has already been prototyped^[13], but more on that in a following blog post.

References #

Hi all!

This month, two large patch series have been merged into wlroots! The first one is toplevel capture, which will allow tools such as grim and xdg-desktop-portal-wlr to capture the contents of a specific window. The wlroots side is super simple because wlroots just sends an event when a client requests to capture a toplevel. Producing frames for a particular toplevel from scratch would be pretty cumbersome to implement for a compositor, so wlroots also exposes a helper to create a capture source from an arbitrary scene-graph node. The compositor can pass the toplevel’s scene-graph node to this helper to implement toplevel capture. This is pretty flexible and leaves a lot of freedom to the compositor, making it easy to customize the capture result and to add support other kinds of capture targets! This also handles well popups (which need a composition step) and off-screen toplevels (which would otherwise stop rendering). The grim and xdg-desktop-portal-wlr side are not ready yet, but hopefully they shouldn’t be too much work. Still missing are cursors and a using a fully transparent background color (right now the background is black).

The other large patch series is color management support (part 1 was merged a while back, part 2, part 3 and part 4 just got merged). This was very challenging because one needs to learn a lot about colors before even understanding how color management should be implemented from a high-level architectural point-of-view. Sway isn’t quite ready yet, we’re missing one last piece of the puzzle to finish up the scene-graph integration. Thanks a lot to Kenny Levinsen, M. Stoeckl and Félix Poisot for going through this big pile of patches and spotting all of the bugs!

Sway 1.11 finally got released, with all of the wlroots 0.19 niceties. I’ve also started the Wayland 1.24 release cycle, hopefully the final release can go out very soon. Speaking of releases, I’ve cut libdrm 2.4.125 with updated kernel headers, an upgraded CI and a GitLab repository rename (“drm” was very confusing and got mixed up with the kernel side). Last, drm_info 2.8.0 adds Apple and MediaTek format modifiers and support for the IN_FORMATS_ASYNC property (contributed by Intel).

David Turner has contributed three optimization patches for libliftoff, with more in the pipeline. Leandro Ribeiro and Sebastian Wick have upstreamed libdisplay-info support for HDR10+ and Dolby Vision vendor-specific video blocks, with HDMI, HDMI Forum and HDMI Forum Sink Capability on the way (yes, these are all separate blocks!).

I’ve migrated the wayland-devel mailing list to a new server powered by Mailman 3 and public-inbox. The old Mailman 2 setup has started showing its age more than a decade ago, and it was about time we started a migration. I’ve started making plans for migrating other mailing lists, hopefully we’ll be able to decommission Mailman 2 in the coming months. Next we’ll need to migrate the postfix server over too, but one step at a time.

delthas has plumbed replies and reactions in Goguma’s compact mode. I’ve taken some time to clean up soju’s docs: the Getting started page has been revamped, the contrib/ directory has an index page, and man pages are linkified on the website. Let me know if you have ideas to improve our docs further!

As part of $dayjob I took part of Hackdays 2025, a hackathon organized by DINUM to work on La Suite (open-source productivity software). With my team, we worked on adding support for importing Notion documents into Docs. It was great meeting a lot of European open-source enthusiasts, and I hope our work can eventually be merged!

Phew, this status update ended up being larger than I expected! Perhaps thanks to getting the wlroots and Sway releases out of the way, and spending less time on triaging issues and investigating bugs. Perhaps thanks to a lot of stuff getting merged, after slowly accumulating and growing patches for months. Either way, see you next month for another status update!

This is, to some degree, a followup to this 2014 post. The TLDR of that is that, many a moon ago, the corporate overlords at Microsoft that decide all PC hardware behaviour decreed that the best way to handle an eraser emulation on a stylus is by having a button that is hardcoded in the firmware to, upon press, send a proximity out event for the pen followed by a proximity in event for the eraser tool. Upon release, they dogma'd, said eraser button shall virtually move the eraser out of proximity followed by the pen coming back into proximity. Or, in other words, the pen simulates being inverted to use the eraser, at the push of a button. Truly the future, back in the happy times of the mid 20-teens.

In a world where you don't want to update your software for a new hardware feature, this of course makes perfect sense. In a world where you write software to handle such hardware features, significantly less so.

Anyway, it is now 11 years later, the happy 2010s are over, and Benjamin and I have fixed this very issue in a few udev-hid-bpf programs but I wanted something that's a) more generic and b) configurable by the user. Somehow I am still convinced that disabling the eraser button at the udev-hid-bpf level will make users that use said button angry and, dear $deity, we can't have angry users, can we? So many angry people out there anyway, let's not add to that.

To get there, libinput's guts had to be changed. Previously libinput would read the kernel events, update the tablet state struct and then generate events based on various state changes. This of course works great when you e.g. get a button toggle, it doesn't work quite as great when your state change was one or two event frames ago (because prox-out of one tool, prox-in of another tool are at least 2 events). Extracing that older state change was like swapping the type of meatballs from an ikea meal after it's been served - doable in theory, but very messy.

Long story short, libinput now has a internal plugin system that can modify the evdev event stream as it comes in. It works like a pipeline, the events are passed from the kernel to the first plugin, modified, passed to the next plugin, etc. Eventually the last plugin is our actual tablet backend which will update tablet state, generate libinput events, and generally be grateful about having fewer quirks to worry about. With this architecture we can hold back the proximity events and filter them (if the eraser comes into proximity) or replay them (if the eraser does not come into proximity). The tablet backend is none the wiser, it either sees proximity events when those are valid or it sees a button event (depending on configuration).

This architecture approach is so successful that I have now switched a bunch of other internal features over to use that internal infrastructure (proximity timers, button debouncing, etc.). And of course it laid the ground work for the (presumably highly) anticipated Lua plugin support. Either way, happy times. For a bit. Because for those not needing the eraser feature, we've just increased your available tool button count by 100%[2] - now there's a headline for tech journalists that just blindly copy claims from blog posts.

[1] Since this is a bit wordy, the libinput API call is just libinput_tablet_tool_config_eraser_button_set_button()
[2] A very small number of styli have two buttons and an eraser button so those only get what, 50% increase? Anyway, that would make for a less clickbaity headline so let's handwave those away.

Introduction

What do concern trolls and privileged people without visible or invisible disabilities who share or make content about accessibility on Linux being trash without contributing anything to projects have in common? They don’t actually really care about the group they’re defending; they just exploit these victims’ unfortunate situation to fuel hate against groups and projects actually trying to make the world a better place.

I never thought I’d be this upset to a point I’d be writing an article about something this sensitive with a clickbait-y title. It’s simultaneously demotivating, unproductive, and infuriating. I’m here writing this post fully knowing that I could have been working on accessibility in GNOME, but really, I’m so tired of having my mood ruined because of privileged people spending at most 5 minutes to write erroneous posts and then pretending to be oblivious when confronted while it takes us 5 months of unpaid work to get a quarter of recognition, let alone acknowledgment, without accounting for the time “wasted” addressing these accusations. This is far from the first time, and it will certainly not be the last.

I’m Not Angry

I’m not mad. I’m absolutely furious and disappointed in the Linux Desktop community for being quiet in regards to any kind of celebration to advancing accessibility, while proceeding to share content and cheer for random privileged people from big-name websites or social media who have literally put a negative amount of effort into advancing accessibility on Linux. I’m explicitly stating a negative amount because they actually make it significantly more stressful for us.

None of this is fair. If you’re the kind of person who stays quiet when we celebrate huge accessibility milestones, yet shares (or even makes) content that trash talks the people directly or indirectly contributing to the fucking software you use for free, you are the reason why accessibility on Linux is shit.

No one in their right mind wants to volunteer in a toxic environment where their efforts are hardly recognized by the public and they are blamed for “not doing enough”, especially when they are expected to take in all kinds of harassment, nonconstructive criticism, and slander for a salary of 0$.

There’s only one thing I am shamefully confident about: I am not okay in the head. I shouldn’t be working on accessibility anymore. The recognition-to-smearing ratio is unbearably low and arguably unhealthy, but leaving people in unfortunate situations behind is also not in accordance with my values.

I’ve been putting so much effort, quite literally hundreds of hours, into:

1. thinking of ways to come up with inclusive designs and experiences;
2. imagining how I’d use something if I had a certain disability or condition;
3. asking for advice and feedback from people with disabilities;
4. not getting paid from any company or organization; and
5. making sure that all the accessibility-related work is in the public, and stays in the public.

Number 5 is especially important to me. I personally go as far as to refuse to contribute to projects under a permissive license, and/or that utilize a contributor license agreement, and/or that utilize anything riskily similar to these two, because I am of the opinion that no amount of code for accessibility should either be put under a paywall or be obscured and proprietary.

Permissive licenses make it painlessly easy for abusers to fork, build an ecosystem on top of it which may include accessibility-related improvements, slap a price tag alongside it, all without publishing any of these additions/changes. Corporations have been doing that for decades, and they’ll keep doing it until there’s heavy push back. The only time I would contribute to a project under a permissive license is when the tool is the accessibility infrastructure itself. Contributor license agreements are significantly worse in that regard, so I prefer to avoid them completely.

The Truth Nobody Is Telling You

KDE hired a legally blind contractor to work on accessibility throughout the KDE ecosystem, including complying with the EU Directive to allow selling hardware with Plasma.

GNOME’s new executive director, Steven Deobald, is partially blind.

The GNOME Foundation has been investing a lot of money to improve accessibility on Linux, for example funding Newton, a Wayland accessibility project and AccessKit integration into GNOME technologies. Around 250,000€ (1/4) of the STF budget was spent solely on accessibility. And get this: literally everybody managing these contracts and communication with funders are volunteers; they’re ensuring people with disabilities earn a living, but aren’t receiving anything in return. These are the real heroes who deserve endless praise.

The Culprits

Do you want to know who we should be blaming? Profiteers who are profiting from the community’s effort while investing very little to nothing into accessibility.

This includes a significant portion of the companies sponsoring GNOME and even companies that employ developers to work on GNOME. These companies are the ones making hundreds of millions, if not billions, in net profit indirectly from GNOME (and other free and open-source projects), and investing little to nothing into them. However, the worst offenders are the companies actively using GNOME without ever donating anything to fund the projects.

Some companies actually do put an effort, like Red Hat and Igalia. Red Hat employs people with disabilities to work on accessibility in GNOME, one of which I actually rely on when making accessibility-related contributions in GNOME. Igalia funds Orca, the screen reader as part of GNOME, which is something the Linux community should be thankful of. However, companies have historically invested what’s necessary to comply with governments’ accessibility requirements, and then never invest in it again.

The privileged people who keep sharing and making content around accessibility on Linux being bad without contributing anything to it are, in my opinion, significantly worse than the companies profiting off of GNOME. Companies are and stay quiet, but these privileged people add an additional burden to contributors by either trash talking or sharing trash talkers. Once again, no volunteer deserves to be in the position of being shamed and ridiculed for “not doing enough”, since no one is entitled to their free time, but themselves.

My Work Is Free but the Worth Is Not

Earlier in this article, I mentioned, and I quote: “I’ve been putting so much effort, quite literally hundreds of hours […]”. Let’s put an emphasis on “hundreds”. Here’s a list of most accessibility-related merge requests that have been incorporated into GNOME:

• GNOME Calculator: !180 and !186
• GNOME Calendar: !331, !332, !333, !335, !336, !337, !344, !348, !358, !360, !362, !387, !388, !390, !421, !435, !489, !559, !563, !564, !569, !576, !587, and !588
• GNOME Contacts: !230
• GNOME Settings: !3017, !3018, and !3027
• GNOME Software: !1519 and !1570
• Papers: !119, !122, and !527
• libadwaita: !1243 (superseded by !1327) and !1245

GNOME Calendar’s !559 addresses an issue where event widgets were unable to be focused and activated by the keyboard. That was present since the very beginning of GNOME Calendar’s existence, to be specific: for more than a decade. This alone was was a two-week effort. Despite it being less than 100 lines of code, nobody truly knew what to do to have them working properly before. This was followed up by !576, which made the event buttons usable in the month view with a keyboard, and then !587, which properly conveys the states of the widgets. Both combined are another two-week effort.

Then, at the time of writing this article, !564 adds 640 lines of code, which is something I’ve been volunteering on for more than a month, excluding the time before I opened the merge request.

Let’s do a little bit of math together with ‘only’ !559, !576, and !587. Just as a reminder: these three merge requests are a four-week effort in total, which I volunteered full-time—8 hours a day, or 160 hours a month. I compiled a small table that illustrates its worth:

To summarize the table: those three merge requests that I worked on for free were worth 9,393.60$ CAD (6,921.36$ USD) in total at a minimum.

Just a reminder:

• these merge requests exclude the time spent to review the submitted code;
• these merge requests exclude the time I spent testing the code;
• these merge requests exclude the time we spent coordinating these milestones;
• these calculations exclude the 30+ merge requests submitted to GNOME; and
• these calculations exclude the merge requests I submitted to third-party GNOME-adjacent apps.

Now just imagine how I feel when I’m told I’m “not doing enough”, either directly or indirectly, by privileged people who don’t rely on any of these accessibility features. Whenever anybody says we’re “not doing enough”, I feel very much included, and I will absolutely take it personally.

It All Trickles Down to “GNOME Bad”

I fully expect everything I say in this article to be dismissed or be taken out of context on the basis of ad hominem, simply by the mere fact I’m a GNOME Foundation member / regular GNOME contributor. Either that, or be subject to whataboutism because another GNOME contributor made a comment that had nothing to do with mine but ‘is somewhat related to this topic and therefore should be pointed out just because it was maybe-probably-possibly-perhaps ableist’. I can’t speak for other regular contributors, but I presume that they don’t feel comfortable talking about this because they dared be a GNOME contributor. At least, that’s how I felt for the longest time.

Any content related to accessibility that doesn’t dunk on GNOME doesn’t foresee as many engagement, activity, and reaction as content that actively attacks GNOME, regardless of whether the criticism is fair. Many of these people don’t even use these accessibility features; they’re just looking for every opportunity to say “GNOME bad” and will 🪄 magically 🪄 start caring about accessibility.

Regular GNOME contributors like myself don’t always feel comfortable defending ourselves because dismissing GNOME developers just for being GNOME developers is apparently a trend…

Final Word

Dear people with disabilities,

I won’t insist that we’re either your allies or your enemies—I have no right to claim that whatsoever.

I wasn’t looking for recognition. I wasn’t looking for acknowledgment since the very beginning either. I thought I would be perfectly capable of quietly improving accessibility in GNOME, but because of the overall community’s persistence to smear developers’ efforts without actually tackling the underlying issues within the stack, I think I’ve justified myself to at least demand for acknowledgment from the wider community.

I highly doubt it will happen anyway, because the Linux community feeds off of drama and trash talking instead of being productive, without realizing that it negatively demotivates active contributors while pushing away potential contributors. And worst of all: people with disabilities are the ones affected the most because they are misled into thinking that we don’t care.

It’s so unfair and infuriating that all the work I do and share online gain very little activity compared to random posts and articles from privileged people without disabilities that rant about the Linux desktop’s accessibility being trash. It doesn’t help that I become severely anxious sharing accessibility-related work to avoid signs of virtue signalling. The last thing I want is to (unintentionally) give any sign and impression of pretending to care about accessibility.

I beg you, please keep writing banger posts like fireborn’s I Want to Love Linux. It Doesn’t Love Me Back series and their interluding post. We need more people with disabilities to keep reminding developers that you exist and your conditions and disabilities are a spectrum, and not absolute.

We simultaneously need more interest from people with disabilities to contribute to free and open-source software, and the wider community to be significantly more intolerant of bullies who profit from smearing and demotivating people who are actively trying.

We should take inspiration from “Accessibility on Linux sucks, but GNOME and KDE are making progress” by OSNews. They acknowledge that accessibility on Linux is suboptimal while recognizing the efforts of GNOME and KDE. As a community, we should promote progress more often.

The All Systems Go! 2025 Call for Participation Closes Tomorrow!

The Call for Participation (CFP) for All Systems Go! 2025 will close tomorrow, on 13th of June! We’d like to invite you to submit your proposals for consideration to the CFP submission site quickly!

The Vulkan WG has released VK_KHR_video_decode_vp9. I did initial work on a Mesa extensions for this a good while back, and I've updated the radv code with help from AMD and Igalia to the final specification.

There is an open MR[1] for radv to add support for vp9 decoding on navi10+ with the latest firmware images in linux-firmware. It is currently passing all VK-GL-CTS tests for VP9 decode.

Adding this decode extension is a big milestone for me as I think it now covers all the reasons I originally got involved in Vulkan Video as signed off, there is still lots to do and I'll stay involved, but it's been great to see the contributions from others and how there is a bit of Vulkan Video community upstream in Mesa.

 [1] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/merge_requests/35398

Time Constraints

As many of you have seen, I’ve been deleting a lot of code lately. There’s a reason for this, aside from it being a really great feeling to just obliterate some entire subsystem, and that reason is time.

There are 24 hours in a day. You sleep for 6. You work for 8. Spend an hour eating, and then you’re down to only 9 hours at the gym minus a few minutes to manage those pesky social and romantic obligations. That doesn’t leave a lot of time for mucking around in random codebases.

For example. Suppose I maintain a Gallium driver. This likely means I know my way around that driver, various related infrastructure, the GL state tracker, NIR, maybe enough GLSL to rubber stamp some MRs from @tarceri, and I know which channel on IRC in which to scream when my MRs get blocked by something that is definitely not me failing to test-compile the patches before merging them. Everything outside of these areas is out of scope for this hypothetical version of me, which means it may as well be a black box.

Now imagine I am all the maintainers of all the Gallium drivers. My collective scope has expanded. I am the master of all things src/gallium/drivers. I wave my hand and src/mesa obeys my whim. CI is always green, except when matters beyond the control of mere mortals conspire against me. I have a blog. News sites cover my MRs as though OpenGL is still relevant.

But there are still black boxes. Vulkan drivers, for example, are a mystery. CI is an artifact from a distant civilization which, though alien, ensures everything functions as I know it does. And then there are the esoteric parts of the tree in src/gallium/frontends. People I’ve never met may file bug reports against my drivers with tags for one of these components. Who is sexypixel420, what is a teflon, and why is that my problem?

Maintenance

A key aspect of any good Open Source project is maintenance. This is, relatively speaking, how well it is expected to function if Joe Randomguy installs and runs it. Maintenance of projects requires people to work on them and fix bugs. These are maintainers. When a project has a maintainer, we say that it is maintained. A project which does not have a maintainer is unmaintained. Simple enough.

Mesa is a project comprised of many subprojects. We call this an ecosystem. An ecosystem functions when all its projects work together in harmony towards a common goal, in this case blasting out those pixels into as many green triangles per second as possible.

What happens when a maintained project has an issue? Well, that’s when the maintainer steps in to fix it (assuming some other random contributor doesn’t, but we’re assuming a very low bus factor here). Tickets are filed, maintainers analyze and fix, and end users are happy because the software they randomly installed happens to work as they expect.

But what happens when a project with no maintainer has an issue? In short, nothing. That issue is filed away into the void, never to be resolved ever in a million years (unless some kind soul happens to pitch an unreviewed #TrustMeBuddy patch into the repo, but this is rare). These issues accumulate, and nobody even notices because nobody is subscribed to that label on the issue tracker. The project is derelict. If the project accumulates enough of these issues, distributions may even stop packaging it; packaging a defective piece of software creates downstream tickets for packagers, and much of the time they are not looking to drag their editor upstream and solve all the problems because they have more than enough problems already with packaging.

Now here’s where things start to get messy: what happens when an unmaintained subproject in an ecosystem has an issue? Some might be tempted to say this is the same as the above scenario, but it’s subtly different because the issue might not be directly user-facing. It might be “what happens in this codebase if I change this thing over here?” And if a codebase is unmaintained, then nobody knows what happens. The code can be read, but without a maintainer who possesses deep knowledge about the intent of the machinery, such shallow readings can only do so much.

This Is Why We Prune

Like trees with dead limbs, dead parts of Open Source projects must be periodically pruned to keep the rest of the project healthy. Having all these dead limbs around creates a larger surface area for the ecosystem, which creates the potential for unintended side effects (and bizarro bugs from unknown components) to manifest. It also has a hidden cost, which is burnout. When a maintainer must step outside their area in an attempt to triage something in a codebase that they do not know, instinctual fear and distaste of Other Code kicks in: this code is terrible because I didn’t write it. Also what the fuck is with this formatting? Is that a same-line brace with no space after the closing parens?! That’s it, I’m clocking it for today.

We’ve all been out in the jungle with some code that may as well be written in dirt. It sucks. And any time you’re stuck out in the dirt for more than a couple minutes, you want to be able to call in an expert to bail you out. Those experts are called maintainers. When you enter territory which is unmaintained, you’re effectively stranded unless you can cut your way out. If you can’t cut your way out, you’re stuck, and being stuck is frustrating, and being frustrated makes you not want to work on your thing anymore, which is how you end up losing maintainers. One of the ways, that is, because we’re all just one sarcastic winky-face away from a ranty ragequit mail.

Now is when I reveal that this long-winded, circuitous explanation is not actually about everyone’s favorite D3D9 state tracker (pour one out for a legend) or whatever the hell XA was. I’m talking about last week when I deleted legacy renderpass support from Zink. It’s been a long time coming, and realistically I should have done this sooner.

Zink Struggles

Like Mesa, Zink is an ecosystem supporting a wide variety of projects, but it’s also a single project with a single maintainer. A bug in RadeonSI code will not affect me, but a bug in Zink code affects me even if it is not code which has been tested or even used in the past 5 years. While it’s likely true that any code in Zink is code that I have written, there’s a big difference between code written in the past year and code written back in like 2020: in the former case I probably know what’s happening and why, and in the latter case it’s more likely that I’m confused how the code still exists.

Vulkan is a moving target. Every month brings changes and improvements, fun new extensions to misuse, and long-lost validation errors to tell us that nobody actually knows how to use SPIR-V. Over time, these new features and changes become more widely adopted, which makes them reliable, but historically Zink has been very lax in requiring “new” features.

There is this idea that Zink should be able to provide high-level OpenGL support to any device which provides any amount of conformant Vulkan support. It’s a neat idea: provide Vulkan 1.0, and you get GL 4.6 + ES 3.2 for free. There are, however, a number of issues with this pie-in-the-sky thinking:

• Generally speaking, you can have broad GL support, or you can have performant GL support. This is the difference between your apps running at near-native speed and running much, much slower. Without relying on newer Vulkan features, it is impossible to achieve good across-the-board performance.
• You can have broad GL support, or you can have reliable GL support. This is the difference between your apps running as expected vs crashing randomly on some bizarre assertion. Old codepaths are not tested or exercised, and often even keeping them around requires concessions to CPU-based performance.
• There is only one me, unfortunately, and I do not spend a majority of my time working on Zink anymore. I fix the hard bugs, I refactor the incredibly gross old code after I rewrite half the tree, and I still do cool perf enhancements every now and then. Zink is huge though (5th largest Gallium driver by volume), and there are a crazy number of feature combinations which can hit bizarre codepaths (think tiler renderpass tracking + GPL + descriptor templates vs desktop rendering + shader objects + descriptor buffer, now tell me which one gets better perf on RADV–it’s the first one because Zink does not ever create linked/optimized shader objects).

I’m not saying all this as a cry for help, though help is always appreciated, encouraged, and welcomed. This is a notice that I’m going to be pruning some old and unused codepaths to keep things manageable. Zink isn’t going to work on Vulkan 1.0; that goal is a nice idea but not achievable, especially when there is fierce competition like ANGLE gunning for every fraction of a perf percent they can get. I don’t foresee requiring any new extensions/features the day they ship, but I also don’t foresee keeping legacy fallbacks for codepaths which should be standard by now.

TL;DR: If you want Zink on old drivers/hardware, try Mesa 25.1. Everyone else, business as usual.

Well.

I had intended to be writing this post over a month ago, but [for reasons] I’m here writing it now.

Way back in March of ‘25, I was doing work that I could talk about publicly, and a sizable chunk of that was working to improve Gallium. The stopping point of that work was the colossal !34054, which roughly amounts to “remove a single * from a struct”. The result was rewriting every driver and frontend in the tree to varying extents:

` 260 files changed, 2179 insertions(+), 2331 deletions(-)`

So as I was saying, I expected to merge this right after the 25.1 branchpoint back around mid-April, which would have allowed me to keep my train of thought and momentum. Sadly this did not come to pass, and as a result I’ve forgotten most of the key points of that blog post (and related memes). But I still have this:

But Hwhy?

As readers of this blog, you’re all very smart. You can smell bullshit a country mile away. That’s why I’m going to treat you like the intelligent rhinoceroses you are and tell you right now that I no longer have any of the performance statistics I’d gathered for this post. We’re all gonna have to go on vibes and #TrustMeBuddy energy. I’ll begin by posing a hypothetical to you.

Suppose you’re running a complex application. Suppose this application has threads which share data. Now suppose you’re running this on an AMD CPU. What is your most immediate, significant performance concern?

If you said atomic operations, you are probably me from way back in February–Take that time machine and get back where you belong. The problems are not fixed.

AMD CPUs are bad with atomic operations. It’s a feature. No, I will not go into more detail; months have passed since I read all those dissertations, and I can’t remember what I ate for breakfast an hour ago. #TrustMeBuddy.

I know what you’re thinking. Mike, why aren’t you just pinning your threads?

Well, you incredibly handsome reader, the thing is thread pinning is a lie. You can pin threads by setting their affinity to keep them on the same CCX, and L3 cache, and blah blah blah, and even when you do that sometimes it has absolutely zero fucking effect and your fps is still 6. There is no explanation. PhDs who work on atomic operations in compilers cannot explain this. The dark lord Yog-Sothoth cowers in fear when pressed for details. Even tariffs on performance penalties cannot mitigate this issue.

In that sense, when you have your complex threadful application which uses atomic operations on an AMD CPU, and when you want to achieve the same performance it can have for free on a different type of CPU, you have four options:

• pray that CPUs, kernels, and compilers improve to the extent that the problem eventually goes away on its own
• stop using AMD CPUs
• stop using threads
• stop using atomic operations

Obviously none of these options are very appealing. If you have a complex application, you need threads, you need your AMD CPU with its bazillion cores, you need atomic operations, and, being realistic, the situation here with hardware/kernel/compiler is not going to improve before AI takes over my job and I quit to become a full-time novel writer in the budding rom-pixel-com genre.

While eliminating all atomic operations isn’t viable, eliminating a certain class of them is theoretically possible. I’m talking, of course, about reference counting, the means by which C developers LARP as Java developers.

In Mesa, nearly every object is reference counted, especially the ones which have no need for garbage collection. Haters will scream REWRITE IT IN RUST, but I’m not going to do that until someone finally rewrites the GLSL compiler in Rust to kick off the project. That’s right, I’m talking to all you rustaceans out there: do something useful for once instead of rewriting things that aren’t the best graphics stack on the planet.

A great example of this reference counting overreliance was sampler views, which I took a hatchet to some months ago. This is a context-specific object which has a clear ownership pattern. Why was it reference counted? Science cannot explain this, but psychologists will tell you that engineers will always follow existing development patterns without question regardless of how non-performant they may be. Don’t read any zink code to find examples. #TrustMeBuddy.

Sampler views were a relatively easy pickup, more like a proof of concept to see if the path was viable. Upon succeeding, I immediately rushed to the hardest possible task: the framebuffer. Framebuffer surfaces can be shared between contexts, which makes them extra annoying to solve in this case. For that reason, the solution was not to try a similar approach, it was to step back and analyze the usage and ownership pattern.

Why pipe_surface*?

Originally the pipe_surface object was used solely for framebuffers, but this concept has since metastacized to clear operations and even video. It’s a useful object at a technical level: it provides a resource, format, miplevel, and layers. But does it really need to be an object?

Deeper analysis said no: the vast majority of drivers didn’t use this for anything special, and few drivers invested into architecture based on this being an actual object vs just having the state available. The majority of usage was pointlessly passing the object around because the caller handed it off to another function.

Of course, in the process of this analysis, I noted that zink was one of the heaviest investors into pipe_surface*. Pour one out for my past decision-making process. But I pulled myself up by my bootstraps, and I rewrote every driver and every frontend, and now whenever the framebuffer changes there are at least num_attachments * (frontend_thread + tc_thread + driver_thread) fewer atomic operations.

More Work

This saga is not over. There’s still base buffers and images to go, which is where a huge amount of performance is lost if you are hitting an affected codepath. Ideally those changes will be smaller and more concentrated than the framebuffer refactor.

Ideally I will find time for it.

#TrustMeBuddy.

The Linux 6.15 has just been released, bringing a lot of new features:

• nova-core, the “base” driver for the new NVIDIA GPU driver, written in Rust. nova project will eventually replace Nouveau driver for all GSP-based GPUs.
• RISC-V gained support for some extensions: BFloat16 floating-point, Zaamo, Zalrsc and ZBKB.
• The fwctl subsystem has been merged. This new family of drivers acts as a transport layer between userspace and complex firmware. To understand more about its controversies and how it got merged, check out this LWN article.
• Support for MacBook touch bars, both as a DRM driver and input source.
• Support for Adreno 623 GPU.

As always, I suggest to have a look at the Kernel Newbies summary. Now, let’s have a look at Igalia’s contributions.

DRM wedged events

In 3D graphics APIs such Vulkan and OpenGL, there are some mechanisms that applications can rely to check if the GPU had reset (you can read more about this in the kernel documentation). However, there was no generic mechanism to inform userspace that a GPU reset has happened. This is useful because in some cases the reset affected not only the app involved in the reset, but the whole graphic stack and thus needs some action to recover, like doing a module rebind or even bus reset to recovery the hardware. For this release, we helped to add an userspace event for this, so a daemon or the compositor can listen to it and trigger some recovery measure after the GPU has reset. Read more in the kernel docs.

DRM scheduler work

In the DRM scheduler area, in preparation for the future scheduling improvements, we worked on cleaning up the code base, better separation of the internal and external interfaces, and adding formal interfaces at places where individual drivers had too much knowledge of the scheduler internals.

General GPU/DRM stack

In the wider GPU stack area we optimised the most frequent dma-fence single fence merge operation to avoid memory allocations and array sorting. This should slightly reduce the CPU utilisation with workloads which use the DRM sync objects heavily, such as the modern composited desktops using Vulkan explicit sync.

Some releases ago, we helped to enable async page flips in the atomic DRM uAPI. So far, this feature was only enabled for the primary plane. In this release, we added a mechanism for the driver to decide which plane can perform async flips. We used this to enable overlay planes to do async flips in AMDGPU driver.

We also fixed a bug in the DRM fdinfo common layer which could cause use after free after driver unbind.

Intel Xe driver improvements

On the Intel GPU specific front we worked on adding better Alderlake-P support to the new Intel Xe driver by identifying and adding missing hardware workarounds, fixed the workaround application in general and also made some other smaller improvements.

sched_ext

When developing and optimizing a sched_ext-based scheduler, it is important to understand the interactions between the BPF scheduler and the in-kernel sched_ext core. If there is a mismatch between what the BPF scheduler developer expects and how the sched_ext core actually works, such a mismatch could often be the source of bugs or performance issues.

To address such a problem, we added a mechanism to count and report the internal events of the sched_ext core. This significantly improves the visibility of subtle edge cases, which might easily slip off. So far, eight events have been added, and the events can be monitored through a BPF program, sysfs, and a tracepoint.

A few less bugs

As usual, as part of our work on diverse projects, we keep an eye on automated test results to look for potential security and stability issues in different kernel areas. We’re happy to have contributed to making this release a bit more robust by fixing bugs in memory management, network (SCTP), ext4, suspend/resume and other subsystems.

This is the complete list of Igalia’s contributions for this release:

Authored (75)

André Almeida

• drm/amdgpu: Use device wedged event
• drm/atomic: Let drivers decide which planes to async flip
• drm/amdgpu: Enable async flip on overlay planes
• drm/amdgpu: Log the creation of a coredump file
• drm/amdgpu: Log after a successful ring reset
• drm/amdgpu: Create a debug option to disable ring reset
• drm/amdgpu: Trigger a wedged event for ring reset

Angelos Oikonomopoulos

• arm64: Don’t call NULL in do_compat_alignment_fixup()

Bhupesh

• ext4: ignore xattrs past end

Changwoo Min

• sched_ext: Implement event counter infrastructure
• sched_ext: Add an event, SCX_EV_SELECT_CPU_FALLBACK
• sched_ext: Add an event, SCX_EV_DISPATCH_LOCAL_DSQ_OFFLINE
• sched_ext: Add an event, SCX_EV_DISPATCH_KEEP_LAST
• sched_ext: Add an event, SCX_EV_ENQ_SKIP_EXITING
• sched_ext: Add an event, SCX_EV_BYPASS_ACTIVATE
• sched_ext: Add an event, SCX_EV_BYPASS_DISPATCH
• sched_ext: Add an event, SCX_EV_BYPASS_DURATION
• sched_ext: Add scx_bpf_events() and scx_read_event() for BPF schedulers
• sched_ext: Print core event count in scx_central scheduler
• sched_ext: Print core event count in scx_qmap scheduler
• sched_ext: Add an event, SCX_EV_ENQ_SLICE_DFL
• sched_ext: Print an event, SCX_EV_ENQ_SLICE_DFL, in scx_qmap/central
• tools/sched_ext: Compatible testing of SCX_ENQ_CPU_SELECTED
• tools/sched_ext: Update enum_defs.autogen.h
• sched_ext: Provides a sysfs ‘events’ to expose core event counters
• sched_ext: Change the event type from u64 to s64
• sched_ext: Add trace point to track sched_ext core events

Gavin Guo

• mm/huge_memory: fix dereferencing invalid pmd migration entry

Guilherme G. Piccoli

• x86/tsc: Always save/restore TSC sched_clock() on suspend/resume
• scripts: add script to extract built-in firmware blobs

Luis Henriques

• fuse: removed unused function fuse_uring_create() from header

Maíra Canal

• drm/v3d: Remove v3d->cpu_job
• drm/vc4: Use DRM Execution Contexts
• drm/vc4: Use DMA Resv to implement VC4 wait BO IOCTL
• drm/vc4: Remove BOs seqnos
• drm/v3d: Fix Indirect Dispatch configuration for V3D 7.1.6 and later
• drm/v3d: Add job to pending list if the reset was skipped

Melissa Wen

• drm/amd/display: restore edid reading from a given i2c adapter
• drm/amd/display: Fix null check of pipe_ctx->plane_state for update_dchubp_dpp
• Revert “drm/amd/display: Hardware cursor changes color when switched to software cursor”

Ricardo Cañuelo Navarro

• sctp: detect and prevent references to a freed transport in sendmsg
• mm: fix copy_vma() error handling for hugetlb mappings

Rodrigo Siqueira

• Documentation/gpu: Add acronyms for some firmware components
• MAINTAINERS: Change my role from Maintainer to Reviewer
• mailmap: Add entry for Rodrigo Siqueira

Thadeu Lima de Souza Cascardo

• dlm: prevent NPD when writing a positive value to event_done
• char: misc: improve testing Kconfig description
• parisc: perf: use named initializers for struct miscdevice
• drm/amd/display: avoid NPD when ASIC does not support DMUB
• tpm: do not start chip while suspended
• i2c: cros-ec-tunnel: defer probe if parent EC is not present
• char: misc: register chrdev region with all possible minors

Tvrtko Ursulin

• dma-fence: Add a single fence fast path for fence merging
• dma-fence: Add some more fence-merge-unwrap tests
• drm/sched: Delete unused update_job_credits
• drm/sched: Remove weak paused submission checks
• drm/sched: Add helper to check job dependencies
• drm/imagination: Use the drm_sched_job_has_dependency helper
• drm/scheduler: Remove some unused prototypes
• drm/sched: Add internal job peek/pop API
• drm/amdgpu: Pop jobs from the queue more robustly
• drm/sched: Remove a hole from struct drm_sched_job
• drm/sched: Move drm_sched_entity_is_ready to internal header
• drm/sched: Move internal prototypes to internal header
• drm/sched: Group exported prototypes by object type
• drm/xe: Fix GT “for each engine” workarounds
• drm/xe/xelp: Move Wa_16011163337 from tunings to workarounds
• drm/xe/xelp: Add Wa_1604555607
• drm/xe/xelp: L3 recommended hashing mask
• drm/xe: Add performance tunings to debugfs
• drm/xe: Fix MOCS debugfs LNCF readout
• drm/xe: Fix ring flush invalidation
• drm/xe: Pass flags directly to emit_flush_imm_ggtt
• drm/xe: Use correct type width for alignment in fb pinning code
• drm/fdinfo: Protect against driver unbind

Reviewed (30)

André Almeida

• drm: Introduce device wedged event
• drm/doc: Document device wedged event
• selftests/futex: futex_waitv wouldblock test should fail
• drm: Fix potential overflow issue in event_string array

Christian Gmeiner

• drm/sched: Use struct for drm_sched_init() params

Iago Toral Quiroga

• drm/v3d: Fix Indirect Dispatch configuration for V3D 7.1.6 and later
• drm/v3d: Add job to pending list if the reset was skipped

Jose Maria Casanova Crespo

• drm/v3d: Remove v3d->cpu_job

Luis Henriques

• fuse: add default_request_timeout and max_request_timeout sysctls

Maíra Canal

• drm/vkms: Switch to managed for connector
• drm/vkms: Switch to managed for encoder
• drm/sched: Use struct for drm_sched_init() params
• drm/v3d: Add clock handling

Melissa Wen

• drm/vc4: Use DRM Execution Contexts
• drm/vc4: Use DMA Resv to implement VC4 wait BO IOCTL
• drm/vc4: Remove BOs seqnos

Rodrigo Siqueira

• Documentation/gpu: remove duplicate entries in different glossaries
• drm/amd/display: change kzalloc to kcalloc in dcn30_validate_bandwidth()
• drm/amd/display: change kzalloc to kcalloc in dcn31_validate_bandwidth()
• drm/amd/display: change kzalloc to kcalloc in dcn314_validate_bandwidth()
• drm/amd/display: change kzalloc to kcalloc in dml1_validate()
• drm/amd/display: Remove incorrect macro guard
• drm/amd/display: avoid NPD when ASIC does not support DMUB

Thadeu Lima de Souza Cascardo

• scripts: add script to extract built-in firmware blobs

Tvrtko Ursulin

• dma-buf: add selftest for fence order after merge
• drm/i915/pmu: Drop custom hotplug code
• drm/file: Add fdinfo helper for printing regions with prefix
• drm/sched: Use struct for drm_sched_init() params
• drm/sched: drm_sched_job_cleanup(): correct false doc
• drm/xe/rtp: Drop sentinels from arg to xe_rtp_process_to_sr()

Tested (2)

Changwoo Min

• sched_ext: Fix rq lock state in hotplug ops

Guilherme G. Piccoli

• x86/split_lock: Fix the delayed detection logic

Acked (12)

Changwoo Min

• tool/sched_ext: Event counter dumping updates
• sched_ext: Count SCX_EV_DISPATCH_LOCAL_DSQ_OFFLINE in the right spot
• sched_ext: Add SCX_EV_ENQ_SKIP_MIGRATION_DISABLED
• sched_ext: Take NUMA node into account when allocating per-CPU cpumasks
• tools/sched_ext: Provide consistent access to scx flags
• sched_ext: Track currently locked rq
• sched_ext: Fix missing rq lock in scx_bpf_cpuperf_set()

Maíra Canal

• drm/doc: Document KUnit expectations

Tvrtko Ursulin

• Documentation/gpu: Clarify format of driver-specific fidnfo keys
• drm/i915: Use device wedged event
• drm/doc: Document KUnit expectations
• drm/v3d: Add job to pending list if the reset was skipped

Maintainer SoB (2)

Maíra Canal

• drm/v3d: Add clock handling

Tvrtko Ursulin

• dma-buf: add selftest for fence order after merge

1. Support for the OV02C10 camera sensor, this should e.g. enable the camera to work out of the box on all Dell XPS 9x40 models.
2. Support for the OV02E10 camera sensor, this should e.g. enable the camera to work out of the box on Dell Precision 5690 laptops. When combined with item 3. below and the USBIO drivers from rpmfusion this should also e.g. enable the camera on other laptop models like e.g. the Dell Latitude 7450.
3. Support for the special handshake GPIO used to turn on the sensor and allow sensor i2c-access on various new laptop models using the Lattice MIPI aggregator FPGA / USBIO chip.

First of all, what's outlined here should be available in libinput 1.29 but I'm not 100% certain on all the details yet so any feedback (in the libinput issue tracker) would be appreciated. Right now this is all still sitting in the libinput!1192 merge request. I'd specifically like to see some feedback from people familiar with Lua APIs. With this out of the way:

Come libinput 1.29, libinput will support plugins written in Lua. These plugins sit logically between the kernel and libinput and allow modifying the evdev device and its events before libinput gets to see them.

The motivation for this are a few unfixable issues - issues we knew how to fix but we cannot actually implement and/or ship the fixes without breaking other devices. One example for this is the inverted Logitech MX Master 3S horizontal wheel. libinput ships quirks for the USB/Bluetooth connection but not for the Bolt receiver. Unlike the Unifying Receiver the Bolt receiver doesn't give the kernel sufficient information to know which device is currently connected. Which means our quirks could only apply to the Bolt receiver (and thus any mouse connected to it) - that's a rather bad idea though, we'd break every other mouse using the same receiver. Another example is an issue with worn out mouse buttons - on that device the behavior was predictable enough but any heuristics would catch a lot of legitimate buttons. That's fine when you know your mouse is slightly broken and at least it works again. But it's not something we can ship as a general solution. There are plenty more examples like that - custom pointer deceleration, different disable-while-typing, etc.

libinput has quirks but they are internal API and subject to change without notice at any time. They're very definitely not for configuring a device and the local quirk file libinput parses is merely to bridge over the time until libinput ships the (hopefully upstreamed) quirk.

So the obvious solution is: let the users fix it themselves. And this is where the plugins come in. They are not full access into libinput, they are closer to a udev-hid-bpf in userspace. Logically they sit between the kernel event devices and libinput: input events are read from the kernel device, passed to the plugins, then passed to libinput. A plugin can look at and modify devices (add/remove buttons for example) and look at and modify the event stream as it comes from the kernel device. For this libinput changed internally to now process something called an "evdev frame" which is a struct that contains all struct input_events up to the terminating SYN_REPORT. This is the logical grouping of events anyway but so far we didn't explicitly carry those around as such. Now we do and we can pass them through to the plugin(s) to be modified.

The aforementioned Logitech MX master plugin would look like this: it registers itself with a version number, then sets a callback for the "new-evdev-device" notification and (where the device matches) we connect that device's "evdev-frame" notification to our actual code:

libinput:register(1) -- register plugin version 1
libinput:connect("new-evdev-device", function (_, device)
    if device:vid() == 0x046D and device:pid() == 0xC548 then
        device:connect("evdev-frame", function (_, frame)
            for _, event in ipairs(frame.events) do
                if event.type == evdev.EV_REL and 
                   (event.code == evdev.REL_HWHEEL or 
                    event.code == evdev.REL_HWHEEL_HI_RES) then
                    event.value = -event.value
                end
            end
            return frame
        end)
    end
end)

So why Lua? Because it's very easy to sandbox. I very explicitly did not want the plugins to be a side-channel to get into the internals of libinput - specifically no IO access to anything. This ruled out using C (or anything that's a .so file, really) because those would run a) in the address space of the compositor and b) be unrestricted in what they can do. Lua solves this easily. And, as a nice side-effect, it's also very easy to write plugins in.[1]

Whether plugins are loaded or not will depend on the compositor: an explicit call to set up the paths to load from and to actually load the plugins is required. No run-time plugin changes at this point either, they're loaded on libinput context creation and that's it. Otherwise, all the usual implementation details apply: files are sorted and if there are files with identical names the one from the highest-precedence directory will be used. Plugins that are buggy will be unloaded immediately.

If all this sounds interesting, please have a try and report back any APIs that are broken, or missing, or generally ideas of the good or bad persuation. Ideally before we ship it and the API is stable forever :)

[1] Benjamin Tissoires actually had a go at WASM plugins (via rust). But ... a lot of effort for rather small gains over Lua

This week, I reviewed the last available version of the Linux KMS Color API. Specifically, I explored the proposed API by Harry Wentland and Alex Hung (AMD), their implementation for the AMD display driver and tracked the parallel efforts of Uma Shankar and Chaitanya Kumar Borah (Intel) in bringing this plane color management to life. With this API in place, compositors will be able to provide better HDR support and advanced color management for Linux users.

To get a hands-on feel for the API’s potential, I developed a fork of drm_info compatible with the new color properties. This allowed me to visualize the display hardware color management capabilities being exposed. If you’re curious and want to peek behind the curtain, you can find my exploratory work on the drm_info/kms_color branch. The README there will guide you through the simple compilation and installation process.

Note: You will need to update libdrm to match the proposed API. You can find an updated version in my personal repository here. To avoid potential conflicts with your official libdrm installation, you can compile and install it in a local directory. Then, use the following command: export LD_LIBRARY_PATH="/usr/local/lib/"

In this post, I invite you to familiarize yourself with the new API that is about to be released. You can start doing as I did below: just deploy a custom kernel with the necessary patches and visualize the interface with the help of drm_info. Or, better yet, if you are a userspace developer, you can start developing user cases by experimenting with it.

The more eyes the better.

KMS Color API on AMD

The great news is that AMD’s driver implementation for plane color operations is being developed right alongside their Linux KMS Color API proposal, so it’s easy to apply to your kernel branch and check it out. You can find details of their progress in the AMD’s series.

I just needed to compile a custom kernel with this series applied, intentionally leaving out the AMD_PRIVATE_COLOR flag. The AMD_PRIVATE_COLOR flag guards driver-specific color plane properties, which experimentally expose hardware capabilities while we don’t have the generic KMS plane color management interface available.

If you don’t know or don’t remember the details of AMD driver specific color properties, you can learn more about this work in my blog posts [1] [2] [3]. As driver-specific color properties and KMS colorops are redundant, the driver only advertises one of them, as you can see in AMD workaround patch 24.

So, with the custom kernel image ready, I installed it on a system powered by AMD DCN3 hardware (i.e. my Steam Deck). Using my custom drm_info, I could clearly see the Plane Color Pipeline with eight color operations as below:

└───"COLOR_PIPELINE" (atomic): enum {Bypass, Color Pipeline 258} = Bypass
    ├───Bypass
    └───Color Pipeline 258
        ├───Color Operation 258
        │   ├───"TYPE" (immutable): enum {1D Curve, 1D LUT, 3x4 Matrix, Multiplier, 3D LUT} = 1D Curve
        │   ├───"BYPASS" (atomic): range [0, 1] = 1
        │   └───"CURVE_1D_TYPE" (atomic): enum {sRGB EOTF, PQ 125 EOTF, BT.2020 Inverse OETF} = sRGB EOTF
        ├───Color Operation 263
        │   ├───"TYPE" (immutable): enum {1D Curve, 1D LUT, 3x4 Matrix, Multiplier, 3D LUT} = Multiplier
        │   ├───"BYPASS" (atomic): range [0, 1] = 1
        │   └───"MULTIPLIER" (atomic): range [0, UINT64_MAX] = 0
        ├───Color Operation 268
        │   ├───"TYPE" (immutable): enum {1D Curve, 1D LUT, 3x4 Matrix, Multiplier, 3D LUT} = 3x4 Matrix
        │   ├───"BYPASS" (atomic): range [0, 1] = 1
        │   └───"DATA" (atomic): blob = 0
        ├───Color Operation 273
        │   ├───"TYPE" (immutable): enum {1D Curve, 1D LUT, 3x4 Matrix, Multiplier, 3D LUT} = 1D Curve
        │   ├───"BYPASS" (atomic): range [0, 1] = 1
        │   └───"CURVE_1D_TYPE" (atomic): enum {sRGB Inverse EOTF, PQ 125 Inverse EOTF, BT.2020 OETF} = sRGB Inverse EOTF
        ├───Color Operation 278
        │   ├───"TYPE" (immutable): enum {1D Curve, 1D LUT, 3x4 Matrix, Multiplier, 3D LUT} = 1D LUT
        │   ├───"BYPASS" (atomic): range [0, 1] = 1
        │   ├───"SIZE" (atomic, immutable): range [0, UINT32_MAX] = 4096
        │   ├───"LUT1D_INTERPOLATION" (immutable): enum {Linear} = Linear
        │   └───"DATA" (atomic): blob = 0
        ├───Color Operation 285
        │   ├───"TYPE" (immutable): enum {1D Curve, 1D LUT, 3x4 Matrix, Multiplier, 3D LUT} = 3D LUT
        │   ├───"BYPASS" (atomic): range [0, 1] = 1
        │   ├───"SIZE" (atomic, immutable): range [0, UINT32_MAX] = 17
        │   ├───"LUT3D_INTERPOLATION" (immutable): enum {Tetrahedral} = Tetrahedral
        │   └───"DATA" (atomic): blob = 0
        ├───Color Operation 292
        │   ├───"TYPE" (immutable): enum {1D Curve, 1D LUT, 3x4 Matrix, Multiplier, 3D LUT} = 1D Curve
        │   ├───"BYPASS" (atomic): range [0, 1] = 1
        │   └───"CURVE_1D_TYPE" (atomic): enum {sRGB EOTF, PQ 125 EOTF, BT.2020 Inverse OETF} = sRGB EOTF
        └───Color Operation 297
            ├───"TYPE" (immutable): enum {1D Curve, 1D LUT, 3x4 Matrix, Multiplier, 3D LUT} = 1D LUT
            ├───"BYPASS" (atomic): range [0, 1] = 1
            ├───"SIZE" (atomic, immutable): range [0, UINT32_MAX] = 4096
            ├───"LUT1D_INTERPOLATION" (immutable): enum {Linear} = Linear
            └───"DATA" (atomic): blob = 0

Note that Gamescope is currently using AMD driver-specific color properties implemented by me, Autumn Ashton and Harry Wentland. It doesn’t use this KMS Color API, and therefore COLOR_PIPELINE is set to Bypass. Once the API is accepted upstream, all users of the driver-specific API (including Gamescope) should switch to the KMS generic API, as this will be the official plane color management interface of the Linux kernel.

KMS Color API on Intel

On the Intel side, the driver implementation available upstream was built upon an earlier iteration of the API. This meant I had to apply a few tweaks to bring it in line with the latest specifications. You can explore their latest work here. For a more simplified handling, combining the V9 of the Linux Color API, Intel’s contributions, and my necessary adjustments, check out my dedicated branch.

I then compiled a kernel from this integrated branch and deployed it on a system featuring Intel TigerLake GT2 graphics. Running my custom drm_info revealed a Plane Color Pipeline with three color operations as follows:

├───"COLOR_PIPELINE" (atomic): enum {Bypass, Color Pipeline 480} = Bypass
│   ├───Bypass
│   └───Color Pipeline 480
│       ├───Color Operation 480
│       │   ├───"TYPE" (immutable): enum {1D Curve, 1D LUT, 3x4 Matrix, 1D LUT Mult Seg, 3x3 Matrix, Multiplier, 3D LUT} = 1D LUT Mult Seg
│       │   ├───"BYPASS" (atomic): range [0, 1] = 1
│       │   ├───"HW_CAPS" (atomic, immutable): blob = 484
│       │   └───"DATA" (atomic): blob = 0
│       ├───Color Operation 487
│       │   ├───"TYPE" (immutable): enum {1D Curve, 1D LUT, 3x4 Matrix, 1D LUT Mult Seg, 3x3 Matrix, Multiplier, 3D LUT} = 3x3 Matrix
│       │   ├───"BYPASS" (atomic): range [0, 1] = 1
│       │   └───"DATA" (atomic): blob = 0
│       └───Color Operation 492
│           ├───"TYPE" (immutable): enum {1D Curve, 1D LUT, 3x4 Matrix, 1D LUT Mult Seg, 3x3 Matrix, Multiplier, 3D LUT} = 1D LUT Mult Seg
│           ├───"BYPASS" (atomic): range [0, 1] = 1
│           ├───"HW_CAPS" (atomic, immutable): blob = 496
│           └───"DATA" (atomic): blob = 0

Observe that Intel’s approach introduces additional properties like “HW_CAPS” at the color operation level, along with two new color operation types: 1D LUT with Multiple Segments and 3x3 Matrix. It’s important to remember that this implementation is based on an earlier stage of the KMS Color API and is awaiting review.

A Shout-Out to Those Who Made This Happen

I’m impressed by the solid implementation and clear direction of the V9 of the KMS Color API. It aligns with the many insightful discussions we’ve had over the past years. A huge thank you to Harry Wentland and Alex Hung for their dedication in bringing this to fruition!

Beyond their efforts, I deeply appreciate Uma and Chaitanya’s commitment to updating Intel’s driver implementation to align with the freshest version of the KMS Color API. The collaborative spirit of the AMD and Intel developers in sharing their color pipeline work upstream is invaluable. We’re now gaining a much clearer picture of the color capabilities embedded in modern display hardware, all thanks to their hard work, comprehensive documentation, and engaging discussions.

Finally, thanks all the userspace developers, color science experts, and kernel developers from various vendors who actively participate in the upstream discussions, meetings, workshops, each iteration of this API and the crucial code review process. I’m happy to be part of the final stages of this long kernel journey, but I know that when it comes to colors, one step is completed for new challenges to be unlocked.

Looking forward to meeting you in this year Linux Display Next hackfest, organized by AMD in Toronto, to further discuss HDR, advanced color management, and other display trends.

Hi!

Today wlroots 0.19.0 has finally been released! Among the newly supported protocols, color-management-v1 lays the first stone of HDR support (backend and renderer bits are still being reviewed) and ext-image-copy-capture-v1 enhances the previous screen capture protocol with better performance. Explicit synchronization is now fully supported, and display-only devices such as gud or DisplayLink can now be used with wlroots. See the release notes for more details! I hope I’ll be able to go back to some feature work and reviews now that the release is out of the way.

In other graphics news, I’ve finished my review of the core DRM patches for the new KMS color pipeline. Other kernel folks have reviewed the patches, we’re just waiting on a user-space implementation now (which various compositor folks are working on). I’ve started a discussion about libliftoff support.

In addition to wlroots, this month I’ve also released a new version of my mobile IRC client, Goguma 0.8.0. delthas has sent a patch to synchronize pinned and muted conversations across devices via soju. Thanks to pounce, Goguma now supports message reactions (not included in the release):

My extended-isupport IRCv3 specification has been accepted. It allows servers to advertise metadata such as the maximum nickname length or IRC network name early (before the user provides a nickname and authentication details), which is useful for building nice connection UIs. I’ve posted another proposal for IRC network icons.

go-smtp 0.22.0 has been released with an improved DATA command API, RRVS support (Require Recipient Valid Since), and custom hello after reset or STARTTLS. I’ve also spent quite a bit of time reaching out to companies for XDC 2025 sponsorships.

See you next month!

 It has been almost a year since my last update on the Rockchip NPU, and though I'm a bit sad that I haven't had more time to work on it, I'm happy that I found some time earlier this year for this.

Quoting from my last update on the Rockchip NPU driver:

The kernel driver is able to fully use the three cores in the NPU, giving us the possibility of running 4 simultaneous object detection inferences such as the one below on a stream, at almost 30 frames per second.

All feedback has been incorporated in a new revision of the kernel driver and it was submitted to the Linux kernel mailing list.

Though I'm very happy with the direction the kernel driver is taking, I would have liked to make faster progress on it. I have spent the time since the first revision on making the Etnaviv NPU driver ready to be deployed in production (will be blogging about this soon), and also had to take some non-upstream work to pay my bills.

Next I plan to cleanup the userspace driver so it's ready for review, and then I will go for a third revision of the kernel driver.

2025 was my first year at FOSDEM, and I can say it was an incredible experience where I met many colleagues from Igalia who live around the world, and also many friends from the Linux display stack who are part of my daily work and contributions to DRM/KMS. In addition, I met new faces and recognized others with whom I had interacted on some online forums and we had good and long conversations.

During FOSDEM 2025 I had the opportunity to present about kworkflow in the kernel devroom. Kworkflow is a set of tools that help kernel developers with their routine tasks and it is the tool I use for my development tasks. In short, every contribution I make to the Linux kernel is assisted by kworkflow.

The goal of my presentation was to spread the word about kworkflow. I aimed to show how the suite consolidates good practices and recommendations of the kernel workflow in short commands. These commands are easily configurable and memorized for your current work setup, or for your multiple setups.

For me, Kworkflow is a tool that accommodates the needs of different agents in the Linux kernel community. Active developers and maintainers are the main target audience for kworkflow, but it is also inviting for users and user-space developers who just want to report a problem and validate a solution without needing to know every detail of the kernel development workflow.

Something I didn’t emphasize during the presentation but would like to correct this flaw here is that the main author and developer of kworkflow is my colleague at Igalia, Rodrigo Siqueira. Being honest, my contributions are mostly on requesting and validating new features, fixing bugs, and sharing scripts to increase feature coverage.

So, the video and slide deck of my FOSDEM presentation are available for download here.

And, as usual, you will find in this blog post the script of this presentation and more detailed explanation of the demo presented there.

Kworkflow at FOSDEM 2025: Speaker Notes and Demo

Hi, I’m Melissa, a GPU kernel driver developer at Igalia and today I’ll be giving a very inclusive talk to not let your motivation go by saving time with kworkflow.

So, you’re a kernel developer, or you want to be a kernel developer, or you don’t want to be a kernel developer. But you’re all united by a single need: you need to validate a custom kernel with just one change, and you need to verify that it fixes or improves something in the kernel.

And that’s a given change for a given distribution, or for a given device, or for a given subsystem…

Look to this diagram and try to figure out the number of subsystems and related work trees you can handle in the kernel.

So, whether you are a kernel developer or not, at some point you may come across this type of situation:

There is a userspace developer who wants to report a kernel issue and says:

• Oh, there is a problem in your driver that can only be reproduced by running this specific distribution. And the kernel developer asks:
• Oh, have you checked if this issue is still present in the latest kernel version of this branch?

But the userspace developer has never compiled and installed a custom kernel before. So they have to read a lot of tutorials and kernel documentation to create a kernel compilation and deployment script. Finally, the reporter managed to compile and deploy a custom kernel and reports:

• Sorry for the delay, this is the first time I have installed a custom kernel. I am not sure if I did it right, but the issue is still present in the kernel of the branch you pointed out.

And then, the kernel developer needs to reproduce this issue on their side, but they have never worked with this distribution, so they just created a new script, but the same script created by the reporter.

What’s the problem of this situation? The problem is that you keep creating new scripts!

Every time you change distribution, change architecture, change hardware, change project - even in the same company - the development setup may change when you switch to a different project, you create another script for your new kernel development workflow!

You know, you have a lot of babies, you have a collection of “my precious scripts”, like Sméagol (Lord of the Rings) with the precious ring.

Instead of creating and accumulating scripts, save yourself time with kworkflow. Here is a typical script that many of you may have. This is a Raspberry Pi 4 script and contains everything you need to memorize to compile and deploy a kernel on your Raspberry Pi 4.

With kworkflow, you only need to memorize two commands, and those commands are not specific to Raspberry Pi. They are the same commands to different architecture, kernel configuration, target device.

What is kworkflow?

Kworkflow is a collection of tools and software combined to:

• Optimize Linux kernel development workflow.
• Reduce time spent on repetitive tasks, since we are spending our lives compiling kernels.
• Standardize best practices.
• Ensure reliable data exchange across kernel workflow. For example: two people describe the same setup, but they are not seeing the same thing, kworkflow can ensure both are actually with the same kernel, modules and options enabled.

I don’t know if you will get this analogy, but kworkflow is for me a megazord of scripts. You are combining all of your scripts to create a very powerful tool.

What is the main feature of kworflow?

There are many, but these are the most important for me:

• Build & deploy custom kernels across devices & distros.
• Handle cross-compilation seamlessly.
• Manage multiple architecture, settings and target devices in the same work tree.
• Organize kernel configuration files.
• Facilitate remote debugging & code inspection.
• Standardize Linux kernel patch submission guidelines. You don’t need to double check documentantion neither Greg needs to tell you that you are not following Linux kernel guidelines.
• Upcoming: Interface to bookmark, apply and “reviewed-by” patches from mailing lists (lore.kernel.org).

This is the list of commands you can run with kworkflow. The first subset is to configure your tool for various situations you may face in your daily tasks.

# Manage kw and kw configurations
kw init             - Initialize kw config file
kw self-update (u)  - Update kw
kw config (g)       - Manage kernel .config files

The second subset is to build and deploy custom kernels.

# Build & Deploy custom kernels
kw kernel-config-manager (k) - Manage kernel .config files
kw build (b)        - Build kernel
kw deploy (d)       - Deploy kernel image (local/remote)
kw bd               - Build and deploy kernel

We have some tools to manage and interact with target machines.

# Manage and interact with target machines
kw ssh (s)          - SSH support
kw remote (r)       - Manage machines available via ssh
kw vm               - QEMU support

To inspect and debug a kernel.

# Inspect and debug
kw device           - Show basic hardware information
kw explore (e)      - Explore string patterns in the work tree and git logs
kw debug            - Linux kernel debug utilities
kw drm              - Set of commands to work with DRM drivers

To automatize best practices for patch submission like codestyle, maintainers and the correct list of recipients and mailing lists of this change, to ensure we are sending the patch to who is interested in it.

# Automatize best practices for patch submission
kw codestyle (c)    - Check code style
kw maintainers (m)  - Get maintainers/mailing list
kw send-patch       - Send patches via email

And the last one, the upcoming patch hub.

# Upcoming
kw patch-hub        - Interact with patches (lore.kernel.org)

How can you save time with Kworkflow?

So how can you save time building and deploying a custom kernel?

First, you need a .config file.

• Without kworkflow: You may be manually extracting and managing .config files from different targets and saving them with different suffixes to link the kernel to the target device or distribution, or any descriptive suffix to help identify which is which. Or even copying and pasting from somewhere.
• With kworkflow: you can use the kernel-config-manager command, or simply kw k, to store, describe and retrieve a specific .config file very easily, according to your current needs.

Then you want to build the kernel:

• Without kworkflow: You are probably now memorizing a combination of commands and options.
• With kworkflow: you just need kw b (kw build) to build the kernel with the correct settings for cross-compilation, compilation warnings, cflags, etc. It also shows some information about the kernel, like number of modules.

Finally, to deploy the kernel in a target machine.

• Without kworkflow: You might be doing things like: SSH connecting to the remote machine, copying and removing files according to distributions and architecture, and manually updating the bootloader for the target distribution.
• With kworkflow: you just need kw d which does a lot of things for you, like: deploying the kernel, preparing the target machine for the new installation, listing available kernels and uninstall them, creating a tarball, rebooting the machine after deploying the kernel, etc.

You can also save time on debugging kernels locally or remotely.

• Without kworkflow: you do: ssh, manual setup and traces enablement, copy&paste logs.
• With kworkflow: more straighforward access to debug utilities: events, trace, dmesg.

You can save time on managing multiple kernel images in the same work tree.

• Without kworkflow: now you can be cloning multiple times the same repository so you don’t lose compiled files when changing kernel configuration or compilation options and manually managing build and deployment scripts.
• With kworkflow: you can use kw env to isolate multiple contexts in the same worktree as environments, so you can keep different configurations in the same worktree and switch between them easily without losing anything from the last time you worked in a specific context.

Finally, you can save time when submitting kernel patches. In kworkflow, you can find everything you need to wrap your changes in patch format and submit them to the right list of recipients, those who can review, comment on, and accept your changes.

This is a demo that the lead developer of the kw patch-hub feature sent me. With this feature, you will be able to check out a series on a specific mailing list, bookmark those patches in the kernel for validation, and when you are satisfied with the proposed changes, you can automatically submit a reviewed-by for that whole series to the mailing list.

Demo

Now a demo of how to use kw environment to deal with different devices, architectures and distributions in the same work tree without losing compiled files, build and deploy settings, .config file, remote access configuration and other settings specific for those three devices that I have.

Setup

• Three devices:

  • laptop (debian

    x86

    intel

    local)

  • SteamDeck (steamos

    x86

    amd

    remote)

  • RaspberryPi 4 (raspbian

    arm64

    broadcomm

    remote)

• Goal: To validate a change on DRM/VKMS using a single kernel tree.
• Kworkflow commands:
  • kw env
  • kw d
  • kw bd
  • kw device
  • kw debug
  • kw drm

Demo script

In the same terminal and worktree.

First target device: Laptop (debian|x86|intel|local)

$ kw env --list # list environments available in this work tree
$ kw env --use LOCAL # select the environment of local machine (laptop) to use: loading pre-compiled files, kernel and kworkflow settings.
$ kw device # show device information
$ sudo modinfo vkms # show VKMS module information before applying kernel changes.
$ <open VKMS file and change module info>
$ kw bd # compile and install kernel with the given change
$ sudo modinfo vkms # show VKMS module information after kernel changes.
$ git checkout -- drivers

Second target device: RaspberryPi 4 (raspbian|arm64|broadcomm|remote)

$ kw env --use RPI_64 # move to the environment for a different target device.
$ kw device # show device information and kernel image name
$ kw drm --gui-off-after-reboot # set the system to not load graphical layer after reboot
$ kw b # build the kernel with the VKMS change
$ kw d --reboot # deploy the custom kernel in a Raspberry Pi 4 with Raspbian 64, and reboot
$ kw s # connect with the target machine via ssh and check the kernel image name
$ exit

Third target device: SteamDeck (steamos|x86|amd|remote)

$ kw env --use STEAMDECK # move to the environment for a different target device
$ kw device # show device information
$ kw debug --dmesg --follow --history --cmd="modprobe vkms" # run a command and show the related dmesg output
$ kw debug --dmesg --follow --history --cmd="modprobe -r vkms" # run a command and show the related dmesg output
$ <add a printk with a random msg to appear on dmesg log>
$ kw bd # deploy and install custom kernel to the target device
$ kw debug --dmesg --follow --history --cmd="modprobe vkms" # run a command and show the related dmesg output after build and deploy the kernel change

Q&A

Most of the questions raised at the end of the presentation were actually suggestions and additions of new features to kworkflow.

The first participant, that is also a kernel maintainer, asked about two features: (1) automatize getting patches from patchwork (or lore) and triggering the process of building, deploying and validating them using the existing workflow, (2) bisecting support. They are both very interesting features. The first one fits well the patch-hub subproject, that is under-development, and I’ve actually made a similar request a couple of weeks before the talk. The second is an already existing request in kworkflow github project.

Another request was to use kexec and avoid rebooting the kernel for testing. Reviewing my presentation I realized I wasn’t very clear that kworkflow doesn’t support kexec. As I replied, what it does is to install the modules and you can load/unload them for validations, but for built-in parts, you need to reboot the kernel.

Another two questions: one about Android Debug Bridge (ADB) support instead of SSH and another about support to alternative ways of booting when the custom kernel ended up broken but you only have one kernel image there. Kworkflow doesn’t manage it yet, but I agree this is a very useful feature for embedded devices. On Raspberry Pi 4, kworkflow mitigates this issue by preserving the distro kernel image and using config.txt file to set a custom kernel for booting. For ADB, there is no support too, and as I don’t see currently users of KW working with Android, I don’t think we will have this support any time soon, except if we find new volunteers and increase the pool of contributors.

The last two questions were regarding the status of b4 integration, that is under development, and other debugging features that the tool doesn’t support yet.

Finally, when Andrea and I were changing turn on the stage, he suggested to add support for virtme-ng to kworkflow. So I opened an issue for tracking this feature request in the project github.

With all these questions and requests, I could see the general need for a tool that integrates the variety of kernel developer workflows, as proposed by kworflow. Also, there are still many cases to be covered by kworkflow.

Despite the high demand, this is a completely voluntary project and it is unlikely that we will be able to meet these needs given the limited resources. We will keep trying our best in the hope we can increase the pool of users and contributors too.

Hi!

Last week wlroots 0.19.0-rc1 has been released! It includes the new color management protocol, however it doesn’t include HDR10 support because the renderer and backend bits haven’t yet been merged. Also worth noting is full explicit synchronization support as well as the new screen capture protocols. I plan to release new release candidates weekly until we’re happy with the stability. Please test!

Sway is also getting close to its first release candidate. I plan to publish version 1.11.0-rc1 this week-end. Thanks to Ferdinand Bachmann, Sway no longer aborts on shutdown due to dangling signal listeners. I’ve also updated my HDR10 patch to add an output hdr command (but it’s Sway 1.12 material).

I’ve spent a bit of time on libicc, my C library to manipulate ICC profiles. I’ve introduced an encoder to make it easy to write new ICC profiles, and used that to write a small program to create an ICC profile which inverts colors. The encoder doesn’t support as many ICC elements as the decoder yet (patches welcome!), but does support many interesting bits for display profiles: basic matrices and curves, lut16Type elements and more advanced lutAToBType elements. New APIs have been introduced to apply ICC profile transforms to a color value. I’ve also added tests which compare the results given by libicc and by LittleCMS. For some reason lut16Type and lutAToBType results are multiplied by 2 by LittleCMS, I haven’t yet understood why that is, even after reading the spec in depth and staring at LittleCMS source code for a few hours (if you have a guess please ping me). In the future I’d like to add a small tool to convert ICC profiles to and from JSON files to make it easy to create new files or adjust exist ones.

Version 0.9.0 of the soju IRC bouncer has been released. Among the most notable changes, the database is used by default to store messages, pinned/muted channels and buffers can be synchronized across devices, and database queries have been optimized. I’ve continued working on the Goguma mobile IRC client, fixing a few bugs such as dangling Firebase push subscriptions and message notifications being dismissed too eagerly.

Max Ehrlich has contributed a mako patch to introduce a Notifications property to the mako-specific D-Bus API, so that external programs can monitor active notifications (e.g. display a count in a status bar, or display a list on a lockscreen).

That’s all I have in store, see you next month!

It’s CLover.

We are excited about the Fedora Workstation 42 released today. Having worked on some great features for it.

Fedora Workstation 42 HDR edition
I would say that the main feature that landed was HDR or High Dynamic Range. It is a feature we spent years on with many team members involved and a lot of collaboration with various members of the wider community.

GNOME Settings menu showing HDR settings

HDR setup in Ori and Will of the Wisps

One area that should benefit from HDR support are games. In the screenshot about you see the game Ori and the Will of the Wisps which is known for great HDR support. Valve will need to update to a Wine version for Proton that supports Wayland natively though before this just works, at the moment you can get it working using gamescope, but hopefully soon it will just work under both Mutter and Kwin.

Also a special shoutout to the MPV community for quickly jumping on this and releasing a HDR capable video player recently.

MPV video player playing HDR content

Of course getting Fedora Workstation 42 to out with these features is just the beginning, with the baseline support it now is really the time when application maintainers have a real chance of starting to make use of these features, so I would expect various content creative applications for instance to start having support over the next year.

For the desktop itself there are also open questions we need to decide on like:

• Format to use for HDR screenshots
• Better backlight and brightness handling
• Better offloading
• HDR screen recording video format
• How to handle HDR webcams (seems a lot of them are not really capable of producing HDR output).
• Version of the binary NVIDIA driver released supporting the VK_EXT_hdr_metadata and VK_COLOR_SPACE_HDR10_ST2084_EXT Vulkan extension on Linux
• A million smaller issues we will need to iron out

Accessibility
Our accessibility team has been hard at work trying to ensure we have a great accessibility story in Fedora Workstation 42. Our accessibility team with Lukas Tyrychtr and Bohdan Milar has been working hard together with others to ensure that Fedora Workstation 42 has the best accessibility support you can get on Linux. One major effort that landed was the new keyboard monitoring interface which is critical for making Orca work well under Wayland. This was a collaboration of between Lukas Tyrychtr, Matthias Clasen and Carlos Garnacho on our team. If you are interested in Accessibility, as a user or a developer or both then make sure to join in by reaching out to the Accessibility Working group

PipeWire
PipeWire also keeps going strong with continuous improvements and bugfixes. Thanks to the great work by Jan Grulich the support for PipeWire in Firefox and Chrome is now working great, including for camera handling. It is an area where we want to do an even better job though, so Wim Taymans is currently looking at improving video handling to ensure we are using the best possible video stream the camera can provide and handle conversion between formats transparently. He is currently testing it out using a ffmpeg software backend, but the end goal is to have it all hardware accelerated through directly using Vulkan.

Another feature Wim Taymans added recently is MIDI2 support. This is the next generation of MIDI with only a limited set of hardware currently supporting it, but on the other hand it feels good that we are now able to be ahead of the curve instead of years behind thanks to the solid foundation we built with Pipewire.

Wayland
For a long time the team has been focused on making sure Wayland has all the critical pieces and was functionality wise on the same level as X11. For instance we spent a lot of time and effort on ensuring proper remote desktop support. That work all landed in the previous Fedora release which means that over the last 6 Months the team has had more time to look at things like various proposed Wayland protocols and get them supported in GNOME. Thanks to that we helped ensure the Cursor Shape Protocol and Toplevel Drag protocols got landed in time for this release. We are already looking and what to help land for the next release, so expect a continued acceleration in Wayland protocol adoption going forward.

First steps into AI
So an effort we been plugging away at recently is starting to bring AI tooling to Open Source desktop applications. Our first effort in this regard is Granite.code. Granite.code is a extension for Visual Studio Code that sets up a local AI engine on your system to help with various tasks including code generation and chat inside Visual Studio Code. So what is special about this effort is that it relies on downloading and running a copy of the open source AI Granite LLM model to your system instead on relying on it being run in a cloud instance somewhere. That means you can use Granite.code without having to share your data and work with someone else. Granite.code is still very early stage and it requires a NVIDIA or AMD GPU with over 8GB of video ram to use under Linux. (It also runs under Windows and MacOS X). It is still in a pre-release stage, we are waiting for the Granite 3.3 model update to enable some major features for us before we make the first formal release, but for those willing to help us test you can search for Granite in the Visual Studio Code extension marketplace and install it.
We are hoping though that this will just the starting point where our work can get picked up and used by other IDEs out there too and also we are thinking about how we can offer AI features in other parts of the desktop too.

Granite.code running on Linux

Linux 6.14 is the second release of 2025, and as usual Igalia took part on it. It’s a very normal release, except that it was release on Monday, instead of the usual Sunday release that has been going on for years now. The reason behind this? Well, quoting Linus himself:

I’d like to say that some important last-minute thing came up and delayed things.

But no. It’s just pure incompetence.

But we did not forget about it, so here’s our Linux 6.14 blog post!

A part of the development cycle for this release happened during late December, when a lot of maintainers and developers were taking their deserved breaks. As a result of this, this release contains less changes than usual as stated by LWN as the “lowest level of merge-window activity seen in years”. Nevertheless, some cool features made through this release:

• NT synchronization primitives: Elizabeth Figura, from Codeweavers, is know from her work around improving Wine sync functions, like mutexes and semaphores. She was one the main collaborators behind the futex_waitv() work and now developed a virtual driver that is more compliant with the precise semantics that the NT kernel exposes. This allows Wine to behave closer to Windows without the need to create new syscalls, since this driver uses ioctl() as the front-end uAPI.
• RWF_UNCACHED: Linux has two ways of dealing with storage I/O: buffered I/O (usually the preferred one) that stores data in a temporary buffer and regularly syncs the cache data with the device; and direct I/O that doesn’t use cache and always writes/reads synchronously with the storage device. Now a new mixed approach is available: uncached buffered I/O. This method is aimed to have a fast way to write or read data that will not be needed again in the short term. For reading, the device writes data in the buffer and as soon as the user finished reading the buffer, it’s cleared from the cache. For writing, as soon as userspace fills the cache, the device reads it and removes it from the cache. In this way we still have the advantage of using a fast cache but reducing the cache pressure.
• amdgpu panic support: AMD developers added kernel panic support for amdgpu driver, “which displays a pretty user friendly message on the screen when a Linux kernel panic occurs” instead of just a black screen or a partial dmesg log.

As usual Kernel Newbies provides a very good summary, you should check it for more details: Linux 6.14 changelog. Now let’s jump to see what were the merged contributions by Igalia for this release!

DRM

For the DRM common infrastructure, we helped to land a standardization for DRM client memory usage reporting. Additionally, we contributed to improve and fix bugs found in drivers of AMD, Intel, Broadcom, and Vivante.

AMDGPU

For the AMD driver, we fixed bugs experienced by users of Cosmic Desktop Environment on several AMD hardware versions. One was uncovered with the introduction of overlay cursor mode, and a definition mismatch across the display driver caused a page-fault in the usage of multiple overlay planes. Another bug was related to division by zero on plane scaling. Also, we fixed regressions on VRR and MST generated by the series of changes to migrate AMD display driver from open-coded EDID handling to drm_edid struct.

Intel

For the Intel drivers, we fixed a bug in the xe GPU driver which prevented certain type of workarounds from being applied, helped with the maintainership of the i915 driver, handled external code contributions, maintained the development branch and sent several pull requests.

Raspberry Pi (V3D)

We fixed the GPU resets for the Raspberry Pi 4 as we found out to be broken as per a user bug report.

Also in the V3D driver, the active performance monitor is now properly stopped before being destroyed, addressing a potential use-after-free issue. Additionally, support for a global performance monitor has been added via a new DRM_IOCTL_V3D_PERFMON_SET_GLOBAL ioctl. This allows all jobs to share a single, globally configured perfmon, enabling more consistent performance tracking and paving the way for integration with user-space tools such as perfetto.

A small video demo of perfetto integration with V3D

etnaviv

On the etnaviv side, fdinfo support has been implemented to expose memory usage statistics per file descriptor, enhancing observability and debugging capabilities for memory-related behavior.

sched_ext

Many BPF schedulers (e.g., scx_lavd) frequently call bpf_ktime_get_ns() for tracking tasks’ runtime properties. bpf_ktime_get_ns() eventually reads a hardware timestamp counter (TSC). However, reading a hardware TSC is not performant in some hardware platforms, degrading instructions per cycyle (IPC).

We addressed the performance problem of reading hardware TSC by leveraging the rq clock in the scheduler core, introducing a scx_bpf_now() function for BPF schedulers. Whenever the rq clock is fresh and valid, scx_bpf_now() provides the rq clock, which is already updated by the scheduler core, so it can reduce reading the hardware TSC. Using scx_bpf_now() reduces the number of reading hardware TSC by 50-80% (e.g., 76% for scx_lavd).

Assorted kernel fixes

Continuing our efforts on cleaning up kernel bugs, we provided a few fixes that address issues reported by syzbot with the goal of increasing stability and security, leveraging the fuzzing capabilities of syzkaller to bring to the surface certain bugs that are hard to notice otherwise. We’re addressing bug reports from different kernel areas, including drivers and core subsystems such as the memory manager. As part of this effort, several fixes were done for the probe path of the rtlwifi driver.

Check the complete list of Igalia’s contributions for the 6.14 release

Authored (38)

Changwoo Min

• sched_ext: Relocate scx_enabled() related code
• sched_ext: Implement scx_bpf_now()
• sched_ext: Add scx_bpf_now() for BPF scheduler
• sched_ext: Add time helpers for BPF schedulers
• sched_ext: Replace bpf_ktime_get_ns() to scx_bpf_now()
• sched_ext: Use time helpers in BPF schedulers
• sched_ext: Fix incorrect time delta calculation in time_delta()

Christian Gmeiner

• drm/v3d: Stop active perfmon if it is being destroyed
• drm/etnaviv: Add fdinfo support for memory stats
• drm/v3d: Add DRM_IOCTL_V3D_PERFMON_SET_GLOBAL

Luis Henriques

• fuse: fix possible deadlock if rings are never initialized

Maíra Canal

• drm/v3d: Fix performance counter source settings on V3D 7.x
• drm/v3d: Fix miscellaneous documentation errors
• drm/v3d: Assign job pointer to NULL before signaling the fence
• drm/v3d: Don’t run jobs that have errors flagged in its fence
• drm/v3d: Set job pointer to NULL when the job’s fence has an error

Melissa Wen

• drm/amd/display: fix page fault due to max surface definition mismatch
• drm/amd/display: increase MAX_SURFACES to the value supported by hw
• drm/amd/display: fix divide error in DM plane scale calcs
• drm/amd/display: restore invalid MSA timing check for freesync
• drm/amd/display: restore edid reading from a given i2c adapter

Ricardo Cañuelo Navarro

• mm,madvise,hugetlb: check for 0-length range after end address adjustment
• mm: shmem: remove unnecessary warning in shmem_writepage()

Rodrigo Siqueira

• MAINTAINERS: Change my role from Maintainer to Reviewer
• mailmap: Add entry for Rodrigo Siqueira

Thadeu Lima de Souza Cascardo

• wifi: rtlwifi: do not complete firmware loading needlessly
• wifi: rtlwifi: rtl8192se: rise completion of firmware loading as last step
• wifi: rtlwifi: wait for firmware loading before releasing memory
• wifi: rtlwifi: fix init_sw_vars leak when probe fails
• wifi: rtlwifi: usb: fix workqueue leak when probe fails
• wifi: rtlwifi: remove unused check_buddy_priv
• wifi: rtlwifi: destroy workqueue at rtl_deinit_core
• wifi: rtlwifi: fix memory leaks and invalid access at probe error path
• wifi: rtlwifi: pci: wait for firmware loading before releasing memory
• Revert “media: uvcvideo: Require entities to have a non-zero unique ID”
• char: misc: deallocate static minor in error path

Tvrtko Ursulin

• drm/amdgpu: Use DRM scheduler API in amdgpu_xcp_release_sched
• drm/xe: Fix GT “for each engine” workarounds

Reviewed (36)

André Almeida

• ASoC: cs35l41: Fallback to using HID for system_name if no SUB is available
• ASoC: cs35l41: Fix acpi_device_hid() not found

Christian Gmeiner

• drm/v3d: Fix performance counter source settings on V3D 7.x
• drm/etnaviv: Convert timeouts to secs_to_jiffies()

Iago Toral Quiroga

• drm/v3d: Fix performance counter source settings on V3D 7.x
• drm/v3d: Assign job pointer to NULL before signaling the fence
• drm/v3d: Don’t run jobs that have errors flagged in its fence
• drm/v3d: Set job pointer to NULL when the job’s fence has an error

Jose Maria Casanova Crespo

• drm/v3d: Assign job pointer to NULL before signaling the fence

Luis Henriques

• fuse: rename to fuse_dev_end_requests and make non-static
• fuse: Move fuse_get_dev to header file
• fuse: Move request bits
• fuse: Add fuse-io-uring design documentation
• fuse: make args->in_args[0] to be always the header
• fuse: {io-uring} Handle SQEs - register commands
• fuse: Make fuse_copy non static
• fuse: Add fuse-io-uring handling into fuse_copy
• fuse: {io-uring} Make hash-list req unique finding functions non-static
• fuse: Add io-uring sqe commit and fetch support
• fuse: {io-uring} Handle teardown of ring entries
• fuse: {io-uring} Make fuse_dev_queue_{interrupt,forget} non-static
• fuse: Allow to queue fg requests through io-uring
• fuse: Allow to queue bg requests through io-uring
• fuse: {io-uring} Prevent mount point hang on fuse-server termination
• fuse: block request allocation until io-uring init is complete
• fuse: enable fuse-over-io-uring
• fuse: prevent disabling io-uring on active connections

Maíra Canal

• drm/vkms: Remove index parameter from init_vkms_output
• drm/vkms: Code formatting
• drm/vkms: Use drm_frame directly
• drm/vkms: Use const for input pointers in pixel_read an pixel_write functions
• drm/v3d: Add DRM_IOCTL_V3D_PERFMON_SET_GLOBAL

Tvrtko Ursulin

• drm/etnaviv: Add fdinfo support for memory stats
• drm: make drm-active- stats optional
• Documentation/gpu: Clarify drm memory stats definition
• drm/sched: Fix preprocessor guard

Tested (2)

André Almeida

• ASoC: cs35l41: Fallback to using HID for system_name if no SUB is available

Christian Gmeiner

• hexagon: fix using plain integer as NULL pointer warning in cmpxchg

Acked (1)

Iago Toral Quiroga

• drm/v3d: Fix miscellaneous documentation errors

Maintainer SoB (6)

Maíra Canal

• drm/v3d: Stop active perfmon if it is being destroyed
• drm/v3d: Add DRM_IOCTL_V3D_PERFMON_SET_GLOBAL
• drm/vc4: plane: Remove WARN on state being set in plane_reset

Tvrtko Ursulin

• drm/i915: Remove deadcode
• drm/i915: Remove unused intel_huc_suspend
• drm/i915: Remove unused intel_ring_cacheline_align

Hi all!

This month I’ve finally finished my initial work on HDR10 support for wlroots! My branch supports playing both SDR and HDR content on either an SDR or HDR output. It’s a pretty basic version: wlroots only performs very basic gamut mapping, and has a simple luminance multiplier instead of proper tone mapping. Additionally the source content luminance and mastering display metadata isn’t taken into account. Thus the result isn’t as good as it could be, but that can be improved once the initial work is merged!

I’ve also been talking with dnkl about blending optical color values rather than electrical values in foot (“gamma-correct blending”). Thanks to the color-management protocol, foot can specify that its buffers contain linearly encoded values (as opposed to the default, sRGB) and can implement this blending method without sacrificing performance. See the foot pull request for more details.

We’ve been working on fixing the few last known blockers remaining for the next wlroots release, in particular related to scene-graph clipping, custom modes, and explicit synchronization. I hope we’ll be able to start the release candidate dance soon.

The NPotM is Bakah, a small utility to build Docker Bake configuration files with Buildah (the library powering Podman). I’ve written more about the motivation and design of this tool in a separate article.

I’ve released tlstunnel 0.4 with better support for certificate files and some bugfixes. The sogogi WebDAV file server got support for graceful shutdown and Unix socket listeners thanks to Krystian Chachuła. Last, mako 1.10 adds a bunch of useful features such as include directives, more customization for border sizes and icon border radius, and a --no-history flag for makoctl dismiss.

See you next month!

This time I have three topics.

First, I want to promote the blog post I wrote to celebrate the landing of the Wayland color-management extension into wayland-protocols staging area. It's a brief historique of the journey.

Second, I want to discuss SDR and HDR video modes on monitors and TVs. I have seen people expect that the same sRGB content displayed on the SDR video mode and the HDR (BT.2100/PQ) video mode on the same monitor will look the same, and they can arbitrarily switch between the modes at any time. I have argued that this is a false expectation. Why?

Monitors tend to have a slew of settings. I tend to call them monitor "knobs". There are brightness, contrast, color temperature, picture mode, dynamic contrast, sharpness, gamma, and whatever. Many people have noticed that when the video source puts the monitor into BT.2100/PQ video mode, the monitor locks out some settings, often brightness and/or contrast included. So, SDR and HDR video modes do not play by the same rules. Hence, one cannot generally expect a match even if the video source does everything correctly.

Third, there is marketing. Have a look at the first third of this video. They discuss video streaming services, TV selling, and HDR from the picture quality point of view. My take of that is, that (some? most?) monitors and TVs come with a screaming broken picture out-of-the-box because marketing has to sell them. If all displays displayed a given content as intended, they would all look the same, major technology differences notwithstanding, but marketing wants to make each individual stand out.

Have you heard of TV calibration services? If I buy a new TV from a local electronics department store, they offer a calibration service, for a considerable additional fee. Why would anyone need a calibration service, the factory settings should be good, right?

New Frontiers

More info

Once Again We Return Home

It’s been a while, but for the first time this year I have to do it. Some of you are shaking your heads, saying you knew it, and you were right. Here we are again.

It’s time to vkoverhead.

The Numbers Must Go Up

I realized while working on some P E R F that there was a lot of perf to be gained in places I wasn’t testing. That makes sense, right? If there’s no coverage, the perf can’t go up.

So I added a new case for the path I was using, and boy howdy did I start to see some weird stuff.

Normally this is where I’d post up some gorgeous flamegraphs, and we would sit back in our expensive leather armchairs debating the finer points of optimization. But you know what? We can’t do that anymore.

Why, you’re asking. The reason is simple: perf is totally fucking broken and has been for a while. But only on certain machines. Specifically, mine. So no more flamegraphs for you, and none for me.

Despite this massive roadblock, the perf gains must continue. Through the power of guesswork and frustration, I’ve managed some sizable gains:

Though I was mainly targeting the case of using dynamic vertex input and binding new vertex buffers for every draw (and managed a nearly 100% improvement there) , I ended up seeing noteworthy gains across the board for binding vertex buffers, even when using fully static state. This should provide some minor gains to general RADV perf.

Future Improvements

Given the still-massive perf gap between using static and dynamic vertex state when only vertex buffers change, it seems likely there’s still some opportunities to reclaim more perf. Only time will tell what can be achieved here, but for now this is what I’ve got.

Insanity Has A Name

Karol Herbst. At SGC, we know this man. We fear him. His photo is on the wall over a break-in-case-of-emergency glass panel which shields a button activating a subterranean escape route set to implode as soon as I sprint through.

Despite this, and despite all past evidence leading me to be wary of any idea he pitched, the madman got me again.

cl_khr_image2d_from_buffer. On the surface, an innocuous little extension used to access a buffer like a 2D image. Vulkan already has this support for 1D images in the form of VkBufferView, so why would adding a stride to that be any harder (aside from the fact that the API doesn’t support it)?

I was deep into otherworldly optimizations at this point, far beyond the point where I was able to differentiate between improvement and neutral, let alone sane or twisted. His words seemed so reasonable: why couldn’t I just throw a buffer to the GPU as a 2D image? I’d have to be an idiot not to be able to do something as simple as that. Wouldn’t I?

Dammit, Karol.

How to 2D a Buffer

You can’t. I mean, I can, but you? Vulkan won’t let you do it. There’s (currently) no extension that enables a 2D bufferview. Rumor has it some madman on a typewriter is preparing to fax over an extension specification to add this, but only time will tell whether Khronos accepts submissions in this format.

Here at SGC, we’re all smart HUMANS though, so there’s an obvious solution to this.

It’s not memory aliasing. Sure, rebinding buffer memory onto an image might work. But in reading the spec, the synchronization guarantees for buffer-image aliasing didn’t seem that strong. And also it’d be a whole bunch of code to track it, and maybe do weird layout stuff, and add some kind of synchronization on the buffer too, and pray the driver isn’t buggy, and doesn’t this sound a lot like the we-have-this-at-home version of another, better mechanism that zink already has incredible support for?

Yeah. What about these things? How do they wORK?

DMA Buffers: Totally Normal

A DMAbuf is basically a pipe. On one end you have memory. And if you yell TRIANGLE into the other end really loud, something unimaginable and ineffable that lurks deep withinthevoid will slitherand crawl its way up the pipeuntil it GAZES UPON YOU IN YOUR FLESHY MORTAL SHELL ATTEMPTING TO USURP THE POWERS OF THE OLD ONES. It’s a fun little experiment with absolutely no unwanted consequences. Try it at home!

The nice thing about dmabufs is I know they work. And I know they work in zink. That’s because in order to run an x̸̧̠͓̣̣͎͚̰͎̍̾s̶̡̢͙̞̙͍̬̝̠̩̱̞̮̩̣̑͂͊̎͆̒̓͐͛͊̒͆̄̋ȩ̶̡̨̳̭̲̹̲͎̪̜͒̓̈́̏r̶̩̗͖͙͖̬̟̞̜̠͙̠̎͑̉̌̎̍̑́̏̓̏̒̍͜͝v̶̞̠̰̘̞͖̙̯̩̯̝̂̃̕͜e̴̢̡͎̮͔̤͖̤͙̟̳̹͛̓͌̈̆̈́̽͘̕ŕ̶̫̾͐͘ or a Wayland compositor (e.g., Ŵ̶̢͍̜̙̺͈͉̼̩̯̺̗̰̰͕͍̱͊͊̓̈̀͛̾̒̂̚̕͝ͅḙ̵̛̬̜͔̲͕͖̜̱̻͊̌̾͊͘s̶̢̗̜͈̘͎̠̘̺͉͕̣̯̘̦͓͈̹̻͙̬̘̿͆̏̃̐̍̂̕ͅt̷̨͈̠͕͔̬̙̣͈̪͕̱͕̙̦͕̼̩͙̲͖͉̪̹̼͛̌͋̃̂̂̓̏̂́̔͠͝ͅơ̸̢̛̛̲̟͙͚̰͇̞̖̭̲͍͇̫̘̦̤̩̖͍̄̓́͑̉̿̅̀̉͒͋͒̂́̆̋̚͝ͅͅn̶̢̡̝̥̤̣͔̣͉͖̖̻̬̝̥̦͇͕̘͋͂͛̌̃͠ͅͅ, the reference compositor), dmabufs have to work. Zink can run both of those just fine, so I know there’s absolutely zero bugs. There can’t be any bugs. No. Not bugs again. NO MORE BUGS

Even better, I know that I can do imports and exports of dmabufs in any dimensionality thanks to that crazy CL-GL sharing extension Karol already suckered me into supporting at the expense of every Vulkan driver’s bug tracker. That KAROL HERBST guy, hah, he’s such a kidder!

So obviously–It’s just common sense at this point–Obviously I should just be able to hook up the pipes here. Export a buffer and then import a 2D image with whatever random CAUSALITY IS A LIE passes for stride. Right? Basically a day at the beach for me.

And of course it works perfectly with no problems whatsoever, giving Davinci Resolve a nice performance boost.

Stay sane, readers.

1. Some ov08x40 sensor patches, these are available as downstream cherry-picks in Fedora kernels >= 6.12.13
2. A small pipewire fix to avoid WirePlumber listing a bunch of bogus extra "ipu6" Video Sources, these fixes are available in Fedora's pipewire packages >= 1.2.7-4
3. I2C and GPIO drivers for the new Lattice USB IO-expander, these drivers are not available in the upstream / mainline kernel yet

• Camera's failing on Dell XPS laptops due to iVSC errors (rhbz#2316918, rhbz#2324683) after a long debugging session this is finally fixed, the fix for this will be available in Fedora kernels >= 6.13.4 which should show up in updates-testing today
• Camera's no working on Microsoft Surface book with ov7251 sensor, the fix for this has landed upstream
   

Ready in time for libinput 1.28 [1] and after a number of attempts over the years we now finally have 3-finger dragging in libinput. This is a long-requested feature that allows users to drag by using a 3-finger swipe on the touchpad. Instead of the normal swipe gesture you simply get a button down, pointer motion, button up sequence. Without having to tap or physically click and hold a button, so you might be able to see the appeal right there.

Now, as with any interaction that relies on the mere handful of fingers that are on our average user's hand, we are starting to have usage overlaps. Since the only difference between a swipe gesture and a 3-finger drag is in the intention of the user (and we can't detect that yet, stay tuned), 3-finger swipes are disabled when 3-finger dragging is enabled. Otherwise it does fit in quite nicely with the rest of the features we have though.

There really isn't much more to say about the new feature except: It's configurable to work on 4-finger drag too so if you mentally substitute all the threes with fours in this article before re-reading it that would save me having to write another blog post. Thanks.

[1] "soonish" at the time of writing

This is a heads up as mutter PR!4292 got merged in time for GNOME 48. It (subtly) changes the behaviour of drag lock on touchpads, but (IMO) very much so for the better. Note that this feature is currently not exposed in GNOME Settings so users will have to set it via e.g. the gsettings commandline tool. I don't expect this change to affect many users.

This is a feature of a feature of a feature, so let's start at the top.

"Tapping" on touchpads refers to the ability to emulate button presses via short touches ("taps") on the touchpad. When enabled, a single-finger tap corresponds emulates a left mouse button click, a two-finger tap a right button click, etc. Taps are short interactions and to be recognised the finger must be set down and released again within a certain time and not move more than a certain distance. Clicking is useful but it's not everything we do with touchpads.

"Tap-and-drag" refers to the ability to keep the pointer down so it's possible to drag something while the mouse button is logically down. The sequence required to do this is a tap immediately followed by the finger down (and held down). This will press the left mouse button so that any finger movement results in a drag. Releasing the finger releases the button. This is convenient but especially on large monitors or for users with different-than-whatever-we-guessed-is-average dexterity this can make it hard to drag something to it's final position - a user may run out of touchpad space before the pointer reaches the destination. For those, the tap-and-drag "drag lock" is useful.

"Drag lock" refers to the ability of keeping the mouse button pressed until "unlocked", even if the finger moves off the touchpads. It's the same sequence as before: tap followed by the finger down and held down. But releasing the finger will not release the mouse button, instead another tap is required to unlock and release the mouse button. The whole sequence thus becomes tap, down, move.... tap with any number of finger releases in between. Sounds (and is) complicated to explain, is quite easy to try and once you're used to it it will feel quite natural.

The above behaviour is the new behaviour which non-coincidentally also matches the macOS behaviour (if you can find the toggle in the settings, good practice for easter eggs!). The previous behaviour used a timeout instead so the mouse button was released automatically if the finger was up after a certain timeout. This was less predictable and caused issues with users who weren't fast enough. The new "sticky" behaviour resolves this issue and is (alanis morissette-stylue ironically) faster to release (a tap can be performed before the previous timeout would've expired).

Anyway, TLDR, a feature that very few people use has changed defaults subtly. Bring out the pitchforks!

As said above, this is currently only accessible via gsettings and the drag-lock behaviour change only takes effect if tapping, tap-and-drag and drag lock are enabled:

  $ gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.peripherals.touchpad tap-to-click true
  $ gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.peripherals.touchpad tap-and-drag true
  $ gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.peripherals.touchpad tap-and-drag-lock true
  

For my day job, I need to build and run a Docker Compose project. However, because Docker doesn’t play well with nftables and I prefer a rootless + daemonless approach, I’m using Podman.

Podman supports Docker Compose projects with two possible solutions: either by connecting the official Docker Compose CLI to a Podman socket, either by using their own drop-in replacement. They ship a small wrapper to select one of these options. (The wrapper has the same name as the replacement, which makes things confusing.)

Unfortunately, both options have downsides. When using the official Docker Compose CLI, the classic builder is used instead of the newer BuildKit builder. As a result, some features such as additional contexts are not supported. When using the podman-compose replacement, some other features are missing, such as !reset, configs and referencing another service in additional contexts. It would be possible to add these features to podman-compose, but that’s an endless stream of work (Docker Compose regularly adds new features) and I don’t really see the value in re-implementing all of this (the fact that it’s Python doesn’t help me getting motivated).

I’ve started looking for a way to convince the Docker Compose CLI to run under Podman with BuildKit enabled. I’ve tried a few months ago and never got it to work, but it seems like this recently became easier! The podman-compose wrapper force-disables BuildKit, so we need to use directly the Docker Compose CLI without the wrapper. On Arch Linux, this can be achieved by enabling the Podman socket and creating a new Docker context (same as setting DOCKER_HOST, but more permanent):

pacman -S docker-compose docker-buildx
systemctl --user start podman.socket
docker context create podman --docker host=unix://$XDG_RUNTIME_DIR/podman/podman.sock
docker context use podman

With that, docker compose just works! It turns out it automagically creates a buildx_buildkit_default container under-the-hood to run the BuildKit daemon. Since I don’t like automagical things, I immediately tried to run BuildKit daemon myself:

pacman -S buildkit
systemctl --user start buildkit.service
docker buildx create --name local unix://$XDG_RUNTIME_DIR/buildkit/rootless
docker buildx use local

Now docker compose uses our systemd-managed BuildKit service. But we’re not done yet! One of the reasons I like Podman is because it’s daemonless, and we’ve got a daemon running in the background. This isn’t the end of the world, but it’d be nicer to be able to run the build without BuildKit.

Fortunately, there’s a way around this: any Compose project can be turned into a JSON description of the build commands called Bake. docker buildx bake --print will print that JSON file (and the Docker Compose CLI will use Bake files if COMPOSE_BAKE=true is set since v2.33). Note, Bake supports way more features (e.g. HCL files) but we don’t really need these for our purposes (and the command above can lower fancy Bake files into dumb JSON ones).

The JSON file is pretty similar to the podman build CLI arguments. It’s not that hard to do the translation, so I’ve written Bakah, a small tool which does exactly this. It uses Buildah instead of shelling out to Podman (Buildah is the library used by Podman under-the-hood to build images). A few details required a bit more attention, for instance dependency resolution and parallel builds, but it’s quite simple. It can be used like so:

docker buildx bake --print >bake.json
bakah --file bake.json

Bakah is still missing the fancier Bake features (HCL files, inheritance, merging/overriding files, variables, and so on), but it’s enough to build complex Compose projects. I plan to use it for soju-containers in the future, to better split my Dockerfiles (one for the backend, one for the frontend) and remove the CI shell script (which contains a bunch of Podman CLI invocations). I hope it can be useful to you as well!

Busy.

I didn’t forget to blog. I know you don’t believe me, but I’ve been accumulating items to blog about for the past month. Powering up. Preparing. And now, finally, it’s time to begin opening the valves.

Insanity Returns

When I got back from hibernation, I was immediately accosted by a developer I’d forgotten. One with whom I spent an amount of time consuming adult beverages at XDC again. One who walks with a perpetual glint of madness in his eyes, ready at the drop of a hat to tackle the nearest driver developer and begin raving about the benefits of supporting OpenCL.

Obviously I’m talking about Karol “HOW IS THE PUB ALREADY CLOSED IT’S ONLY 10:30???” Herbst.

I was minding my own business, fixing bugs and addressing perf issues when he assaulted me with a vicious nerdsnipe late one night in January. “Hey, why can’t I run DaVinci Resolve on Zink?” he casually asked me, knowing full well the ramifications of such a question.

I tried to put him off, but he persisted. “You know, RadeonSI supports all those features,” he said next, and my entire week was ruined. As everyone knows, Zink can only ever be compared to one driver, and the comparisons can’t be too uneven.

So it was that I started looking at the CL CTS for the first time this year to implement cl_khr_gl_sharing. This extension is basically EXT_external_objects for CL. It should “just work”. Right?

Right…

The thing is, this mechanism (on Linux) uses dmabufs. You know, that thing we all love because they make display servers go vroom. dmabufs allow sharing memory regions between processes through file descriptors. Or just within the same process. Anywhere, really. One side exports the memory object to the FD, and the other side imports it.

But that’s how normal people use dmabufs. 2D image import/export for display server usage. Or, occasionally, some crazy multi-process browser engine thing. But still 2D.

You know who uses dmabufs with all-the-Ds? OpenCL.

You know who doesn’t implement all-the-Ds? Any Vulkan drivers. Probably. Case in point, I had to hack it in for RADV before I could get CTS to pass and VVL to stop screaming at me.

From there, it turned out zink mostly supported everything already. A minor bugfix and some conditionals to enable raw buffer import/export, and it just works.

Brace yourselves, because this is the foundation for getting Cthulhu-level insane next time.

Hi!

This month has been pretty hectic, with FOSDEM and all. I’ve really enjoyed meeting face-to-face all of these folks I work online with the rest of the year! My talk about modern IRC has been published on the FOSDEM website (unfortunately the audio quality isn’t great).

In Wayland news, the color management protocol has finally been merged! I haven’t done much apart cheering from the sidelines: huge thanks to everyone involved for carrying this over the finish line, especially Pekka Paalanen, Sebastian Wick and Xaver Hugl! I’ve started a wlroots implementation, which was enough with some hacks to get MPV to display a HDR video on Sway. I’ve also posted a patch to convert to BT2020 and encode to PQ, but I still need to figure out why red shows up as pink (or rebrand it as lipstick-filter in the Sway config file).

I’ve released sway 1.10.1 with a bunch of bugfixes, as well as wlr-randr 0.5.0 which adds relative positioning options (e.g. --left-of) and a man page. I’ve rewritten makoctl in C (the shell script approach has been showing its limitations for a while), and merged support for icon border radius, per-corner radius settings, and a new signal in the mako-specific D-Bus API to notify when the current modes are changed.

delthas has contributed support for showing redacted messages as such in gamja. goguma’s compact mode now displays an unread and date delimiter, just like the default mode (thanks Eigil Skjæveland!). I’ve added a basic UI to my WebDAV server, sogogi, to display directory listings and easily upload files from the browser.

That’s all, see you next month!

So a we are a little bit into the new year I hope everybody had a great break and a good start of 2025. Personally I had a blast having gotten the kids an air hockey table as a Yuletide present :). Anyway, wanted to put this blog post together talking about what we are looking at for the new year and to let you all know that we are hiring.

Artificial Intelligence
One big item on our list for the year is looking at ways Fedora Workstation can make use of artificial intelligence. Thanks to IBMs Granite effort we know have an AI engine that is available under proper open source licensing terms and which can be extended for many different usecases. Also the IBM Granite team has an aggressive plan for releasing updated versions of Granite, incorporating new features of special interest to developers, like making Granite a great engine to power IDEs and similar tools. We been brainstorming various ideas in the team for how we can make use of AI to provide improved or new features to users of GNOME and Fedora Workstation. This includes making sure Fedora Workstation users have access to great tools like RamaLama, that we make sure setting up accelerated AI inside Toolbx is simple, that we offer a good Code Assistant based on Granite and that we come up with other cool integration points.

Wayland
The Wayland community had some challenges last year with frustrations boiling over a few times due to new protocol development taking a long time. Some of it was simply the challenge of finding enough people across multiple projects having the time to follow up and help review while other parts are genuine disagreements of what kind of things should be Wayland protocols or not. That said I think that problem has been somewhat resolved with a general understanding now that we have the ‘ext’ namespace for a reason, to allow people to have a space to review and make protocols without an expectation that they will be universally implemented. This allows for protocols of interest only to a subset of the community going into ‘ext’ and thus allowing protocols that might not be of interest to GNOME and KDE for instance to still have a place to live.

The other more practical problem is that of having people available to help review protocols or providing reference implementations. In a space like Wayland where you need multiple people from multiple different projects it can be hard at times to get enough people involved at any given time to move things forward, as different projects have different priorities and of course the developers involved might be busy elsewhere. One thing we have done to try to help out there is to set up a small internal team, lead by Jonas Ådahl, to discuss in-progress Wayland protocols and assign people the responsibility to follow up on those protocols we have an interest in. This has been helpful both as a way for us to develop internal consensus on the best way forward, but also I think our contribution upstream has become more efficient due to this.

All that said I also believe Wayland protocols will fade a bit into the background going forward. We are currently at the last stage of a community ‘ramp up’ on Wayland and thus there is a lot of focus on it, but once we are over that phase we will probably see what we saw with X.org extensions over time, that for the most time new extensions are so niche that 95% of the community don’t pay attention or care. There will always be some new technology creating the need for important new protocols, but those are likely to come along a relatively slow cadence.

High Dynamic Range

HDR support in GNOME Control Center

As for concrete Wayland protocols the single biggest thing for us for a long while now has of course been the HDR support for Linux. And it was great to see the HDR protocol get merged just before the holidays. I also want to give a shout out to Xaver Hugl from the KWin project. As we where working to ramp up HDR support in both GNOME Shell and GTK+ we ended up working with Xaver and using Kwin for testing especially the GTK+ implementation. Xaver was very friendly and collaborative and I think HDR support in both GNOME and KDE is more solid thanks to that collaboration, so thank you Xaver!

Talking about concrete progress on HDR support Jonas Adahl submitted merge requests for HDR UI controls for GNOME Control Center. This means you will be able to configure the use of HDR on your system in the next Fedora Workstation release.

PipeWire
I been sharing a lot of cool PipeWire news here in the last couple of years, but things might slow down a little as we go forward just because all the major features are basically working well now. The PulseAudio support is working well and we get very few bug reports now against it. The reports we are getting from the pro-audio community is that PipeWire works just as well or better as JACK for most people in terms of for instance latency, and when we do see issues with pro-audio it tends to be more often caused by driver issues triggered by PipeWire trying to use the device in ways that JACK didn’t. We been resolving those by adding more and more options to hardcode certain options in PipeWire, so that just as with JACK you can force PipeWire to not try things the driver has problems with. Of course fixing the drivers would be the best outcome, but for some of these pro-audio cards they are so niche that it is hard to find developers who wants to work on them or who has hardware to test with.

We are still maturing the video support although even that is getting very solid now. The screen capture support is considered fully mature, but the camera support is still a bit of a work in progress, partially because we are going to a generational change the camera landscape with UVC cameras being supplanted by MIPI cameras. Resolving that generational change isn’t just on PipeWire of course, but it does make the a more volatile landscape to mature something in. Of course an advantage here is that applications using PipeWire can easily switch between V4L2 UVC cameras and libcamera MIPI cameras, thus helping users have a smooth experience through this transition period.
But even with the challenges posed by this we are moving rapidly forward with Firefox PipeWire camera support being on by default in Fedora now, Chrome coming along quickly and OBS Studio having PipeWire support for some time already. And last but not least SDL3 is now out with PipeWire camera support.

MIPI camera support
Hans de Goede, Milan Zamazal and Kate Hsuan keeps working on making sure MIPI cameras work under Linux. MIPI cameras are a step forward in terms of technical capabilities, but at the moment a bit of a step backward in terms of open source as a lot of vendors believe they have ‘secret sauce’ in the MIPI camera stacks. Our works focuses mostly on getting the Intel MIPI stack fully working under Linux with the Lattice MIPI aggregator being the biggest hurdle currently for some laptops. Luckily Alan Stern, the USB kernel maintainer, is looking at this now as he got the hardware himself.

Flatpak
Some major improvements to the Flatpak stack has happened recently with the USB portal merged upstream. The USB portal came out of the Sovereign fund funding for GNOME and it gives us a more secure way to give sandboxed applications access to you USB devcices. In a somewhat related note we are still working on making system daemons installable through Flatpak, with the usecase being applications that has a system daemon to communicate with a specific piece of hardware for example (usually through USB). Christian Hergert got this on his todo list, but we are at the moment waiting for Lennart Poettering to merge some pre-requisite work into systemd that we want to base this on.

Accessibility
We are putting in a lot of effort towards accessibility these days. This includes working on portals and Wayland extensions to help facilitate accessibility, working on the ORCA screen reader and its dependencies to ensure it works great under Wayland. Working on GTK4 to ensure we got top notch accessibility support in the toolkit and more.

GNOME Software
Last year Milan Crha landed the support for signing the NVIDIA driver for use on secure boot. The main feature Milan he is looking at now is getting support for DNF5 into GNOME Software. Doing this will resolve one of the longest standing annoyances we had, which is that the dnf command line and GNOME Software would maintain two separate package caches. Once the DNF5 transition is done that should be a thing of the past and thus less risk of disk space being wasted on an extra set of cached packages.

Firefox
Martin Stransky and Jan Horak has been working hard at making Firefox ready for the future, with a lot of work going into making sure it supports the portals needed to function as a flatpak and by bringing HDR support to Firefox. In fact Martin just got his HDR patches for Firefox merged this week. So with the PipeWire camera support, Flatpak support and HDR support in place, Firefox will be ready for the future.

We are hiring! looking for 2 talented developers to join the Red Hat desktop team
We are hiring! So we got 2 job openings on the Red Hat desktop team! So if you are interested in joining us in pushing the boundaries of desktop linux forward please take a look and apply. For these 2 positions we are open to remote workers across the globe and while the job adds list specific seniorities we are somewhat flexible on that front too for the right candidate. So be sure to check out the two job listings and get your application in! If you ever wanted to work fulltime on GNOME and related technologies this is your chance.

Just as 2025 is starting, we got a new Linux release in mid January, tagged as 6.13. In the spirit of holidays, Linus Torvalds even announced during 6.13-rc6 that he would be building and raffling a guitar pedal for a random kernel developer!

As usual, this release comes with a pack of exciting news done by the kernel community:

• This release has two important improvements for task scheduling: lazy preemption and proxy execution. The goal with lazy preemption is to find a better balance between throughput and response time. A secondary goal is being able to make it the preferred non-realtime scheduling policy for most cases. Tasks that really need a reschedule in a hurry will use the older TIF_NEED_RESCHED flag. A preliminary work for proxy execution was merged, which will let us avoid priority-inversion scenarios when using real time tasks with deadline scheduling, for use cases such as Android.

• New important Rust abstractions arrived, such as VFS data structures and interfaces, and also abstractions for misc devices.

• Lightweight guard pages: guard pages are used to raise a fatal signal when accessed. This feature had the drawback of having a heavy performance impact, but in this new release the flag MADV_GUARD_INSTALL was added for the madvise() syscall, offering a lightweight way to guard pages.

To know more about the community improvements, check out the summary made by Kernel Newbies.

Now let’s highlight the contributions made by Igalians for this release.

Case-insensitive support for tmpfs

Case sensitivity has been a traditional difference between Linux distros and MS Windows, with the most popular filesystems been in opposite sides: while ext4 is case sensitive, NTFS is case insensitive. This difference proved to be challenging when Windows apps, mainly games, started to be a common use case for Linux distros (thanks to Wine!). For instance, games running through Steam’s Proton would expect that the path assets/player.png and assets/PLAYER.PNG would point to be the same file, but this is not the case in ext4. To avoid doing workarounds in userspace, ext4 has support for casefolding since Linux 5.2.

Now, tmpfs joins the group of filesystems with case-insensitive support. This is particularly useful for running games inside containers, like the combination of Wine + Flatpak. In such scenarios, the container shares a subset of the host filesystem with the application, mounting it using tmpfs. To keep the filesystem consistent, with the same expectations of the host filesystem about the mounted one, if the host filesystem is case-insensitive we can do the same thing for the container filesystem too. You can read more about the use case in the patchset cover letter.

While the container frameworks implement proper support for this feature, you can play with it and try it yourself:

$ mount -t tmpfs -o casefold fs_name /mytmpfs
$ cd /mytmpfs # case-sensitive by default, we still need to enable it
$ mkdir a
$ touch a; touch A
$ ls
A  a
$ mkdir B; cd b
cd: The directory 'b' does not exist
$ # now let's create a case-insensitive dir
$ mkdir case_dir
$ chattr +F case_dir
$ cd case_dir
$ touch a; touch A
$ ls
a
$ mkdir B; cd b
$ pwd
$ /home/user/mytmpfs/case_dir/B

V3D Super Pages support

As part of Igalia’s effort for enhancing the graphics stack for Raspberry Pi, the V3D DRM driver now has support for Super Pages, improving performance and making memory usage more efficient for Raspberry Pi 4 and 5. Using Linux 6.13, the driver will enable the MMU to allocate not only the default 4KB pages, but also 64KB “Big Pages” and 1MB “Super Pages”.

To measure the difference that Super Pages made to the performance, a series of benchmarks where used, and the highlights are:

• +8.36% of FPS boost for Warzone 2100 in RPi4
• +3.62% of FPS boost for Quake 2 in RPi5
• 10% time reduction for the Mesa CI job v3dv-rpi5-vk-full:arm64
• Aether SX2 emulator is more fluid to play

You can read a detailed post about this, with all benchmark results, in Maíra’s blog post, including a super cool PlayStation 2 emulation showcase!

New transparent_hugepage_shmem= command-line parameter

Igalia contributed new kernel command-line parameters to improve the configuration of multi-size Transparent Huge Pages (mTHP) for shmem. These parameters, transparent_hugepage_shmem= and thp_shmem=, enable more flexible and fine-grained control over the allocation of huge pages when using shmem.

The transparent_hugepage_shmem= parameter allows users to set a global default huge page allocation policy for the internal shmem mount. This is particularly valuable for DRM GPU drivers. Just as CPU architectures, GPUs can also take advantage of huge pages, but this is possible only if DRM GEM objects are backed by huge pages.

Since GEM uses shmem to allocate anonymous pageable memory, having control over the default huge page allocation policy allows for the exploration of huge pages use on GPUs that rely on GEM objects backed by shmem.

In addition, the thp_shmem= parameter provides fine-grained control over the default huge page allocation policy for specific huge page sizes.

By configuring page sizes and policies of huge-page allocations for the internal shmem mount, these changes complement the V3D Super Pages feature, as we can now tailor the size of the huge pages to the needs of our GPUs.

DRM and AMDGPU improvements

As usual in Linux releases, this one collects a list of improvements made by our team in DRM and AMDGPU driver from the last cycle.

Cosmic (the desktop environment behind Pop! OS) users discovered some bugs in the AMD display driver regarding the handling of overlay planes. These issues were pre-existing and came to light with the introduction of cursor overlay mode. They were causing page faults and divide errors. We debugged the issue together with reporters and proposed a set of solutions that were ultimately accepted by AMD developers in time for this release.

In addition, we worked with AMD developers to migrate the driver-specific handling of EDID data to the DRM common code, using drm_edid opaque objects to avoid handling raw EDID data. The first phase was incorporated and allowed the inclusion of new functionality to get EDID from ACPI. However, some dependencies between the AMD the Linux-dependent and OS-agnostic components were left to be resolved in next iterations. It means that next steps will focus on removing the legacy way of handling this data.

Also in the AMD driver, we fixed one out of bounds memory write, fixed one warning on a boot regression and exposed special GPU memory pools via the fdinfo common DRM framework.

In the DRM scheduler code, we added some missing locking, removed a couple of re-lock cycles for slightly reduced command submission overheads and clarified the internal documentation.

In the common dma-fence code, we fixed one memory leak on the failure path and one significant runtime memory leak caused by incorrect merging of fences. The latter was found by the community and was manifesting itself as a system out of memory condition after a few hours of gameplay.

sched_ext

The sched_ext landed in kernel 6.12 to enable the efficient development of BPF-based custom schedulers. During the 6.13 development cycle, the sched_ext community has made efforts to harden the code to make it more reliable and clean up the BPF APIs and documentation for clarity.

Igalia has contributed to hardening the sched_ext core code. We fixed the incorrect use of the scheduler run queue lock, especially during initializing and finalizing the BPF scheduler. Also, we fixed the missing RCU lock protections when the sched_core selects a proper CPU for a task. Without these fixes, the sched_ext core, in the worst case, could crash or raise a kernel oops message.

Other Contributions & Fixes

syzkaller, a kernel fuzzer, has been an important instrument to find kernel bugs. With the help of KASAN, a memory error detector, and syzbot, numerous such bugs have been reported and fixed.

Igalians have contributed to such fixes around a lot of subsystems (like media, network, etc), helping reduce the number of open bugs.

Check the complete list of Igalia’s contributions for the 6.13 release

Authored (70)

André Almeida

• unicode: Fix utf8_load() error path
• MAINTAINERS: Add Unicode tree
• scripts/kernel-doc: Fix build time warnings
• libfs: Create the helper function generic_ci_validate_strict_name()
• ext4: Use generic_ci_validate_strict_name helper
• unicode: Export latest available UTF-8 version number
• unicode: Recreate utf8_parse_version()
• libfs: Export generic_ci_ dentry functions
• tmpfs: Add casefold lookup support
• tmpfs: Add flag FS_CASEFOLD_FL support for tmpfs dirs
• tmpfs: Expose filesystem features via sysfs
• docs: tmpfs: Add casefold options
• libfs: Fix kernel-doc warning in generic_ci_validate_strict_name
• tmpfs: Fix type for sysfs’ casefold attribute
• tmpfs: Initialize sysfs during tmpfs init

Changwoo Min

• sched_ext: Replace rq_lock() to raw_spin_rq_lock() in scx_ops_bypass()
• sched_ext: Clarify sched_ext_ops table for userland scheduler
• sched_ext: add a missing rcu_read_lock/unlock pair at scx_select_cpu_dfl()
• MAINTAINERS: add me as reviewer for sched_ext

Christian Gmeiner

• drm/v3d: Use v3d_perfmon_find()

Guilherme G. Piccoli

• Documentation: Improve crash_kexec_post_notifiers description
• wifi: rtlwifi: Drastically reduce the attempts to read efuse in case of failures

Maíra Canal

• drm/v3d: Address race-condition in MMU flush
• drm/v3d: Flush the MMU before we supply more memory to the binner
• drm/v3d: Fix return if scheduler initialization fails
• drm/gem: Create a drm_gem_object_init_with_mnt() function
• drm/v3d: Introduce gemfs
• drm/gem: Create shmem GEM object in a given mountpoint
• drm/v3d: Reduce the alignment of the node allocation
• drm/v3d: Support Big/Super Pages when writing out PTEs
• drm/v3d: Use gemfs/THP in BO creation if available
• drm/v3d: Add modparam for turning off Big/Super Pages
• drm/v3d: Expose Super Pages capability
• drm/vc4: Use vc4_perfmon_find()
• MAINTAINERS: Add Maíra to VC4 reviewers
• mm: shmem: control THP support through the kernel command line
• mm: move get_order_from_str() to internal.h
• mm: shmem: override mTHP shmem default with a kernel parameter
• mm: huge_memory: use strscpy() instead of strcpy()
• drm/v3d: Enable Performance Counters before clearing them
• drm/v3d: Ensure job pointer is set to NULL after job completion

Melissa Wen

• drm/amd/display: switch amdgpu_dm_connector to use struct drm_edid
• drm/amd/display: switch to setting physical address directly
• drm/amd/display: always call connector_update when parsing freesync_caps
• drm/amd/display: remove redundant freesync parser for DP
• drm/amd/display: add missing tracepoint event in DM atomic_commit_tail
• drm/amd/display: fix page fault due to max surface definition mismatch
• drm/amd/display: increase MAX_SURFACES to the value supported by hw
• drm/amd/display: fix divide error in DM plane scale calcs

Thadeu Lima de Souza Cascardo

• media: uvcvideo: Require entities to have a non-zero unique ID
• hfsplus: don’t query the device logical block size multiple times
• Bluetooth: btmtk: avoid UAF in btmtk_process_coredump

Tvrtko Ursulin

• drm/v3d: Appease lockdep while updating GPU stats
• drm/sched: Add locking to drm_sched_entity_modify_sched
• Documentation/gpu: Document the situation with unqualified drm-memory-
• drm/amdgpu: Drop unused fence argument from amdgpu_vmid_grab_used
• drm/amdgpu: Use drm_print_memory_stats helper from fdinfo
• drm/amdgpu: Drop impossible condition from amdgpu_job_prepare_job
• drm/amdgpu: Remove the while loop from amdgpu_job_prepare_job
• drm/sched: Optimise drm_sched_entity_push_job
• drm/sched: Stop setting current entity in FIFO mode
• drm/sched: Re-order struct drm_sched_rq members for clarity
• drm/sched: Re-group and rename the entity run-queue lock
• drm/sched: Further optimise drm_sched_entity_push_job
• drm/amd/pm: Vangogh: Fix kernel memory out of bounds write
• drm/amdgpu: Stop reporting special chip memory pools as CPU memory in fdinfo
• drm/amdgpu: Expose special on chip memory pools in fdinfo
• dma-fence: Fix reference leak on fence merge failure path
• dma-fence: Use kernel’s sort for merging fences
• workqueue: Do not warn when cancelling WQ_MEM_RECLAIM work from !WQ_MEM_RECLAIM worker

Reviewed (41)

André Almeida

• futex: Use atomic64_inc_return() in get_inode_sequence_number()
• futex: Use atomic64_try_cmpxchg_relaxed() in get_inode_sequence_number()
• mm: shmem: use signed int for version handling in casefold option

Christian Gmeiner

• drm/vc4: Use vc4_perfmon_find()
• drm/etnaviv: Request pages from DMA32 zone on addressing_limited
• drm/etnaviv: Use unsigned type to count the number of pages
• drm/etnaviv: Use ‘unsigned’ type to count the number of pages
• drm/etnaviv: Drop the <linux/pm_runtime.h> header
• drm/etnaviv: Fix missing mutex_destroy()
• drm/etnaviv: hold GPU lock across perfmon sampling
• drm/etnaviv: assert GPU lock held in perfmon pipe_*_read functions
• drm/etnaviv: unconditionally enable debug registers
• drm/etnaviv: update hardware headers from rnndb
• drm/etnaviv: take current primitive into account when checking for hung GPU
• drm/etnaviv: always allocate 4K for kernel ringbuffers
• drm/etnaviv: flush shader L1 cache after user commandstream

Iago Toral Quiroga

• drm/v3d: Address race-condition in MMU flush
• drm/v3d: Flush the MMU before we supply more memory to the binner
• drm/v3d: Fix return if scheduler initialization fails
• drm/v3d: Introduce gemfs
• drm/v3d: Reduce the alignment of the node allocation
• drm/v3d: Expose Super Pages capability
• drm/v3d: Enable Performance Counters before clearing them

Jose Maria Casanova Crespo

• drm/v3d: Ensure job pointer is set to NULL after job completion

Juan A. Suarez

• drm/vc4: Use vc4_perfmon_find()

Maíra Canal

• drm/v3d: Use v3d_perfmon_find()
• drm/vc4: Run default client setup for all variants.
• drm/vc4: Match drm_dev_enter and exit calls in vc4_hvs_lut_load
• drm/vc4: Match drm_dev_enter and exit calls in vc4_hvs_atomic_flush
• drm/vc4: Correct generation check in vc4_hvs_lut_load
• drm/vkms: Drop unnecessary call to drm_crtc_cleanup()

Tvrtko Ursulin

• drm/gem: Create a drm_gem_object_init_with_mnt() function
• drm/gem: Create shmem GEM object in a given mountpoint
• drm/v3d: Support Big/Super Pages when writing out PTEs
• drm/v3d: Use gemfs/THP in BO creation if available
• drm/v3d: Add modparam for turning off Big/Super Pages
• drm: add DRM_SET_CLIENT_NAME ioctl
• drm: use drm_file client_name in fdinfo
• drm/amdgpu: make drm-memory-* report resident memory
• dma-buf: fix dma_fence_array_signaled v4
• dma-buf: Fix __dma_buf_debugfs_list_del argument for !CONFIG_DEBUG_FS

Tested (1)

Christian Gmeiner

• drm/etnaviv: Replace the ‘&pdev->dev’ with ‘dev’

Acked (5)

Changwoo Min

• sched_ext: Rename scx_bpf_dispatch[_vtime]() to scx_bpf_dsq_insert[_vtime]()
• sched_ext: Rename scx_bpf_consume() to scx_bpf_dsq_move_to_local()
• sched_ext: Rename scx_bpf_dispatch[_vtime]_from_dsq*() -> scx_bpf_dsq_move[_vtime]*()

Maíra Canal

• MAINTAINERS: remove myself as a VKMS maintainer
• MAINTAINERS: Add myself as VKMS Maintainer

Maintainer SoB (6)

Maíra Canal

• MAINTAINERS: remove myself as a VKMS maintainer
• MAINTAINERS: Add myself as VKMS Maintainer
• drm/vkms: Add documentation
• drm/vkms: Suppress context imbalance detected by sparse warning
• drm/vkms: Add missing check for CRTC initialization
• drm/v3d: Drop allocation of object without mountpoint

Hi all!

FOSDEM is approaching rapidly! I’ll be there and will give a talk about modern IRC.

In wlroots land, we’ve finally merged support for the next-generation screen capture protocols, ext-image-capture-source-v1 and ext-image-copy-capture-v1! Compared to the previous wlroots-specific protocol, the new one provides better damage tracking, enables cursor capture (useful for remote desktop apps) and per-window capture (this part is not yet implemented in wlroots). Thanks to Kirill Primak, wlroots now supports the xdg-toplevel-icon-v1 protocol, useful for clients which want to update their window icon without changing their application ID (either by providing an icon name or pixel buffers). Kirill also added safety assertions everywhere in wlroots to ensure that all listeners are properly removed when a struct is destroyed.

I’ve revived some old patches to better identify outputs in wlroots and libdisplay-info. Currently, there are two common ways to refer to an output: either by its name (e.g. “DP-2”), or by its make+model+serial (e.g. “Foo Corp C4FE 42424242”). Unfortunately, both of these naming schemes have downsides. The name is ill-suited to configuration files because it’s unstable and might change on reboot or unplug (it depends on driver load order, and DP-MST connectors get a new name each time they are re-plugged). The make+model+serial uses a database to look up the human-readable manufacturer name (so database updates break config files), and is not unique enough (different models might share a duplicate string). A new wlr_output.port field and a libdisplay-info device tag should address these shortcomings.

Jacob McNamee has contributed a Sway patch to add security context properties to IPC, criteria and title format. With this patch, scripts can now figure out whether an application is sandboxed, and a special title can be set for sandboxed (or unsandboxed) apps. There are probably more use-cases we didn’t think of!

I’ve managed to put aside some time to start reviewing the DRM color pipeline patches. As discussed in the last XDC it’s in a pretty good shape so I’ve started dropping some Reviewed-by tags. While discussing with David Turner about libliftoff, I’ve realized that the DRM_MODE_PAGE_FLIP_EVENT flag was missing some documentation (it’s not obvious how it interacts with the atomic uAPI) so I’ve sent a patch to fix that.

I continue pushing small updates to go-imap, bringing it little by little closer to version 2.0. I’ve added helpers to make it easier for servers to implement the FETCH command, implemented FETCH BINARY and header field decoding for SEARCH in the built-in in-memory server, added limits for the IMAP command size to prevent denial-of-service, and fixed a few bugs. While testing with ImapTest, I’ve discovered and fixed a bug in Go’s mime/quotedprintable package.

Thanks to pounce, goguma now internally keeps track of message reactions. This is not used just yet, but will be soon once we add a user interface to display and send reactions. Support for deleting messages (called “redact” in the spec) has been merged. I’ve also implemented a small date indicator which shows up when scrolling in a conversation.

That’s all for this month, see you at FOSDEM!

I have been working on making the camera work on more laptop models. After receiving and sending many emails and blog post comments about this I have started filing Fedora bugzilla issues on a per sensor and/or laptop-model basis to be able to properly keep track of all the work.

Currently the following issues are being either actively being worked on, or are being tracked to be fixed in the future.

Issues which have fixes pending (review) upstream:

• IPU6 camera on TERRA PAD 1262 V2 not working, fix has been accepted upstream.
• IPU6 camera on Dell XPS 9x40 models with ov02c10 sensor not working, sensor driver has been submitted upstream.

• IPU6 camera on Dell Latitude 7450 laptop not working
• IPU6 camera on HP Spectre x360 14-eu0xxx / Spectre 16 MeteorLake with ov08x40 not working
• IPU6 camera on HP Spectre x360 2-in-1 16-f1xxx/891D with hi556 sensor not working
• IPU6 camera on Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 12 not working
• Lattice MIPI Aggregator support for IPU6 cameras
• Lunar Lake MIPI camera / IPU7 CSI receiver support
• ov01a10 camera sensor driver lacks 1296x816 mode support
• No driver for ov01a1s camera sensor
• iVSC fails to probe with ETIMEDOUT
• iVSC fails to probe with EINVAL on XPS 9315

First Perf of the Year

I got a ticket last year about this game Everspace having bad perf on zink. I looked at it a little then, but it was the end of the year and I was busy doing other stuff. More important stuff. I definitely wasn’t just procrastinating.

In any case, I didn’t fix it last year, so I dusted it off the other day and got down to business. Unsurprisingly, it was still slow.

Easing Into Speed

The first step is always a flamegraph, and as expected, I got a hit:

Huge bottlenecking when checking query results, specifically in semaphore waits. What’s going on here?

What’s going on is this game is blocking on timestamp queries, and the overhead of doing vkWaitSemaphores(t=0) to check drm syncobj progress for the result is colossal. Who could have guessed that using core Vulkan mechanics in a hotpath would obliterate perf?

Fixing this is very stupid: directly checking query results with vkGetQueryPoolResults avoids syncobj access inside drivers by accessing what are effectively userspace fences, which Vulkan doesn’t directly permit. If an app starts polling on query results, zink now uses this rather than its usual internal QBO mechanism.

Bottleneck uncorked and performance fixed. Right?

Naaaaaa

The perf is still pretty bad. It’s time to check in with the doctor. Looking through some of the renderpasses reveals all kinds of begin/end tomfoolery. Paring this down, renderpasses are being split for layout changes to toggle feedback loops:

The game is rendering to one miplevel of a framebuffer attachment while sampling from another miplevel of the same image. This breaks zink’s heuristic for detecting implicit feedback loops. Improvements here tighten up that detection to flatten out the renderpasses.

Gottagofastium

Perf recovered: the game runs roughly 150% faster, putting it on par with RadeonSI. Maybe some other games will be affected? Who can say.

I’m not saying we’re doing it

Don’t quote me. We’re not doing it.

Unless we are, in which case everything I wrote last year may come to pass with the advent of the unified OpenGL/ES ‘25 release. This is not a release announcement, but I’m tentatively planning to provide the date of the announcement once the ray-tracing EXT goes live.

Confused? Well, you better figure it out quick cuz this is only the first week of 2025 and we got 51 more to go.

In the meanwhile, get in the car: we’re going mesh shading.

DISCLAIMER

I gotta do this every year because we can’t have fun anymore on the internet. C’mon. Obviously there’s no ray-tracing EXT in the pipe BECAUSE WE’RE GOING MESH SHAAADIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII

2024 has been an exciting year for the Igalia’s Graphics Team. We’ve been making a lot of progress on Turnip, AMD display driver, the Raspberry Pi graphics stack, Vulkan video, and more.

Vulkan Device Generated Commands

Igalia’s Ricardo Garcia has been working hard on adding support for the new VK_EXT_device_generated_commands extension in the Vulkan Conformance Test Suite. He wrote an excellent blog post on the extension and on his work that you can read here. Ricardo also presented the extension at XDC 2024 in Montréal, which he also blogged about. Take a look and see what generating Vulkan commands directly on the GPU looks like!

Raspberry Pi Enhancements & Performance Improvements

Our very own Maíra Canal made a big contribution to improve the graphics performance of Raspberry Pi 4 & 5 devices by introducing support for “Super Pages”. She wrote an excellent and detailed blog post on what Super Pages are, how they improve performance, and comparing performance of different apps and games. You can read all the juicy details here.

She also worked on introducing CPU jobs to the Broadcom GPU kernel driver in Linux. These changes allow user space to implement jobs that get executed on the CPU in sync with the work on the GPU. She wrote a great blog post detailing what CPU jobs allow you to do and how they work that you can read here.

Christian Gmeiner on the Graphics team has also been working on adding Perfetto support to Broadcom GPUs. Perfetto is a performance tracing tool and support for it in Broadcom drivers will allow to developers to gain more insight into bottlenecks of their GPU applications. You can check out his changes to add support in the following MRs: - MR 31575 - MR 32277 - MR 31751

The Raspberry Pi team here at Igalia presented all of their work at XDC 2024 in Montréal. You can see a video below.

Linux Kernel 6.8

A number of Igalians made several contributions to the Linux 6.8 kernel release back in March of this year. Our colleague Maíra wrote a great blog post outlining these contributions that you can read here. To highlight some of these contributions:

• AMD HDR & Color Management
  • Melissa Wen has been working on improving and implementing HDR support in AMD’s display driver as well as working on color management in the Linux display stack.
• Async Flip
  • André Almeida implemented support for asynchronous page flip in the atomic DRM modesetting API.
• V3D 7.1.x Kernel Driver
  • Iago Toral contributed a number of patches upstream to get the Broadcom DRM driver working with the latest Broadcom hardware used in the Raspberry Pi 5.
• GPU stats for the Raspberry Pi 4/5
  • José María “Chema” Casanova worked on adding GPU stats support to the latest Raspberry Pi hardware.

Turnip Improvements

Dhruv Mark Collins has been very hard at work to try and bring performance parity between Qualcomm’s proprietary driver and the open source Turnip driver. Two of his big contributions to this were improving the 2D buffer to image copies on A7XX devices, and implementing unidirectional Low Resolution Z (LRZ) on A7XX devices. You can see the MR for these changes here and here.

A new member of the Igalia Graphics Team Karmjit Mahil has been working on different parts of the Turnip stack, but one notable improvement he made was to improve fmulz handling for Direct3D 9. You can check out his changes here and read more about them.

Danylo Piliaiev has been hard at work adding support for the latest generation of Adreno GPUs. This included getting support for the A750 working, and then implementing performance improvements to bring it up to parity with other Adreno GPUs in Turnip. All-together the turnip team implemented a number of Vulkan extensions and performance improvements such as:

• VK_KHR_shader_atomic_int64 - Amber
  • MR 27776
• VK_KHR_fragment_shading_rate - Danylo Piliaiev
  • MR 30905
• VK_KHR_8bit_storage - Žan Dobersek
  • MR 28254
• shaderInt8 feature - Žan Dobersek
  • MR 29875
• VK_KHR_shader_subgroup_rotate - Job Noorman
  • MR 31358
• VK_EXT_map_memory_placed - Dhruv Mark Collins
  • MR 28928
• VK_EXT_legacy_dithering - Karmjit Mahil
  • MR 30536
• VK_EXT_depth_clamp_zero_one - Danylo Piliaiev
  • MR 29387

Display Next Hackfest & Display/KMS Meet-up

Igalia hosted the 2024 version of the Display Next Hackfest. This community event is a way to get Linux display developers together to work on improving the Linux display stack. Our Melissa Wen wrote a blog post about the event and what it was like to organize it. You can read all about it here.

Display Next Hackfest

Just in-case you thought you couldn’t get enough Linux display stack, Melissa also helped organize a Display/KMS meet-up at XDC 2024. She wrote all about that meet-up and the progress the community made on her blog here.

AMD Display & AMDGPU

Melissa Wen has also been hard at work improving AMDGPU’s display driver. She made a number of changes including improving display debug log to include hardware color capabilities, Migrating EDID handling to EDID common code and various bug fixes such as:

• Fixing null-pointer dereference on edid reading
  • https://lore.kernel.org/amd-gfx/20240216122401.216860-1-mwen@igalia.com/
• Checking dc_link before dereferencing
  • https://lore.kernel.org/amd-gfx/20240227190828.444715-1-mwen@igalia.com/
• Using mpcc_count to log MPC state
  • https://lore.kernel.org/amd-gfx/20240412163928.118203-1-mwen@igalia.com/
• Fixing cursor offset on rotation 180
  • https://lore.kernel.org/amd-gfx/20240807075546.831208-22-chiahsuan.chung@amd.com/
• Fixes for kernel crashes since cursor overlay mode
  • https://lore.kernel.org/amd-gfx/20241217205029.39850-1-mwen@igalia.com/

Tvrtko Ursulin, a recent addition to our team, has been working on fixing issues in AMDGPU and some of the Linux kernel’s common code. For example, he worked on fixing bugs in the DRM scheduler around missing locks, optimizing the re-lock cycle on the submit path, and cleaned up the code. On AMDGPU he worked on improving memory usage reporting, fixing out of bounds writes, and micro-optimized ring emissions. For DMA fence he simplified fence merging and resolved a potential memory leak. Lastly, on workqueue he fixed false positive sanity check warnings that AMDGPU & DRM scheduler interactions were triggering. You can see the code for some of changes below: - https://lore.kernel.org/amd-gfx/20240906180639.12218-1-tursulin@igalia.com/ - https://lore.kernel.org/amd-gfx/20241008150532.23661-1-tursulin@igalia.com/ - https://lore.kernel.org/amd-gfx/20241227111938.22974-1-tursulin@igalia.com/ - https://lore.kernel.org/amd-gfx/20240813135712.82611-1-tursulin@igalia.com/ - https://lore.kernel.org/amd-gfx/20240712152855.45284-1-tursulin@igalia.com/

Vulkan & OpenGL Extensions

• GL_EXT_texture_offset_non_const
  • Ricardo was busy working on extending OpenGL by adding this extension to GLSL as well as providing an implementation for it in glslang
• VK_KHR_video_encode_av1 & VK_KHR_video_decode_av1
  • Igalia is listed as a contributor to these extensions and worked very hard to implement CTS support for the extensions.

Etnaviv Improvements

Christian Gmeiner, one of the maintainers of the Etnaviv driver for Vivante GPUs, has been hard at work this year to make a number of big improvements to Etnaviv. This includes using hwdb to detect GPU features, which he wrote about here. Another big improvement was migrating Etnaviv to use isaspec for the GPU isa description, allowing an assembler and disassembler to be generated from XML. This also allowed Etnaviv to reuse some common features in Mesa for assemblers/disassemblers and take advantage of the python code generation features others in the community have been working on. He wrote a detailed blog about it, that you can find here. On the same vein of Etnaviv infrastructure improvements, Christian has also been working on a new shader compiler, written in Rust, called “EBC”. Christian presented this new shader compiler at XDC 2024 this year. You can check out his presentation below.

On the side of new features, Christian landed a big one in Mesa 24.03 for Etnaviv: Multiple Render Target (MRT) support! This allows games and applications to render to multiple render targets (think framebuffers) in a single graphics operations. This feature is heavily used by deferred rendering techniques, and is a requirement for later versions of desktop OpenGL and OpenGL ES 3. Keep an eye on Christian’s blog to see any of his future announcements.

Lavapipe/LLVMpipe, Android & ChromeOS

I had a busy year working on improving Lavapipe/LLVMpipe platform integration. This started with adding support for DMABUF import/export, so that the display handles from Android Window system could be properly imported and mapped. Next came Android window system integration for DRI software rendering backend in EGL, and lastly but most importantly came updating the documentation in Mesa for building Android support. I wrote all about this effort here.

The latter half on the year had me working on improving lavapipe’s integration with ChromeOs, and having Lavapipe work as a host Vulkan driver for Venus. You can see some of the changes I made in virglrenderer here and crosvm here. This work is still ongoing.

What’s Next?

We’re not planning to stop our 2024 momentum, and we’re hopping for 2025 to be a great year for Igalia and the Linux graphics stack! I’m booked to present about Lavapipe at Vulkanised 2025, where Ricardo will also present about Device-Generated Commands. Maíra & Chema will be presenting together at FOSDEM 2025 about improving performance on Raspberry Pi GPUs, and Melissa will also present about kworkflow there. We’ll also be at XDC 2025, networking and presenting about all the work we are doing on the Linux graphics stack. Thanks for following our work this year, and here’s to making 2025 an even better year for Linux graphics!

This is a heads up that if you file an issue in the libinput issue tracker, it's very likely this issue will be closed. And this post explains why that's a good thing, why it doesn't mean what you want, and most importantly why you shouldn't get angry about it.

Unfixed issues have, roughly, two states: they're either waiting for someone who can triage and ideally fix it (let's call those someones "maintainers") or they're waiting on the reporter to provide some more info or test something. Let's call the former state "actionable" and the second state "needinfo". The first state is typically not explicitly communicated but the latter can be via different means, most commonly via a "needinfo" label. Labels are of course great because you can be explicit about what is needed and with our bugbot you can automate much of this.

Alas, using labels has one disadvantage: GitLab does not allow the typical bug reporter to set or remove labels - you need to have at least the Planner role in the project (or group) and, well, suprisingly reporting an issue doesn't mean you get immediately added to the project. So setting a "needinfo" label requires the maintainer to remove the label. And until that happens you have a open bug that has needinfo set and looks like it's still needing info. Not a good look, that is.

So how about we use something other than labels, so the reporter can communicate that the bug has changed to actionable? Well, as it turns out there is exactly thing a reporter can do on their own bugs other than post comments: close it and re-open it. That's it [1]. So given this vast array of options (one button!), we shall use them (click it!).

So for the forseeable future libinput will follow the following pattern:

• Reporter files an issue
• Maintainer looks at it, posts a comment requesting some information, closes the bug
• Reporter attaches information, re-opens bug
• Maintainer looks at it and either: files a PR to fix the issue or closes the bug with the wontfix/notourbug/cantfix label

This process should work (in libinput at least), all it requires is for reporters to not get grumpy about issue being closed. And that's where this blog post (and the comments bugbot will add when closing) come in. So here's hoping. And to stave off the first question: yes, I too wish there was a better (and equally simple) way to go about this.

[1] we shall ignore magic comments that are parsed by language-understanding bots because that future isn't yet the present

TL;DR — I’ve lost a ton of weight from mid-2023 to early 2024 and maintained the vast majority of that loss. I’ve also begin exercising and had great results in my fitness and strength. Here, I’m sharing what I’ve learned as well as a bunch of my tips and tricks. Overall on the diet side, it’s about eating a wide variety and healthy ratio of colorful, minimally processed whole foods, with natural flavor and sweetness, only during meals. On the exercise side, I do both cardio and resistance training. For cardio, I focus on post-meal, moderate-intensity cardio (specifically, 1-mile brisk walks). For strength training, I use calisthenics-based compound exercises (complex multi-muscle movements) 2x/wk, performing a single set to near-exhaustion. I’ve optimized this down from 3 sets 3x/wk, based on my experience and academic research in the area.

In the past 18 months, I’ve lost 75 pounds and gone from completely sedentary to fit, while minimizing the effort to do so (but needing a whole lot of persistence and grit). On the fitness side, I’ve taken my cardiorespiratory fitness from below average to high, and I’m stronger than I’ve been in my entire life. Again I’ve aimed to do so with maximum efficiency, shooting for the 80% of value with 20% of effort.

Here’s what I wrote in my initial post on weight loss:

I have no desire to be a bodybuilder, but I want to be in great shape now and be as healthy and mobile as possible well into my old age. And a year ago, my blood pressure was already at pre-hypertension levels, despite being at a relatively young age.

Research shows that 5 factors are key to a long life — extending your life by 12–14 years:

• Never smoking
• BMI of 15.5–24.9
• 30+ min a day of moderate/vigorous exercise
• Moderate alcohol intake (vs none, occasional, or heavy)
  • Unsurprisingly, there is vigorous scientific and philosophical/religious/moral debate about this one. However all studies agree that heavy drinking is bad, so ensure you avoid that.
• Diet quality in the upper 40% (Alternate Healthy Eating Index)

Additionally, people who are in good health have a much shorter end-of-life period. This means they can enjoy a longer healthy part of their lives (the “healthspan”) and squeeze the toughest times into a shorter period right at the end. After seeing many seniors struggle for years as they got older, I wanted my own story to end differently.

Although I’m no smoker, I lacked three other factors. My weight was incredibly unhealthy, I was completely sedentary, and my diet was terrible. I do drink moderately, however (nearly all beer).

This post accompanies my earlier writeups, “The lazy technologist’s guide to weight loss” and “The lazy technologist’s guide to fitness” Check them out for in-depth, science-driven reviews of my experience losing weight and getting fit. 

Why is this the lazy technologist’s guide, again? I wanted to lose weight in the “laziest” way possible — in the same sense that lazy programmers work to find the most efficient solutions to problems. I’ll reference an apocryphal quote by Bill Gates and a real one by Larry Wall, creator of Perl. Gates supposedly said, “I choose a lazy person to do a hard job. Because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it.” Wall wrote in Programming Perl, “Laziness: The quality that makes you go to great effort to reduce overall energy expenditure. It makes you write labor-saving programs that other people will find useful and document what you wrote so you don’t have to answer so many questions about it.”

What’s the lowest-effort, most research-driven way to lifelong health, whether you’re losing weight, getting in shape, or trying to maintain your current healthy weight or state after putting in a whole lot of time and effort getting there? Discovering and executing upon that was my journey. Read on if you’re considering taking a similar path.

Hitting my goals

Since my posts early this year, I broke through into my target ranges for both maintenance weight and fitness. In mid-April, I hit a low of 164 lbs. Since then, I’ve been gradually transitioning into maintenance mode, hovering within ~10 lbs of my low. As I write this, I’m about 10 pounds above my minimum weight, at a current BMI of 23. At my lowest, I had a BMI around 22.

On the fitness side, in late May, I broke into the VO2Max range for high cardiorespiratory fitness. (In my case, that’s 47 based on my age and gender, as measured by my Apple Watch.)

In the next few sections, I’ll share how I’ve continued to change what I eat and how I work out to keep improving my overall health.

Evolving what I eat for long-term health

In this section, I’ll share a lot of what I’ve learned regarding how to eat healthier. There’s a lot to it, from focusing on whole foods with enough protein and fiber to eating enough veggies and managing portion sizes, so dig in for all the details!

Keep up the protein

As I wrote in the post on weight loss, high protein is a great way to lose weight and maintain or build muscle. Protein also promotes fullness, so I’ve shifted my diet so that every meal (breakfast included) has a good amount of protein — targeting 25%–30% of daily calories. Previously, I used to get quite hungry in the late morning, before it was time to eat lunch. That’s no longer a concern even when I’m on a caloric deficit, let alone eating at maintenance.

Use Mediterranean plate ratios

Although I’m not officially eating a Mediterranean diet, I’ve found its plate ratios to be incredibly valuable:

• 1/2 vegetable
• 1/4 lean protein (white meat, seafood, lentils/beans)
• 1/4 starchy carb (whole grains or starchy vegetables, avoiding white/processed grains)

Building meals that way makes it very hard for me to overeat, because the vegetables are so high-volume and low-calorie that they take up a lot of space in my stomach. Following this guideline is especially helpful at restaurants, which I’ll detail later.

My main exception is breakfast, where I do incorporate veggies but not as half of my meal. Veggies plus fruits are certainly half of it, though.

Count calories for a while, and then set a permanent weight-gain trigger

After overeating for a sizable fraction of my lifetime, and then eating at a large deficit for a year, I need to teach myself what sustainable eating habits look like because they clearly aren’t intuitive, for me. The “intuitive eating” trend may work for people who already have a habit of healthy eating and weight maintenance, but not for the rest of us — our intuition is broken from years or decades of bad habits.

As a result, calorie counting at maintenance is a good practice to learn what the correct amount of food per day looks and feels like.

My plan is to continue counting calories at maintenance until I’m confident that I’m no longer gaining weight, and then stop. However, that raises the risk that my weight could then start increasing again, because it’s incredibly common for people to re-gain the weight they’ve lost. Around 80%–90% of people fail to maintain their weight loss — mostly those who don’t exercise and stop tracking their eating/weight. There’s great studies on the US National Weight Control Registry about the habits of people who keep their weight off.

As a process control, I’m going to continue weighing myself daily. I’m setting an upper limit of 5 pounds above my target weight that will trigger me to begin calorie counting again. To avoid reacting to the random deviations that accompany daily weight, I’ve started using a specialized app called Happy Scale that is designed for creating smoothed trends for body weight. You could also do this in a spreadsheet, but I like the ease of use of this app.

Dine out at restaurants, safely

Eating out at restaurants (or getting takeout/takeaway) is a challenge that a lot of people on diets — or just trying to eat healthy — can’t figure out how to make work. A lot of people just give up and always order a salad. Surprisingly, that can trick you into thinking you’re eating healthy without actually doing so. I’ve created a set of guidelines that I follow when eating out:

• Aim for lean protein & veggies, prepared simply (e.g. grilled, roasted, sautéed, steamed).
• Always start with veggies. If your meal doesn’t come with them, order a starter salad or veggies as an appetizer.
• Minimize high-fat, calorie-dense sauces & toppings. Watch out for anything based on cream (like Alfredo sauce), cheese, mayo (aioli), oil, or butter. A little bit of a high-flavor cheese is great (like finely grated parmesan, or crumbled feta/goat cheese), but avoid the cheese sauce or a big pile of shredded cheese. Get meals served with tomato-based sauces, slices of lime/lemon or just spices/seasonings, which bring tons of flavor without the calories. If it comes with a calorie-dense sauce, ask for it on the side and dip your bites instead of getting your meal drenched in it. You’ll often be shocked by how big of a cup they provide for the sauce, which would’ve been coating your food.
• In salads, always get dressing on the side, and prefer oil & vinegar or a vinaigrette. Do the same with any other high-fat sauces — get them on the side. That way, you’re in control of the portion, or you can just dip bites. Salad dressings can have hundreds of calories in them. If you add a huge pile of cheese and croutons, and maybe some processed meats like pepperoni or some oil-covered pasta, then you’ve just turned a healthy meal into the opposite.
• Avoid breaded, deep-fried foods. This includes the protein as well as French fries or chips/crisps.
• Don’t eat the table bread when it comes out first at a restaurant. Eat veggies, then protein, and only then starchy carbs. Remember, only 1/4 of your meal can be starchy carbs, according to the Mediterranean plate ratio (bread, rice, pasta, potatoes, etc).
• Avoid meals that are 1/2 or more starchy carbs.
• Only eat half of what you order, because restaurant portions are massive. Restaurant portions are big enough for 2 meals, sometimes 3. Split it physically on your plate when you get it, and ask for a box as soon as possible.

As one example, I love burgers. When I order one, I’ll look for a healthier, simpler option instead of the one with 15 fatty add-ons, I’ll stick with a single patty instead of a double, and I’ll often ask for the aioli on the side. That way, I can lightly dip each bite if it needs the flavor. I’ll frequently get a turkey or bison patty instead of beef, and I’ll often order it without a bun — either on a bed of lettuce (eaten with a fork & knife), or wrapped in lettuce instead of the bun. For the side, instead of fries, I’ll get a side salad (no croutons, no cheese, vinaigrette on the side), veggies, or fruit. Sometimes I’ll get coleslaw or a lower-calorie soup, when that’s the best option. I allow myself one “extra” from my guidelines, and it’s usually getting cheese on the burger (the other toppings are veggies).

As another, noodle/rice dishes at Italian, Indian or SE Asian restaurants (Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Japanese, etc) are common. Get a stir-fry, add lots of veggies, get the grilled/roasted chicken or seafood, avoid the buttery/creamy sauces, and/or eat less of the rice/noodle part of the dish. If you get sushi, prefer sashimi and rolls over nigiri, which has a lot more rice. When you do order starchy carbs, prefer the whole-grain version when possible (brown rice, whole-wheat pasta, etc). When you can make it work, first eat the veggies, then protein, then grains.

Sometimes you’re stuck at a place that doesn’t fit any of those guidelines. Fast-food restaurants like McDonald’s, Burger King, or Dairy Queen have no healthy meal options — no grilled chicken, no salad or wraps without fried food, etc. In those cases, I’ll order smaller portions, like a kid’s meal, or a single cheeseburger and the smallest size of fries (the one that comes in a little bag instead of a fry holder), with a cup of water. Another option is a double fish sandwich, if you order it without tartar sauce and skip the bun. You can probably manage a meal around 500–600 calories, but you’ll be hungry because you hardly got any veggies or fiber, so you’re missing out on fullness signals. You also will have eaten all kinds of ultraprocessed ingredients instead of healthy whole foods, which we’ll discuss later.

Eat like it’s the 1950s

In the US, if you go back to before we had ultraprocessed foods, people ate very differently. Most of that emerged in the 1960s and really gained popularity in the 1970s, so let’s return to the 1950s.

Eat a savory breakfast

Before we had overwhelmingly sugar-doused cereal, people often ate breakfast differently. It might be leftovers from the night before, or it could be oatmeal, peanut-butter toast, or something like eggs & bacon. In general, breakfasts were much more savory than sweet.

I’ve adopted that philosophy, shifting away from breakfasts like sweet cereal or flavored yogurt (both with plenty of added sugar) to a more savory approach, or at least foods with no sugar added. Most often, I’ll have something with eggs and beans, as well as a separate bowl with berries and plain skyr or Greek yogurt. The fruit adds plenty of flavor and sweetness, so there’s no need to add any more from sugar/honey/etc.

Eliminate snacks

Before ultraprocessed foods, snacks also weren’t really a thing. There weren’t food companies trying to create opportunities for profit through people eating outside of typical meals. You’d eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and that was it. Eating random snacks throughout the day didn’t really exist, although some families might have an extra mini-meal of sorts at some point.

Decrease portion size by decreasing plate size

Additionally, portion sizes have increased dramatically. In part, this is because plateware has increased in size. For example, the diameter of plates has increased from 9″ in the 1950s to 10.5″–11″ between the 1980s and 2000, and as much as 12″–13″ today. People will subconsciously take larger portions and eat more calories when their plates are larger, as academic studies have shown.

This brings us to another easy thing I did to eat healthier — reduced the size of my plates, bowls, and glasses. Even without buying new plates, I started only adding food to the “inner ring” instead of all the way to the edge, and stopped piling anything on top of other food. I bought new, smaller bowls and glasses, because those were harder to manage. And when I eat out or get takeout, I have a mental baseline to compare to their plate sizes. I also watch out for the use of multiple courses to keep me from thinking about how much I’m eating.

To sum up, I switched to a savory breakfast, eliminated snacks outside of meals, and reduced the size of my plateware. Even if you only do 1 or 2 of those 3 things, that’ll make a meaningful difference.

Ultraprocessed foods trick your body

I’ve read quite a bit about ultraprocessed foods. The summary is that they are effectively ways to trick your body into thinking it’s getting something that’s not really there. Artificial sweeteners, things with the taste & consistency of fat that have no fat, and artificial/natural flavors in foods that make your body expect something else are just a few examples.

Sugar that’s not sugar

When your body tastes something sweet, it expects that it will soon get an influx of calories from sugar to digest. Artificial sweeteners mess with this, tricking your body. A number of studies have shown that people tend to make up for these “lost” calories by subconsciously eating more later that day. It’s possible to prevent this with strict calorie counting, but it’s a bias you want to be aware of. It’s also unclear what these mixed signals will do to your body over the long term, when it can’t tell what calories to expect based on what you taste. As a result, I’ve begun avoiding alternative sweeteners, and just getting something with sugar if that’s really what I want.

Fat that’s not fat

This one is especially sneaky, because you can’t always spot it in the ingredient labels. Using seemingly normal ingredients, companies have created fat substitutes with unique structures that provide the same sort of mouth-feel as fat, without containing the expected levels of fat. These can come in the easily identifiable varieties such as all sorts of “gum” — this results in ice cream that basically doesn’t melt, for example. “Whey protein concentrate” is another common one, as is anything with “dextrin” in the name and a variety of emulsifiers such as “polyesters.” You need to work (and typically pay a premium) for things like ice cream or chocolate with a simple ingredient list, because natural ingredients cost more and often don’t transport as well.

Flavor that’s not flavor

Flavors in the wrong foods are another example of tricking your body into expecting a different set of nutrients than it gets. This can cause you to develop craving for unhealthy foods, based on your desire for a particular flavor profile that comes from added flavorings. For example, you might want some orange-, apple-, or grape-flavored drink instead of actual oranges, apples, or grapes. Your body will cause you to crave certain things based upon their nutrient profile, and what your body needs. This is most obvious in pregnancy and in studies done on babies/toddlers, given free choice on what to eat.

Micronutrients that don’t belong

“Enriched” foods are stealing your health, again based on artificially induced cravings for unnaturally added ingredients. A good case study here is flour in bread. In the early 1940s, the United States passed a law requiring enrichment of bread flour to prevent diseases around missing micronutrients (e.g. folic acid, niacin, thiamin, riboflavin, iron). Italy, however, did no such thing — instead, it focused on educating its citizens on healthy diet components. As a result, Italians eat far more beans than Americans, for example, which contain many of the same missing micronutrients. Americans instead eat far more white bread than they should — an ultraprocessed food that our body desires because of the added micronutrients that don’t belong.

Salt that’s over the top

Overly salty foods are another danger area. In the US, the recommended amount is 2300 mg/day, which it’s quite easy to hit even while trying to avoid extra-salty foods. For example, I mostly don’t eat ramen, other soups, preserved meats like smoked salmon or beef jerky, or frozen meals. Another surprising one is sugar-sweetened beverages like soda, which have so much sugar that they also add salt to trick you into feeling like they aren’t that sweet.

Optimize for gut health

Another area that’s become increasingly visible in the past couple of decades is the importance of gut microbiota in health. Keeping them healthy is critical to being healthy. That’s come down to a few key factors for me: fibers, fermented food, and reduced alcohol.

Eat enough fiber — and that’s a lot!

The average American only eats 10–15 grams of fiber per day, while the recommended daily allowance for adults up to age 50 is 25 grams for women and 38 grams for men. I see this as a general correlation with our consumption of ultraprocessed foods, because fiber is primarily present in whole foods. Whole fruits, whole vegetables, whole grains, legumes (beans/lentils), and seeds are among the best sources of fiber.

As soon as you stop eating the whole, unprocessed food and replace it with something more processed, you lose the benefits. Make sure to eat the whole fruit, including the edible portion of the skin. Even something as simple as making a fruit smoothie or fruit juice will chop up or remove the fiber and other long-chain complex molecules, reducing its nutritional value. Personally, I found it surprisingly hard to modify my diet enough to get enough fiber while I was losing weight, because I’d been eating ultraprocessed foods for so long. In the end, the main things I added were raspberries & blackberries, chia seeds, broccoli & cauliflower, and beans/lentils.

Among fruit, raspberries and blackberries are particularly high fiber (you can tell from all the seeds as you’re eating them). Other great options include apples, oranges, pears, grapefruit, and kiwifruit, as long as you eat the edible portion of the skin & rind. Passion fruit is an all-star with many times more fiber, but it’s quite expensive. Dried fruit can be a great complement to fresh fruit in moderation — especially golden berries (another all-star), plums, and apricots. It’s easy to eat too much dried fruit, though, because all the water’s been removed so it doesn’t fill you up as quickly. For example, you can eat 5 dried apricots in a few minutes, but imagine eating 5 fresh apricots in a row.

Vegetables are another great source of fiber, but again you need to focus on the right ones. Among non-starchy options (basically anything but root vegetables), broccoli and cauliflower are great choices, as is kale. I like to begin my meals with one of those, whenever I can. Among starchy options, sweet potatoes, carrots, and corn are great choices.

Whole grains (such as whole-wheat bread, the denser the better, and brown rice) are also high in fiber, but they tend to have lots more carbs — while I optimized more for protein. When I’m eating at maintenance, I occasionally have some dense whole-grain breads such as a Danish pumpernickel or a German roggenbrot/vollkornbrot. They’re nothing like your typical American pumpernickel or rye, so try to find a bakery near you that offers them. Otherwise, any 100% whole-grain bread (they often have a stamp) with low sugar and a decent amount of protein & fiber are a good option. Any bread with no sugar is even better, but it’s hard to find. I’d recommend checking out local bakeries first, then the bakery within your favorite grocery store, followed by national brands such as Dave’s Killer Bread or Ezekiel from Food for Life.

Legumes & seeds are a great source — I’ve saved perhaps the best for last. Beans and lentils are fiber superstars — a single serving around 100 calories could have 5–10 grams. They also offer a complete set of protein (all 20 amino acids) when combined with a whole-grain rice, such as brown, red or purple. I have a serving of black beans with eggs almost every day.

Fermented foods improve gut health

Another great way to improve the types of gut microbiota is eating more fermented foods. These are more common things in the US like yogurts and sauerkraut, as well as cultural food like Korean kimchi, increasingly popular drinks like kombucha, and less common drinks like kefir (basically drinkable yogurt). The benefits seem to fade away after just a few weeks though, so it’s important to maintain consumption instead of thinking you can transform your microbiota once and then you’re done.

I’m regularly eating skyr, which is a thick Icelandic yogurt with as much protein as Greek yogurt but not the tangy, bitter flavor. It’s a great protein-dense option, even when you eat the version based on whole milk (which I do). I’m also occasionally using kimchi on my eggs or drinking a small half-glass of kefir. Sauerkraut is reserved for summer barbecues, and I haven’t gotten into kombucha at this point.

Moderate your alcohol intake

Another thing that made a big difference was reducing the amount of alcohol I drink. Cutting this down from a beer every day to more like once a week has made a big difference. I’m overall feeling more energetic and my gut’s much healthier too.

Appreciate the sweeter (natural) things in life

As I learned more about eating healthy, I came across increasing amounts of material about how added sugar caused major problems, leading toward obesity or diabetes. Interestingly, many parts of the world eat far less sweet food, and there tends to be a general correlation between consumption of ultraprocessed sugary food and obesity. In my own life, I’ve noticed this difference in practice when traveling to Europe and Asia, where many of the desserts are far less sweet (and the obesity rate is much lower). Two great examples are Polish cheesecake (sernik) — which is far less sweet than American cheesecake — and the frequent use of less-sweet ingredients in Asia such as red bean, sesame, or glutinous rice.

Based on this, I’ve cut down on foods with added sugar. Natural levels of sugar are generally fine, such as that in many fruits, but even then I try to bias toward less-sweet options. For example, I’ll typically have an apple or pear instead of mango. Among dried fruit, I avoid dates and figs, tending toward lower-sugar options instead.

Once you start looking, it’s shocking how seemingly every processed food has added sugar. This goes all the way down to even basic staples such as bread, unless you specifically look for the rare breads without it.

In America, we’ve trained ourselves from birth (with sweetened baby food) to eat sweeter and sweeter foods with more and more unnatural levels of sugar, to the point where it tastes too sweet or even sickening to people from other cultures.

As a pleasant side effect of this, I find myself enjoying moderately sweet foods almost in the same way that I used to think of desserts. Fruit like strawberry or mango, chia pudding or overnight oats w/ fruit and no other sweetener, frozen Greek yogurt bars, skyr with cinnamon and just a little honey, dried fruit, trail mix, or 85%+ dark chocolate now taste great.

Try the “No S Diet”

While on my journey, I came across a simple approach called the “No S Diet” that I quite appreciated. It boils down healthy eating into just three rules and one exception:

• No Snacks
• No Sweets
• No Seconds

Except (sometimes) on days that start with “S”

Even this alone would get you a long, long way. Combining it with a Mediterranean diet (plate ratios, whole foods, lean protein) is almost all you need.

I have stopped snacking entirely, as mentioned earlier. I’m a bit more flexible on sweets, if they fit into my calories for the day, but I do try to save more of that for the weekend. For example, I might have a little 85%+ dark chocolate on a weekday after lunch, or some strawberries w/ whipped cream after dinner, but I’ll eat a full dessert serving on the weekend.

Eat in the right order

Interestingly, I also learned that even the order in which you eat can make a difference. Specifically, you can flatten blood-sugar spikes by eating in a specific order: fiber, then protein, then starchy carbs.

For example, start with a salad, then eat the main portion of your entree (e.g. chicken or fish), followed by the sides (rice, potatoes or whatever).

This has served me well at home, but it’s been especially helpful at restaurants. Every time I go out, I make a point of ordering either a salad or a veggie-based appetizer to enjoy before the main course. Eating in this specific order isn’t the only reason that helps — it also uses up a bunch of the room in my stomach on veggies instead of more calorie-dense foods, so I’m often full enough before I finish my starchy carbs.

Add antioxidants

Antioxidants are another great way to eat healthier. These protect your body at a subcellular level from oxidizing reactions, which can damage parts of your cells (especially the mitochondria, basically your cell’s energy factory) over time and contribute to aging.

An easy way to identify foods with higher levels of antioxidants is to look for more color. Instead of the bland-looking food, pick one with a stronger color. It could be dark green, red, orange, blue, purple, or something else — just avoid white and beige options within a food family. Although there are many exceptions, this is a good guideline.

Remember: eat the rainbow.

Go for whole grains and prefer resistant starches

Whole grains are hugely more valuable than the more processed options. You get the germ, which has a lot of the nutrients. With your typical American white bread, a lot of the healthy bits are removed (the germ and bran), leaving you with only the endosperm. With whole-grain bread, the germ and bran are also used, which keeps more of the fiber and micronutrients. This also reduces the blood-sugar spike after meals, which is another great benefit.

Another thing I learned is that there are different types of starches — rapidly digested, slowly digested, and resistant.

Resistant starch takes longer to digest, flattening some of the glucose spikes that can create hunger cravings a couple of hours after meals. Two of the best examples of those are whole grains (type 2 resistant starch, or RS2) as well as pasta, potatoes, or rice that’s cooked and then cooled (type 3, or RS3).

One way to prefer resistant starch is to aim for foods that are higher in amylose and lower in amylopectin. Amylose is a single straight-chain polymer, so it takes longer to break down and digest, whereas amylopectin is branched with many ends (so it’s faster to break down in parallel). That parallel breakdown means you get a sugar spike rather than spreading out the sugar over time. In general, this means whole grains over processed grains, and the more colorful versions of foods. Here are some examples:

• Bread: Whole-wheat/pumpernickel/rye > sourdough/multigrain/50% wheat > white
• Rice: Purple/black/red/wild > brown > long-grain white > short-grain white
• Pasta: Bean-based > whole-wheat > standard (durum)
• Potatoes: Stokes/Okinawan (purple inside) > sweet > white
• Oats: Steel-cut > rolled > instant

Another way to get more resistant starch is to eat more grains that were cooked and then cooled. Pasta salad, potato salad, grain bowls, and reheating leftover rice are a few common examples. Yes, that reheated Chinese stir-fry w/ rice can be healthier than it was when you ordered it!

Get nutrients from whole foods, not pills & powders

A lot of people try to add missing nutrients to their diet in the form of a multivitamin or a large variety of supplements. Unfortunately, research has shown that despite containing the same chemical compounds, this is frequently not a substitute. The bioavailability (the amount that actually makes it into your bloodstream) is often much higher when you eat these micronutrients as part of whole foods, rather than taking them in a pill or as powders.

Protein powder is another issue. A lot of people will make protein shakes or add protein powder to foods like yogurt to get enough protein. Unfortunately, protein powders are missing a lot of the nutrients that protein-based whole foods contain. For protein shakes specifically, the below point applies regarding drinking your calories and its poor effect on satiety. If whole foods aren’t an option, I’d recommend looking into protein bars with high fiber rather than a liquid option. RXBar is my favorite protein bar because of its simple ingredient list, high protein & fiber content (12g protein, 5g fiber) and good flavor, and it’s well-priced at Costco at ~$1.25/bar vs $2 elsewhere. When I need a packable meal replacement that doesn’t require refrigeration, I’ll usually grab an RXBar, a Wholesome Medley trail mix (from Whole Foods), and an apple or pear.

Avoid drinking your calories — focus on low- or no-calorie beverages

Overall, drinking calories can confuse your body into consuming too many calories in a day. Your primary beverage should be water. That should be complemented primarily by low-calorie, unsweetened options like coffee or tea (potentially with milk and minimal sugar).

Drop the sugar-sweetened beverages, like soda

Soda and other sugar-sweetened beverages are not recognized by the body as consumed calories. When you consume 500 calories soda, you’re likely to increase your total daily consumption by 500 calories (gaining weight) instead of eating less food later. Not to mention, if you drink sugar-sweetened beverages frequently throughout the day, you’re also destroying your teeth and potentially giving yourself diabetes.

Eat your meals instead of blending them into smoothies

Smoothies destroy much of the nutritional value in whole fruit, such as fibers and other complex molecules, because it’s ground up into tiny bits by a blender. They also make it much easier to consume far more than you normally would. How much fruit goes into a single smoothie, compared to how many whole fruits you would eat in a single sitting?

Drop the sugary alcoholic drinks

Alcohol is another place to be careful. Cocktails are full of sugar from the simple syrup. Trying to save calories by getting a basic mixed drink with Diet Coke? Then you’ve got artificial sweeteners. Your best liquor-based option is probably a mix with soda water and lime — things like a vodka soda, ranch water, gin Rickey, or whiskey highball. High-alcohol beers have incredibly high calorie counts as well. There are some good options for low-calorie or non-alcoholic beer, which I covered in an earlier post.

For coffee, stick to the classics in the smallest size (4–8 oz)

Coffee-based drinks can be incredibly high-calorie, especially in the US. Mochas and blended/frozen drinks can be 500–1000 calories or more, for a single drink. This is especially harmful because of the American tendency to order the largest size instead of the smallest — it’s a better deal, right? A Starbucks Java Chip Frappuccino is 560 calories for a venti (large). But this pales in comparison to Caribou Coffee, which offers drinks like the Turtle Mocha for 960 cal (L) / 1140 (XL) or the Caramel Caribou Cooler for 830 cal (L) / 1050 (XL). At Dunkin’, you can get the Triple Mocha Frozen Coffee at 1100 cal (L) and the Caramel Creme Frozen Coffee at 1120 cal (L). So keep your eyes open on any specialty coffees.

When drinking coffee, go for the classics. If you don’t like black coffee or espresso, then get a latte, cappuccino, flat white, cortado, or espresso macchiato. Out of those, lattes have the most milk (so the most calories), while espresso macchiatos have the least.

Also, order the smallest possible size — this is also the most authentic size, with a better ratio of espresso to milk. Starbucks carries a short size (8 oz) that isn’t on their printed menu, but unfortunately many other chains only offer 12 oz as their smallest size. Third-wave coffee shops often have 8 oz or smaller sizes as well, especially for classics like a cappuccino or flat white.

One trick if you want to order a seasonal or flavored latte is that most coffee shops have a “1/2 sweet” option that uses half the syrup, which is usually more than sufficient to add flavor. I’ll often order the smaller-sized cappuccino plus 1/2 the seasonal syrup instead of a latte, which gives me a similar experience in a smaller portion size and lower price.

Non-dairy milks at coffee shops are often full of unnecessary additives and over-sweetened, so try skim milk instead of almond/coconut milk if your goal is lower calories. Non-dairy milks are also full of empty carbs, whereas dairy milk has much more protein. For a richer drink, upgrade to whole milk and add a bit of sugar yourself if needed, instead of letting the barista pour in a huge amount of sugar-packed flavor syrup.

Give tea a try

Another great zero-calorie option is tea. Experiment with different teas, whether it’s black, green, white, masala chai, or an herbal non-caffeinated tea. The only calories come from any milk or sugar you add, but try appreciating the flavor of the tea alone. If you don’t like it, maybe you want to upgrade to higher-quality teas. I particularly like the herbal options from Celestial Seasonings and Twinings. Tazo, Rishi, and Stash come well-recommended as tea brands you can find at many places in the US. If you really get serious, you’ll probably upgrade to loose-leaf tea from a local shop.

Overall, minimize the calories in your drinks. Water, coffee (but not mochas / frozen drinks), and tea are great options, while you should minimize smoothies, soda, and alcohol.

But what do meals actually look like?

That seems like a ton of restrictions and rules, right? How can you, or I, keep track of them all? Overall, it’s about eating a wide variety and healthy ratio of colorful, minimally processed whole foods, with natural flavor and sweetness, only during meals.

Here’s some examples for a day at 1500 calories (a 1000-calorie deficit):

Breakfast

I eat the same thing almost every day, aiming for a savory breakfast rather than a sweet one. The only things I change are additions to the eggs. The veggies vary, and sometimes I substitute salsa with kimchi or sriracha.

• 2 scrambled pasture-raised eggs, with 2 diced mushrooms, 1/3 diced heirloom tomato, low-sodium lentils / black beans, and sriracha
• 250g (~9 oz) Costco three-berry blend of blackberries/raspberries/blueberries (microwaved), combined with 90g (~3.5 oz) whole-milk skyr and 15g (~1 tbsp) chia seeds
• 110g (~4 oz) kefir (fermented milk)

Lunch

Every day for lunch, I’ll have a side salad, a veggie plate, or an entree salad with lean protein in it. I aim for flavorful veggies that don’t require any sort of dip — try your local farmer’s market for better-tasting veggies than the grocery store carries.

• Big salad with Costco power greens (kale, spinach, baby chard), dressed with 1 tsp extra-virgin olive oil, vinegar, salt, and pepper
• 115g (~4 oz) pulled chicken with mustard-based BBQ sauce
• 200g (~7 oz) Stokes/Okinawan sweet potato with 1 tsp grass-fed butter

Usually my protein is chicken, canned tuna, canned salmon, or frozen, pre-cooked shrimp. On other days, I might make a chicken-salad open-faced sandwich, or the same with tuna salad. Sometimes I’ll put smoked salmon on Wasa crackers, or I’ll add salmon or shrimp to my salad. I’ll also regularly have tacos with chicken/shrimp, corn tortillas, veggies, salsa, and skyr (instead of sour cream).

Dinner

This day, I ate out at a burger restaurant. Here’s the healthier option I constructed, using Mediterranean ratios and my other guidelines:

• Crispy Brussels sprouts for a starter
• Bison burger (6 oz / 180g patty), no bun, on a bed of lettuce and tomato
• Topped with ~1 tbsp fig jam and ~15g blue cheese (I scraped off half of the blue cheese and got the fig jam on the side, so I could control the portion)
• Side of steamed broccoli with butter

Maintaining weight is just as hard as losing it

One of my biggest challenges has been making this transition into a sustainable diet, after depriving myself of many foods I enjoy for the past year. In particular, it’s extremely hard to avoid eating too many desserts or snack foods with added sugar, especially when I’m toward the lower end of my target weight range.

I speculate that this is partially related to “set point” theory. My body’s used to being much heavier, and it will take time for my body to realize that I’m healthy at this new level rather than trying to survive a famine, where I should try hard to eat high-calorie foods whenever I come across them. Exercise also helps in maintaining weight loss (there’s a study done on police officers who continued exercise post-weight-loss vs those who didn’t, and a variety of examples from the National Weight Control Registry).

Fitness is a lifelong journey

On the fitness side, I’ve taken an even more efficiency-optimized approach than I had before, with continued success.

I found my energy levels getting extremely low as I approached my target weight while maintaining a large calorie deficit. This prompted me to experiment with whether I could decrease my frequency and intensity of exercise, while still getting most of the results.

Dropping HIIT with no hit in results

I kept my daily walks for low-intensity steady state (LISS) cardio exercise, although I’ve adapted them slightly into 3 per day — with a 15-minute walk after each of my 3 meals. However, I experimented with dropping the high-intensity interval training (HIIT).

Surprisingly, my VO2Max (a measure of cardiorespiratory health) continued to increase at almost the same rate as before. My plan is to watch for a plateau in VO2Max, and consider re-introducing HIIT at that point. Alternately, if I ever get too short on time to continue with enough LISS, I could replace it entirely with my extremely low-volume HIIT program.

I would like to re-add HIIT at some point because a mixture of different intensities is overall better than just one. However I frankly don’t enjoy HIIT so I’m not in a big rush, until I have a clear need (like I mentioned above).

Simplifying and reducing strength training

I was also doing strength training 3x/week, with 3 paired sets per workout. I’ve replaced that with a 2x/week pattern, also dropping from 3 to only 1 paired set — importantly, performed to near-failure. Again, I’ve seen nearly equivalent results. Upon reviewing the academic research and expert recommendations in this area, many experts suggest that sets 2 and 3 essentially serve as “insurance” that you’ve maximized your potential growth in strength & size during a workout. At worst, doing a single set might offer more than 50% of the total benefit of any number of sets. That means a single set — if done well — could provide a majority of the benefits in just 1/3 of the time. This fits nicely into my 80/20 philosophy.

If you’d like to look into this in more detail, go on Google Scholar and look up “resistance training single-set OR one-set review OR meta-analysis.” In general, the research shows a dose-dependent response (more sets produce better results), but there’s diminishing returns from each additional set. You need to carefully look at the effect sizes, comparing the effect size of one set to the effect size of multiple sets. There will often be statistically significant differences, but the effect size is the important part. It’s not about whether the difference is real, it’s about how big it is. Overall, if you’re optimizing for efficiency on time spent working out rather than maximizing muscle growth in a certain period of time (e.g. a year), single sets can be a great approach. My perspective is that I’ll be doing this for the rest of my life, and I’ll be moving increasingly slowly toward a plateau of my biological maximum strength, so I don’t really care how many years it takes.

I may find that I need to increase my set count as I get more experience with strength training, and my “newbie gains” gradually fade away. We’ll see how things continue to develop over time, and whether I hit a plateau where that might be an option I try.

My current strength training routine continues to use a similar routine as described in my last writeup. I use the 8×3 app to track my progressions & progressive overload, and I alternate between two routines, both of which are full-body workouts with compound movements:

Day 1: Vertical push/pull (+core & legs). L-sit pull-ups, dips / handstand push-ups, squats, Nordic curls.

Day 2: Horizontal push/pull (+core & legs). Horizontal rows, push-ups, squats, Nordic curls, hanging leg raises.

Each exercise is part of a progression toward more advanced, lower-leverage movements that will continue to build strength, without the need to use any weights. For example, I’m specifically working on pistol & shrimp squats, handstand push-up negatives, pseudo planche push-ups, L-sit pull-ups, and tucked front levers.

I’ve added two more low-cost, small, and portable pieces of equipment to make this easy, bringing my total to three pieces. I’d already purchased a doorway pull-up bar ($26). Since then, I’ve added gymnastics rings ($32) hanging from the pull-up bar. Rings are extremely flexible — I use them for horizontal rows and dips, but they can be used for ab roll-outs, pull-ups (instead of the bar), and so much more. I’m also using a Nordstick ($27, or a bit more for the Pro) that slides under a closet door, because Nordic curls are tricky without some sort of specialized device. An alternative, equipment-free exercise is a reverse hyperextension, but the unweighted version will plateau pretty quickly.

Overall, I’ve further reduced the time commitment from exercise without significant impact. I’ve removed HIIT, maintained LISS (daily, 15 min x 3), and reduced strength training (2x/wk, 10 min x 1), and I still see nearly equivalent outcomes.

I’m not just maintaining my fitness and strength — it’s continuing to grow, even without any caloric surplus. I do expect that re-composition to plateau within a year or two at a maintenance diet. At that point, I may need to do mini bulks and cuts (gaining/losing weight in cycles to grow my muscle mass).

Learn more

Want to learn more? Here’s some books that I’ve found helpful, roughly in order. I’ve also shared my Kindle highlights for each one, in case you want to see my perspective on the key points before reading the full book.

• Ultra-Processed People (my Kindle highlights)
• Metabolical: The Lure and the Lies of Processed Food, Nutrition, and Modern Medicine (my Kindle highlights)
• Glucose Revolution: The Life-Changing Power of Balancing Your Blood Sugar (my Kindle highlights)
• Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us (my Kindle highlights)
• Sugarless: A 7-Step Plan to Uncover Hidden Sugars, Curb Your Cravings, and Conquer Your Addiction (my Kindle highlights)
• The No S Diet: The Strikingly Simple Weight-Loss Strategy That Has Dieters Raving–and Dropping Pounds (my Kindle highlights)
• Ravenous: How to get ourselves and our planet into shape (my Kindle highlights)
• The Way We Eat Now: How the Food Revolution Has Transformed Our Lives, Our Bodies, and Our World (my Kindle highlights)
• Spoon-Fed: Why Almost Everything We’ve Been Told About Food is Wrong (my Kindle highlights)
• Food for Life: The New Science of Eating Well (my Kindle highlights)
• The Dorito Effect (my Kindle highlights)
• The End of Craving: Recovering the Lost Wisdom of Eating Well (my Kindle highlights)
• Lose It Forever: The 6 Habits of Successful Weight Losers from the National Weight Control Registry (my Kindle highlights)

Last week we released systemd v257 into the wild.

In the weeks leading up to this release (and the week after) I have posted a series of serieses of posts to Mastodon about key new features in this release, under the #systemd257 hash tag. In case you aren't using Mastodon, but would like to read up, here's a list of all 37 posts:

• Post #1: Fully Locked Accounts with systemd-sysusers
• Post #2: Combined Signed PCR and Locally Managed PCR Policies for Disk Encryption
• Post #3: Progress Indication via Terminal ANSI Sequence
• Post #4: Multi-Profile UKIs
• Post #5: The New sd-varlink & sd-json APIs in libsystemd
• Post #6: Querying for Passwords in User Scope
• Post #7: Secure Attention Key Logic in systemd-logind
• Post #8: systemd-nspawn --bind-user= Now Copies User's SSH Key
• Post #9: The New DeferReactivation= Switch in .timer Units
• Post #10: Support for the New IPE LSM
• Post #11: Environment Variables for Shell Prompt Prefix/Suffix
• Post #12: sysctl Conflict Detection via eBPF
• Post #13: initrd and µcode UKI Add-Ons
• Post #14: SecureBoot Signing with the New systemd-sbsign Tool
• Post #15: Managed Access to hidraw devices in systemd-logind
• Post #16: Fuzzy Filtering in userdbctl
• Post #17: MAC Address Based Alternative Network Interface Names
• Post #18: Conditional Copying/Symlinking in tmpfiles.d/
• Post #19: Automatic Service Restarts in Debug Mode
• Post #20: Filtering by Invocation ID in journalctl
• Post #21: Supplement Partitions in repart.d/
• Post #22: DeviceTree Matching in UKIs
• Post #23: The New ssh-exec: Protocol in varlinkctl
• Post #24: SecureBoot Key Enrollment Preparation with bootctl
• Post #25: Automatically Installing confext/sysext/portable/VMs/container Images at Boot
• Post #26: Designated Maintenance Time in systemd-logind
• Post #27: PID Namespacing in Service Management
• Post #28: Marking Experimental OS Releases in /etc/os-release
• Post #29: Decoding Capability Masks with systemd-analyze
• Post #30: Investigating Passed SMBIOS Type #11 Data
• Post #31: Initializing Partitions from Character Devices in repart.d/
• Post #32: Entering Namespaces to Generate Stacktraces
• Post #33: ID Mapped Mounts for Per-Service Directories
• Post #34: A Daemon for systemd-sysupdate
• Post #35: User Record Modifications without Administrator Consent in systemd-homed
• Post #36: DNR DHCP Support
• Post #37: Name Based AF_VSOCK ssh Access

I intend to do a similar series of serieses of posts for the next systemd release (v258), hence if you haven't left tech Twitter for Mastodon yet, now is the opportunity.

Hi!

For once let’s open things up with the NPotM. I’ve started working on sajin, an Android app which synchronizes camera pictures in the background. I’ve grown tired of manually copying files around, and I don’t want to use proprietary services to backup my pictures, so I’ve been meaning to write a tiny app to upload pictures to my server. It’s super simple: enter the WebDAV server URL and credentials, then just forget about the app. It plays well with sogogi (my WebDAV file server) and Photoview (a Web picture gallery). I’d like to implement feedback on synchronization status and manual synchronization of older pictures. I really need to find an icon for it too.

Once again, this month I’ve spent a fair bit of time on Sway and wlroots bug fixes, in particular wlroots DRM backend issues affecting old GPUs (these not supporting the atomic KMS API) and multi-GPU setups (I’ve had to bite the bullet and bring my super shaky setup out of the closet). wlroots 0.18.2 has been released, among other things it also fixes some X11 drag-and-drop bugs (thanks Consolatis!).

In IRC land, delthas has added soju support for the metadata extension, enabling clients to mark conversations as pinned or muted. Once senpai and Goguma add support for this extension, they will be able to synchronize this bit of state. In other words, marking a conversation as pinned on a mobile phone will also affect all other connected clients.

Thanks to John Regan, PostgreSQL message queries have been optimized by several orders of magnitude: on large message stores, they now take a few milliseconds instead of multiple seconds. I’ve turned on WAL mode for SQLite, which should help with message insertion performance.

I’ve worked on making Goguma play better with direct connections to old IRC servers such as Libera Chat and OFTC. These servers support only a few IRCv3 extensions, and they aggressively rate-limit TCP connections and commands (including CAP REQ commands sent to initialize the connection). Goguma should now reconnect less often on first setup and should connect more quickly (by reducing the amount of CAP REQ commands).

Last, I’ve added proper support for GitLab Pages to dalligi, a small bridge to use builds.sr.ht as a GitLab CI runner. GitLab Pages requires to define a special job with the exact name “pages”, which is cumbersome with builds.sr.ht. dalligi can now copy over artifacts of a previous job to this special “pages” job. I hope this can be used to automatically publish wlroots docs.

See you next year!

English version follows.

Aujourd’hui, Khronos Group a sorti la spécification 1.4 de l’API graphique standard Vulkan. Le projet Asahi Linux est fier d’annoncer le premier pilote Vulkan 1.4 pour le matériel d’Apple. En effet, notre pilote graphique Honeykrisp est reconnu par Khronos comme conforme à cette nouvelle version dès aujourd’hui.

Ce pilote est déjà disponible dans nos dépôts officiels. Après avoir installé Fedora Asahi Remix, executez dnf upgrade --refresh pour obtenir la dernière version du pilote.

Vulkan 1.4 standardise plusieurs fonctionnalités importantes, y compris les horodatages et la lecture locale avec le rendu dynamique. L’industrie suppose que ces fonctionnalités devront être plus courantes, et nous y sommes préparés.

Sortir un pilote conforme reflète notre engagement en faveur des standards graphiques et du logiciel libre. Asahi Linux est aussi compatible avec OpenGL 4.6, OpenGL ES 3.2, et OpenCL 3.0, tous conformes aux spécifications pertinentes. D’ailleurs, les nôtres sont les seuls pilotes conformes pour le materiel d’Apple de n’importe quel standard graphique.

Même si le pilote est sorti, il faut encore compiler une version expérimentale de Vulkan-Loader pour utiliser la nouvelle version de Vulkan. Toutes les nouvelles fonctionnalités sont néanmoins disponibles comme extensions à notre pilote Vulkan 1.3 pour en profiter tout de suite.

Pour plus d’informations, consultez l’article du blog de Khronos.

Today, the Khronos Group released the 1.4 specification of Vulkan, the standard graphics API. The Asahi Linux project is proud to announce the first Vulkan 1.4 driver for Apple hardware. Our Honeykrisp driver is Khronos-recognized as conformant to the new version since day one.

That driver is already available in our official repositories. After installing Fedora Asahi Remix, run dnf upgrade --refresh to get the latest drivers.

Vulkan 1.4 standardizes several important features, including timestamps and dynamic rendering local read. The industry expects that these features will become more common, and we are prepared.

Releasing a conformant driver reflects our commitment to graphics standards and software freedom. Asahi Linux is also compatible with OpenGL 4.6, OpenGL ES 3.2, and OpenCL 3.0, all conformant to the relevant specifications. For that matter, ours are the only conformant drivers on Apple hardware for any graphics standard.

Although the driver is released, you still need to build an experimental version of Vulkan-Loader to access the new Vulkan version. Nevertheless, you can immediately use all the new features as extensions in our Vulkan 1.3 driver.

For more information, see the Khronos blog post.

Hi all!

This month I’ve spent a lot of time triaging Sway and wlroots issues following the Sway 1.10 release. There are a few regressions, some of which are already fixed (thanks to all contributors for sending patches!). Kenny has added support for software-only secondary KMS devices such as GUD and DisplayLink. David Turner from Raspberry Pi has contributed crop and scale support for output buffers, that way video players are more likely to hit direct scan-out. I’ve added support for explicit sync in the Wayland backend for nested compositors.

I’ve worked a bit on the Goguma mobile IRC client. The auto-complete dropdown now shows user display names, channel topics and command descriptions. Additionally, commands which don’t make sense given the current context are hidden (for instance, /part is not displayed in a conversation with a single user).

The gamja Web IRC client should now reconnect more quickly after regaining connectivity. For instance, after resume from suspend, gamja now reconnects immediately instead of waiting 10 seconds. Thanks to Matteo, soju-containers now ships arm64 images.

The NPotM is sogogi, a simple WebDAV file server. It’s quite minimal for now: a list of directories to serve is defined in the configuration file, as well as users and access lists. In the future, I’d like to add external authentication (e.g. via PAM or via another HTTP server), HTML directory listings and configuration file reload.

That’s all for now! Once again, that’s a pretty short status update. A lot of my time goes into more boring maintenance tasks and reviews. See you next month!

XDC 2024 in Montreal was another fantastic gathering for the Linux Graphics community. It was again a great time to immerse in the world of graphics development, engage in stimulating conversations, and learn from inspiring developers.

Many Igalia colleagues and I participated in the conference again, delivering multiple talks about our work on the Linux Graphics stack and also organizing the Display/KMS meeting. This blog post is a detailed report on the Display/KMS meeting held during this XDC edition.

Short on Time?

1. Catch the lightning talk summarizing the meeting here (you can even speed up 2x):

1. For a quick written summary, scroll down to the TL;DR section.

TL;DR

This meeting took 3 hours and tackled a variety of topics related to DRM/KMS (Linux/DRM Kernel Modesetting):

• Sharing Drivers Between V4L2 and KMS: Brainstorming solutions for using a single driver for devices used in both camera capture and display pipelines.
• Real-Time Scheduling: Addressing issues with non-blocking page flips encountering sigkills under real-time scheduling.
• HDR/Color Management: Agreement on merging the current proposal, with NVIDIA implementing its special cases on VKMS and adding missing parts on top of Harry Wentland’s (AMD) changes.
• Display Mux: Collaborative design discussions focusing on compositor control and cross-sync considerations.
• Better Commit Failure Feedback: Exploring ways to equip compositors with more detailed information for failure analysis.

Bringing together Linux display developers in the XDC 2024

While I didn’t present a talk this year, I co-organized a Display/KMS meeting (with Rodrigo Siqueira of AMD) to build upon the momentum from the 2024 Linux Display Next hackfest. The meeting was attended by around 30 people in person and 4 remote participants.

Speakers: Melissa Wen (Igalia) and Rodrigo Siqueira (AMD)

Link: https://indico.freedesktop.org/event/6/contributions/383/

Topics: Similar to the hackfest, the meeting agenda was built over the first two days of the conference and mixed talks follow-up with new ideas and ongoing community efforts.

The final agenda covered five topics in the scheduled order:

1. How to share drivers between V4L2 and DRM for bridge-like components (new topic);
2. Real-time Scheduling (problems encountered after the Display Next hackfest);
3. HDR/Color Management (ofc);
4. Display Mux (from Display hackfest and XDC 2024 talk, bringing AMD and NVIDIA together);
5. (Better) Commit Failure Feedback (continuing the last minute topic of the Display Next hackfest).

Unpacking the Topics

Similar to the hackfest, the meeting agenda evolved over the conference. During the 3 hours of meeting, I coordinated the room and discussion rounds, and Rodrigo Siqueira took notes and also contacted key developers to provide a detailed report of the many topics discussed.

From his notes, let’s dive into the key discussions!

How to share drivers between V4L2 and KMS for bridge-like components.

Led by Laurent Pinchart, we delved into the challenge of creating a unified driver for hardware devices (like scalers) that are used in both camera capture pipelines and display pipelines.

• Problem Statement: How can we design a single kernel driver to handle devices that serve dual purposes in both V4L2 and DRM subsystems?
• Potential Solutions:
  1. Multiple Compatible Strings: We could assign different compatible strings to the device tree node based on its usage in either the camera or display pipeline. However, this approach might raise concerns from device tree maintainers as it could be seen as a layer violation.
  2. Separate Abstractions: A single driver could expose the device to both DRM and V4L2 through separate abstractions: drm-bridge for DRM and V4L2 subdev for video. While simple, this approach requires maintaining two different abstractions for the same underlying device.
  3. Unified Kernel Abstraction: We could create a new, unified kernel abstraction that combines the best aspects of drm-bridge and V4L2 subdev. This approach offers a more elegant solution but requires significant design effort and potential migration challenges for existing hardware.

Real-Time Scheduling Challenges

We have discussed real-time scheduling during this year Linux Display Next hackfest and, during the XDC 2024, Jonas Adahl brought up issues uncovered while progressing on this front.

• Context: Non-blocking page-flips can, on rare occasions, take a long time and, for that reason, get a sigkill if the thread doing the atomic commit is a real-time schedule.
• Action items:
  • Explore alternative backtraces during the busy wait (e.g., ftrace).
  • Investigate the maximum thread time in busy wait to reproduce issues faced by compositors. Tools like RTKit (mutter) can be used for better control (Michel Dänzer can help with this setup).

HDR/Color Management

This is a well-known topic with ongoing effort on all layers of the Linux Display stack and has been discussed online and in-person in conferences and meetings over the last years.

Here’s a breakdown of the key points raised at this meeting:

• Talk: Color operations for Linux color pipeline on AMD devices: In the previous day, Alex Hung (AMD) presented the implementation of this API on AMD display driver.
• NVIDIA Integration: While they agree with the overall proposal, NVIDIA needs to add some missing parts. Importantly, they will implement these on top of Harry Wentland’s (AMD) proposal. Their specific requirements will be implemented on VKMS (Virtual Kernel Mode Setting driver) for further discussion. This VKMS implementation can benefit compositor developers by providing insights into NVIDIA’s specific needs.
• Other vendors: There is a version of the KMS API applied on Intel color pipeline. Apart from that, other vendors appear to be comfortable with the current proposal but lacks the bandwidth to implement it right now.
• Upstream Patches: The relevant upstream patches were can be found here. [As humorously notes, this series is eagerly awaiting your “Acked-by” (approval)]
• Compositor Side: The compositor developers have also made significant progress.
  • KDE has already implemented and validated the API through an experimental implementation in Kwin.
  • Gamescope currently uses a driver-specific implementation but has a draft that utilizes the generic version. However, some work is still required to fully transition away from the driver-specific approach. AP: work on porting gamescope to KMS generic API
  • Weston has also begun exploring implementation, and we might see something from them by the end of the year.
• Kernel and Testing: The kernel API proposal is well-refined and meets the DRM subsystem requirements. Thanks to Harry Wentland effort, we already have the API attached to two hardware vendors and IGT tests, and, thanks to Xaver Hugl, a compositor implementation in place.

Finally, there was a strong sense of agreement that the current proposal for HDR/Color Management is ready to be merged. In simpler terms, everything seems to be working well on the technical side - all signs point to merging and “shipping” the DRM/KMS plane color management API!

Display Mux

During the meeting, Daniel Dadap led a brainstorming session on the design of the display mux switching sequence, in which the compositor would arm the switch via sysfs, then send a modeset to the outgoing driver, followed by a modeset to the incoming driver.

• Context:
  • During this year Linux Display Next hackfest, Mario Limonciello (AMD) introduced the topic and led a discussion on Display Mux.
  • Daniel Dadap (NVIDIA) retook this discussion with the XDC 2024 talk: Dynamic Switching of Display Muxes on Hybrid GPU Systems.
• Key Considerations:
  • HPD Handling: There was a general consensus that disabling HPD can be part of the sequence for internal panels and we don’t need to focus on it here.
  • Cross-Sync: Ensuring synchronization between the compositor and the drivers is crucial. The compositor should act as the “drm-master” to coordinate the entire sequence, but how can this be ensured?
  • Future-Proofing: The design should not assume the presence of a mux. In future scenarios, direct sharing over DP might be possible.
• Action points:
  • Sharing DP AUX: Explore the idea of sharing DP AUX and its implications.
  • Backlight: The backlight definition represents a problem in the mux switch context, so we should explore some of the current specs available for that.

Towards Better Commit Failure Feedback

In the last part of the meeting, Xaver Hugl asked for better commit failure feedback.

• Problem description: Compositors currently face challenges in collecting detailed information from the kernel about commit failures. This lack of granular data hinders their ability to understand and address the root causes of these failures.

To address this issue, we discussed several potential improvements:

• Direct Kernel Log Access: One idea is to directly load relevant kernel logs into the compositor. This would provide more detailed information about the failure and potentially aid in debugging.
• Finer-Grained Failure Reporting: We also explored the possibility of separating atomic failures into more specific categories. Not all failures are critical, and understanding the nature of the failure can help compositors take appropriate action.
• Enhanced Logging: Currently, the dmesg log doesn’t provide enough information for user-space validation. Raising the log level to capture more detailed information during failures could be a viable solution.

By implementing these improvements, we aim to equip compositors with the necessary tools to better understand and resolve commit failures, leading to a more robust and stable display system.

A Big Thank You!

Huge thanks to Rodrigo Siqueira for these detailed meeting notes. Also, Laurent Pinchart, Jonas Adahl, Daniel Dadap, Xaver Hugl, and Harry Wentland for bringing up interesting topics and leading discussions. Finally, thanks to all the participants who enriched the discussions with their experience, ideas, and inputs, especially Alex Goins, Antonino Maniscalco, Austin Shafer, Daniel Stone, Demi Obenour, Jessica Zhang, Joan Torres, Leo Li, Liviu Dudau, Mario Limonciello, Michel Dänzer, Rob Clark, Simon Ser and Teddy Li.

This collaborative effort will undoubtedly contribute to the continued development of the Linux display stack.

Stay tuned for future updates!

A while ago I was looking at Rust-based parsing of HID reports but, surprisingly, outside of C wrappers and the usual cratesquatting I couldn't find anything ready to use. So I figured, why not write my own, NIH style. Yay! Gave me a good excuse to learn API design for Rust and whatnot. Anyway, the result of this effort is the hidutils collection of repositories which includes commandline tools like hid-recorder and hid-replay but, more importantly, the hidreport (documentation) and hut (documentation) crates. Let's have a look at the latter two.

Both crates were intentionally written with minimal dependencies, they currently only depend on thiserror and arguably even that dependency can be removed.

HID Usage Tables (HUT)

As you know, HID Fields have a so-called "Usage" which is divided into a Usage Page (like a chapter) and a Usage ID. The HID Usage tells us what a sequence of bits in a HID Report represents, e.g. "this is the X axis" or "this is button number 5". These usages are specified in the HID Usage Tables (HUT) (currently at version 1.5 (PDF)). The hut crate is generated from the official HUT json file and contains all current HID Usages together with the various conversions you will need to get from a numeric value in a report descriptor to the named usage and vice versa. Which means you can do things like this:

  let gd_x = GenericDesktop::X;
  let usage_page = gd_x.usage_page();
  assert!(matches!(usage_page, UsagePage::GenericDesktop));
  

  let usage = Usage::new_from_page_and_id(0x1, 0x30); // GenericDesktop / X
  println!("Usage is {}", usage.name());
  

hidreport - Report Descriptor parsing

The hidreport crate is the one that can take a set of HID Report Descriptor bytes obtained from a device and parse the contents. Or extract the value of a HID Field from a HID Report, given the HID Report Descriptor. So let's assume we have a bunch of bytes that are HID report descriptor read from the device (or sysfs) we can do this:

  let rdesc: ReportDescriptor = ReportDescriptor::try_from(bytes).unwrap();
  

   let input_report_bytes = read_from_device();
   let report = rdesc.find_input_report(&input_report_bytes).unwrap();
   let field = report.fields().first().unwrap();
   match field {
       Field::Variable(var) => {
          let val: u32 = var.extract(&input_report_bytes).unwrap().into();
          println!("Field {:?} is of value {}", field, val);
       },
       _ => {}
   }
  

hid-recorder

The hidreport and hut crates are still quite new but we have an existing test bed that we use regularly. The venerable hid-recorder tool has been rewritten twice already. Benjamin Tissoires' first version was in C, then a Python version of it became part of hid-tools and now we have the third version written in Rust. Which has a few nice features over the Python version and we're using it heavily for e.g. udev-hid-bpf debugging and development. An examle output of that is below and it shows that you can get all the information out of the device via the hidreport and hut crates.

$ sudo hid-recorder /dev/hidraw1
# Microsoft Microsoft® 2.4GHz Transceiver v9.0
# Report descriptor length: 223 bytes
# 0x05, 0x01,                    // Usage Page (Generic Desktop)              0
# 0x09, 0x02,                    // Usage (Mouse)                             2
# 0xa1, 0x01,                    // Collection (Application)                  4
# 0x05, 0x01,                    //   Usage Page (Generic Desktop)            6
# 0x09, 0x02,                    //   Usage (Mouse)                           8
# 0xa1, 0x02,                    //   Collection (Logical)                    10
# 0x85, 0x1a,                    //     Report ID (26)                        12
# 0x09, 0x01,                    //     Usage (Pointer)                       14
# 0xa1, 0x00,                    //     Collection (Physical)                 16
# 0x05, 0x09,                    //       Usage Page (Button)                 18
# 0x19, 0x01,                    //       UsageMinimum (1)                    20
# 0x29, 0x05,                    //       UsageMaximum (5)                    22
# 0x95, 0x05,                    //       Report Count (5)                    24
# 0x75, 0x01,                    //       Report Size (1)                     26
... omitted for brevity
# 0x75, 0x01,                    //     Report Size (1)                       213
# 0xb1, 0x02,                    //     Feature (Data,Var,Abs)                215
# 0x75, 0x03,                    //     Report Size (3)                       217
# 0xb1, 0x01,                    //     Feature (Cnst,Arr,Abs)                219
# 0xc0,                          //   End Collection                          221
# 0xc0,                          // End Collection                            222
R: 223 05 01 09 02 a1 01 05 01 09 02 a1 02 85 1a 09 ... omitted for previty
N: Microsoft Microsoft® 2.4GHz Transceiver v9.0
I: 3 45e 7a5
# Report descriptor:
# ------- Input Report -------
# Report ID: 26
#    Report size: 80 bits
#  |   Bit:    8       | Usage: 0009/0001: Button / Button 1                          | Logical Range:     0..=1     |
#  |   Bit:    9       | Usage: 0009/0002: Button / Button 2                          | Logical Range:     0..=1     |
#  |   Bit:   10       | Usage: 0009/0003: Button / Button 3                          | Logical Range:     0..=1     |
#  |   Bit:   11       | Usage: 0009/0004: Button / Button 4                          | Logical Range:     0..=1     |
#  |   Bit:   12       | Usage: 0009/0005: Button / Button 5                          | Logical Range:     0..=1     |
#  |   Bits:  13..=15  | ######### Padding                                            |
#  |   Bits:  16..=31  | Usage: 0001/0030: Generic Desktop / X                        | Logical Range: -32767..=32767 |
#  |   Bits:  32..=47  | Usage: 0001/0031: Generic Desktop / Y                        | Logical Range: -32767..=32767 |
#  |   Bits:  48..=63  | Usage: 0001/0038: Generic Desktop / Wheel                    | Logical Range: -32767..=32767 | Physical Range:     0..=0     |
#  |   Bits:  64..=79  | Usage: 000c/0238: Consumer / AC Pan                          | Logical Range: -32767..=32767 | Physical Range:     0..=0     |
# ------- Input Report -------
# Report ID: 31
#    Report size: 24 bits
#  |   Bits:   8..=23  | Usage: 000c/0238: Consumer / AC Pan                          | Logical Range: -32767..=32767 | Physical Range:     0..=0     |
# ------- Feature Report -------
# Report ID: 18
#    Report size: 16 bits
#  |   Bits:   8..=9   | Usage: 0001/0048: Generic Desktop / Resolution Multiplier    | Logical Range:     0..=1     | Physical Range:     1..=12    |
#  |   Bits:  10..=11  | Usage: 0001/0048: Generic Desktop / Resolution Multiplier    | Logical Range:     0..=1     | Physical Range:     1..=12    |
#  |   Bits:  12..=15  | ######### Padding                                            |
# ------- Feature Report -------
# Report ID: 23
#    Report size: 16 bits
#  |   Bits:   8..=9   | Usage: ff00/ff06: Vendor Defined Page 0xFF00 / Vendor Usage 0xff06 | Logical Range:     0..=1     | Physical Range:     1..=12    |
#  |   Bits:  10..=11  | Usage: ff00/ff0f: Vendor Defined Page 0xFF00 / Vendor Usage 0xff0f | Logical Range:     0..=1     | Physical Range:     1..=12    |
#  |   Bit:   12       | Usage: ff00/ff04: Vendor Defined Page 0xFF00 / Vendor Usage 0xff04 | Logical Range:     0..=1     | Physical Range:     0..=0     |
#  |   Bits:  13..=15  | ######### Padding                                            |
##############################################################################
# Recorded events below in format:
# E: .  [bytes ...]
#
# Current time: 11:31:20
# Report ID: 26 /
#                Button 1:     0 | Button 2:     0 | Button 3:     0 | Button 4:     0 | Button 5:     0 | X:     5 | Y:     0 |
#                Wheel:     0 |
#                AC Pan:     0 |
E: 000000.000124 10 1a 00 05 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
  

Several months have passed since the last update. This has been in part due to the summer holidays and a gig doing some non-upstream work, but I have also had the opportunity to continue my work on the NPU driver for the VeriSilicon NPU in the NXP i.MX 8M Plus SoC, thanks to my friends at Ideas on Board.

CC BY-NC 4.0 Henrik Boye

With this, as of yesterday, one can accelerate models such as SSDLite MobileDet on that SoC with only open source software, with the support being provided directly from projects that are already ubiquitous in today's products, such as the Linux kernel and Mesa3D. We can expect this functionality to reach distributions such as Debian in due time, for seamless installation and integration in products.

With this milestone reached, I will be working on expanding support for more models, with a first goal of enabling YOLO-like models, starting with YOLOX. I will be working as well on performance, as currently we are not fully using the capabilities of this hardware.

Unleashing the power of 3D graphics in the Raspberry Pi is a key commitment for Igalia through its collaboration with Raspberry Pi. The introduction of Super Pages for the Raspberry Pi 4 and 5 marks another step in this journey, offering some performance enhancements and more efficient memory usage. In this post, we’ll dive deep into the technical details of Super Pages, discuss the challenges we faced during implementation, and illustrate the benefits this feature brings to the Raspberry Pi ecosystem.

What are Super Pages?

A Memory Management Unit (MMU) is a hardware component responsible for handling memory access at the system level. It translates virtual addresses used by programs into physical addresses in main memory, enabling efficient memory management and protection. The MMU allows the operating system to allocate memory dynamically, isolating processes from one another to prevent them from interfering with each other’s memory.

Recommendation: 📚 Structured computer organization by Andrew Tanenbaum

The V3D MMU, which is part of the Broadcom GPU found in the Raspberry Pi 4 and 5, is responsible for translating 32-bit virtual addresses (VA) used by V3D into 40-bit physical addresses used externally to V3D. The MMU relies on a page table, stored in physical memory, which maps virtual addresses to their corresponding physical addresses. The operating system manages this page table, and the MMU uses it to perform address translation during memory access.

A fundamental principle of modern operating systems is that memory is not stored contiguously. Instead, a contiguous block of memory is divided into smaller blocks, called “pages”, which are scattered across the entire address space. These pages are typically 4KB in size. This approach enables more efficient memory management and allows for features like virtual memory and memory protection.

Over the years, the amount of available memory in computers has increased dramatically. An early IBM PC had up to 640 KiB of RAM, whereas the ThinkPad I’m typing on right now has 32 GB of RAM. Naturally, memory demands have grown alongside this increase. Today, it’s common for web browsers to consume several gigabytes of RAM, and a single shader can take up multiple megabytes.

As memory usage grows, a 4KB page size may become inefficient for managing large memory blocks. Handling a large number of small pages for a single block means the MMU must perform multiple address translations, which increases overhead. This can reduce the effectiveness of the Translation Lookaside Buffer (TLB), as it must store and handle more entries, potentially leading to more cache misses and reduced overall performance.

This is why many CPU manufacturers have introduced support for larger page sizes. For instance, x86 CPUs typically support 4KB and 2MB pages, with 1GB pages available if supported by the hardware. Similarly, ARM64 CPUs can support 4KB, 16KB, and 64KB page sizes. These larger page sizes help reduce the number of pages the MMU needs to manage, improving performance by reducing the overhead of address translation and making more efficient use of the TLB.

So, if CPUs are using bigger sizes, why shouldn’t GPUs do the same?

By default, V3D supports 4KB pages. However, by setting specific bits in the page table entry, it is possible to create 64KB “Big Pages” and 1MB “Super Pages.” The issue is that the current V3D driver available in Linux does not enable the use of Big or Super Pages, meaning this hardware feature is currently unused.

The advantage of enabling Big and Super Pages is that once an entry for any page within a Big or Super Page is cached in the MMU, it can be used to translate all virtual addresses within that page’s range without needing to fetch additional entries. In theory, this should result in improved performance, especially for applications with high memory demands, such as those using multiple large buffer objects (BOs).

As Igalia continually strives to enhance the experience for Raspberry Pi users, we decided to implement this feature in the upstream kernel. But before diving into the implementation details, let’s take a look at the real-world results and see if the theoretical benefits of Super Pages have translated into measurable improvements for Raspberry Pi users.

What Does This Feature Mean for RPi Users?

With Super Pages implemented, let’s now explore the actual performance improvements observed on the Raspberry Pi and see how impactful this feature is for users.

Benchmarking Super Pages: Traces and FPS Improvements

To measure the impact of Super Pages, we tested a variety of games and demos traces on the Raspberry Pi 4 and 5, covering genres from action to racing. On average, we observed a +1.40% FPS improvement on the Raspberry Pi 4 and a +1.30% improvement on the Raspberry Pi 5.

For instance, on the Raspberry Pi 4, Warzone 2100 saw an 8.36% FPS increase, and on the Raspberry Pi 5, Quake II enjoyed a 3.62% boost. These examples demonstrate the benefits of Super Pages in resource-demanding applications, where optimized memory handling becomes critical.

Raspberry Pi 4 FPS Improvements

Raspberry Pi 5 FPS Improvements

While an average +1% FPS improvement might seem modest, Super Pages can deliver more noticeable gains in memory-intensive 3D applications and when the GPU is under heavy usage. Let’s see how the Super Pages perform on Mesa CI.

Benchmarking Super Pages: Mesa CI Job Duration

To avoid introducing regressions in user-space, I usually test my custom kernels with Mesa CI, focusing on the “broadcom-postmerge” stage to verify that all Piglit and CTS tests ran smoothly. For Super Pages, I was pleasantly surprised by the job duration results, as some job durations were reduced by several minutes.

Mesa CI Jobs Duration Improvements

Seeing these reductions is especially rewarding. For example, the “v3dv-rpi5-vk-full:arm64” job duration decreased by 10 minutes, meaning more FPS for users and shorter wait times for Mesa developers.

Benchmarking Super Pages: PS2 Emulation

After sharing a couple of tables, I’ll admit that showcasing performance improvements solely through numbers doesn’t always convey the real impact. Personally, I find it more satisfying to see performance gains in action with real-world applications.

This led me to explore PlayStation 2 (PS2) emulation on the RPi 5. From watching YouTube videos, I noticed that PS2 is a popular console for the RPi 5. While the PlayStation (PS1) emulates well even on the RPi 4, and Nintendo 64 and Sega Saturn struggle across most hardware, PS2 hits a sweet spot for testing the RPi 5’s limits.

Fortunately, I still have my childhood PS2 — my second console after the Nintendo GameCube, and one of the most successful consoles worldwide, including in Brazil. With a library packed with titles like Metal Gear Solid, Resident Evil, Tomb Raider, and Shadow of the Colossus, the PS2 remains a great system for collectors and retro gamers alike.

I selected a few games from my collection to benchmark on the RPi 5 using a PS2 emulator. My emulator of choice was Aether SX2 with Vulkan support. Although AetherSX2 is no longer in development, it still performs well on the RPi.

Initially, many games were barely playable, especially those with large buffer objects, like Shadow of the Colossus and Gran Turismo 4. However, after enabling Super Pages support, I noticed immediate improvements. For example, Shadow of the Colossus wouldn’t even open before Super Pages, and while it’s not fully playable yet, it does load now. This isn’t a silver bullet, but it’s a step forward in improving the driver one piece at a time.

I ended up selecting four games for a video comparison: Burnout 3: Takedown, Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater, Resident Evil 4, and Tekken 4.

Disclaimer: The BIOS used in the emulator was extracted from my own PS2, and I played only games I own, with ROMs I personally extracted. Neither I nor Igalia encourage using downloaded BIOS or ROM files from the internet.

From the video, we can see noticeable improvements in all four games. Although they aren’t perfectly playable yet, the performance gains are evident, particularly in Resident Evil 4, where the gameplay saw a solid 5 FPS boost. I realize 18 FPS might not satisfy most players, but I still had a lot of fun playing Resident Evil 4 on the RPi 5.

When tracking the FPS for these games, it’s clear that the performance gains go well beyond the average 1% seen in other benchmarks. Super Pages show their true potential in high-memory applications like PS2 emulation.

Having seen the performance gains Super Pages can bring to the Raspberry Pi, let’s now dive into the technical aspects of the feature.

Implementing Super Pages

The first challenge was figuring out how to allocate a contiguous block of memory using shmem. The Shared Memory Virtual Filesystem (shmem) is used as a flexible memory mechanism that allows the GPU and CPU to share access to BOs through the system’s temporary filesystem, tmpfs. tmpfs is a volatile filesystem that stores files in RAM, making it ideal for temporary or high-speed data that doesn’t need to persist on RAM.

For example, to allocate a 256KB BO across four 64KB pages, we need four contiguous 64KB memory blocks. However, by default, tmpfs only allocates memory in PAGE_SIZE chunks (as seen in shmem_file_setup()), whereas PAGE_SIZE is 4KB on the Raspberry Pi 4 and 16KB on the Raspberry Pi 5. Since the function drm_gem_object_init() — which initializes an allocated shmem-backed GEM object — relies on shmem_file_setup() to back these objects in memory, we had to consider alternatives, as the default PAGE_SIZE would divide memory into increments that are too small to ensure the large, contiguous blocks needed by the GPU.

The solution we proposed was to create drm_gem_object_init_with_mnt(), which allows us to specify the tmpfs mountpoint where the GEM object will be created. This enables us to allocate our BOs in a mountpoint that supports larger page sizes. Additionally, to ensure that our BOs are allocated in the correct mountpoint, we introduced drm_gem_shmem_create_with_mnt(), which allows the mountpoint to be specified when creating a new DRM GEM shmem object.

[PATCH v6 04/11] drm/gem: Create a drm_gem_object_init_with_mnt() function

[PATCH v6 06/11] drm/gem: Create shmem GEM object in a given mountpoint

The next challenge was figuring out how to create a new mountpoint that would allow for different page sizes based on the allocation. Simply creating a new tmpfs mountpoint with a fixed bigger page size wouldn’t suffice, as we needed flexibility for various allocations. Inspired by the i915 driver, we decided to use a tmpfs mountpoint with the “huge=within_size” flag. This flag, which requires the kernel to be configured with CONFIG_TRANSPARENT_HUGEPAGE, enables the allocation of huge pages.

Transparent Huge Pages (THP) is a kernel feature that automatically manages large memory pages to improve performance without needing changes from applications. THP dynamically combines smaller pages into larger ones, typically 2MB, reducing memory management overhead and improving cache efficiency.

To support our new allocation strategy, we created a dedicated tmpfs mountpoint for V3D, called gemfs, which provides us an ideal space for managing these larger allocations.

[PATCH v6 05/11] drm/v3d: Introduce gemfs

With everything in place for contiguous allocations, the next step was configuring V3D to enable Big/Super Page support.

We began by addressing a major source of memory pressure on the Raspberry Pi: the current 128KB alignment for allocations in the virtual memory space. This alignment wastes space when handling small BO allocations, especially since the userspace driver performs a large number of these small allocations.

As a result, we can’t fully utilize the 4GB address space available for the GPU on the Raspberry Pi 4 or 5. For example, we can currently allocate up to 32,000 BOs of 4KB (~140MB) and 3,000 BOs of 400KB (~1.3GB). This becomes a limitation for memory-intensive applications. By reducing the page alignment to 4KB, we can significantly increase the number of BOs, allowing up to 1,000,000 BOs of 4KB (~4GB) and 10,000 BOs of 400KB (~4GB).

Therefore, the first change I made was reducing the VA alignment of all allocations to 4KB.

[PATCH v6 07/11] drm/v3d: Reduce the alignment of the node allocation

With the alignment issue resolved, we can now implement the code to properly set the flags on the Page Table Entries (PTE) for Big/Super Pages. Setting these flags is straightforward — a simple bitwise operation. The challenge lies in determining which BOs can be allocated in Super Pages. For a BO to be eligible for a Big Page, its virtual address must be aligned to 64KB, and the same applies to its physical address. Same thing for Super Pages, but now the addresses must be aligned to 1MB.

If the BO qualifies for a Big/Super Page, we need to iterate over 16 4KB pages (for Big Pages) or 256 4KB pages (for Super Pages) and insert the appropriate PTE.

Additionally, we modified the way we iterate through the BO’s memory. This was necessary because the THP may not always allocate the entire BO contiguously. For example, it might only allocate contiguously 1MB of a 2MB block. To handle this, we now iterate over the blocks of contiguous memory scattered across the scatterlist, ensuring that each segment is properly handled during the allocation process.

What is a scatterlist? It is a Linux Kernel data structure that manages non-contiguous memory as if it were contiguous. It organizes separate memory blocks into a single logical buffer, allowing efficient data handling, especially in Direct Memory Access (DMA) operations, without needing a physically contiguous memory allocation.

[PATCH v6 08/11] drm/v3d: Support Big/Super Pages when writing out PTEs

However, the last few patches alone don’t fully enable the use of Super Pages. While PATCH 08/11 technically allows for Super Pages, we’re still relying on DRM GEM shmem objects, meaning allocations are still happening in PAGE_SIZE chunks. Although Big/Super Pages could potentially be used if the system naturally allocated 1MB or 64KB contiguously, this is quite rare and not our intended outcome. Our goal is to actively use Big/Super Pages as much as possible.

To achieve this, we’ll utilize the V3D-specific mountpoint we created earlier for BO allocation whenever possible. By creating BOs through drm_gem_shmem_create_with_mnt(), we can ensure that large pages are allocated contiguously when possible, enabling the consistent use of Big/Super Pages.

[PATCH v6 09/11] drm/v3d: Use gemfs/THP in BO creation if available

And there you have it — Big/Super Pages are now fully enabled in V3D. The only requirement to activate this feature in any given kernel is ensuring that CONFIG_TRANSPARENT_HUGEPAGE is enabled.

Final Words

You can learn more about ongoing enhancements to the Raspberry Pi driver stack in this XDC 2024 talk by José María “Chema” Casanova Crespo. In the talk, Chema discusses the Super Pages work I developed, along with other advancements in the driver stack.

Of course, there are still plenty of improvements on the horizon at Igalia. I’m currently experimenting with 64KB CLE allocations in user-space, and I hope to share more good news soon.

Finally, I’d like to express my gratitude to Iago Toral and Tvrtko Ursulin for their invaluable support in developing Super Pages for the V3D kernel driver. Thank you both for sharing your experience with me!

    The new usb_set_wireless_status() driver API function can be used by drivers of USB devices to export whether the wireless device associated with that USB dongle is turned on or not.

    To quote the commit message:

This will be used by user-space OS components to determine whether the
battery-powered part of the device is wirelessly connected or not,
allowing, for example:
- upower to hide the battery for devices where the device is turned off
  but the receiver plugged in, rather than showing 0%, or other values
  that could be confusing to users
- Pipewire to hide a headset from the list of possible inputs or outputs
  or route audio appropriately if the headset is suddenly turned off, or
  turned on
- libinput to determine whether a keyboard or mouse is present when its
  receiver is plugged in.

This is not an attribute that is meant to replace protocol specific
APIs [...] but solely for wireless devices with
an ad-hoc “lose it and your device is e-waste” receiver dongle.
 

    Currently, the only 2 drivers to use this are the ones for the Logitech G935 headset, and the Steelseries Arctis 1 headset. Adding support for other Logitech headsets would be possible if they export battery information (the protocols are usually well documented), support for more Steelseries headsets should be feasible if the protocol has already been reverse-engineered.

    As far as consumers for this sysfs attribute, I filed a bug against Pipewire (link) to use it to not consider the receiver dongle as good as unplugged if the headset is turned off, which would avoid audio being sent to headsets that won't hear it.

    UPower supports this feature since version 1.90.1 (although it had a bug that makes 1.90.2 the first viable release to include it), and batteries will appear and disappear when the device is turned on/off.

A turned-on headset