DRM and Graphics

• Review of Igalia Multimedia activities (2020/H2)

  Regarding digital protected media playback, we worked to upstream OpenCDM, support with Widevine, through RDK’s Thunder framework, while continued with the usual maintenance of the others key systems, such as Clear Key, Widevine and PlayReady.

• Turnips in the wild (Part 1)

  Running games and benchmarks is much more exciting than trying to fix a handful of remaining synthetic tests. Turnip, which is an open-source Vulkan driver for recent Adreno GPUs, should already be capable of running real world applications, and they always have a way to break the driver in a new, unexpected ways.

• [Older] Freedreno now supports OpenGL 3.3 on A6XX

  I recently joined Igalia and as a way to familiarize myself with Adreno GPUs it was decided to get Freedreno up to OpenGL 3.3. Just recently, Freedreno exposed only OpenGL 3.0. The big jump in version required only two small extensions and a few fixes to get rid of most crashes in Piglit since almost all features were already supported.

• GRVK 0.4 Released For Running AMD's Mantle API Over Vulkan

  While AMD's Mantle graphics API development has been suspended for more than a half-decade already with the Vulkan API successfully taking off, the open-source GRVK project continues to let Mantle unofficially live on by re-implementing its interfaces over Vulkan. GRVK was started during the pandemic last year and continues maturing in being a more capable Mantle implementation on top of Vulkan. With today's GRVK 0.4.0 release, this Mantle API re-implementation can now run the Star Swarm demo that was one of the original demos for showcasing this AMD API alternative to Direct3D 11 and OpenGL. While Star Swarm is now running with GRVK, the performance is admittedly very low at this point and there are other known issues.

Compact Whiskey Lake embedded PC supports Linux

Portwell’s fanless, Linux-friendly “WEBS-21G0” embedded PC has a 15W TDP 8th Gen Core CPU and offers dual GbE, dual displays, triple USB, dual M.2, and ruggedization features. American Portwell has announced a rugged, 8th Gen Whiskey Lake based embedded computer based on its NANO-6051 Nano-ITX board. The WEBS-21G0 system supports Ubuntu, Yocto, Wind River, and Windows 10 IoT Enterprise running on Core i5 or i3 chips. Based on the NANO-6051 support list, this would suggest Intel’s quad-core Core i5-8365UE (1.6GHz/4.1GHz) and dual-core, 2.2GHz/3.9GHz Core i3-8145UE, both with 15W TDP.

Linux GUI Apps Comes to Windows 10 via WSL [Announcement]

Microsoft announced and provided information about running Linux GUI Apps in Windows 10 via WSL. Here are the details.

today's leftovers

• HP EliteDesk 800 G2 Mini Desktop PC – Multimedia – Week 3

  This is a weekly blog looking at the HP EliteDesk 800 G2 Mini Desktop PC running Linux. For this week’s blog, we’ve tested video and audio on the HP machine using the Manjaro rolling distro. This machine was made available by Bargain Hardware. Bargain Hardware retails refurbished servers, workstations, PCs, and laptops to consumers and businesses worldwide. All systems are completely customisable on their website along with a vast offering of clean-pulled, tested components and enterprise replacement parts. They supply machines with a choice of Linux distros: Ubuntu, Debian, and Fedora.

• At 140 Million Miles Away From Home Open Source Proved Itself

  NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter became the first powered aircraft to fly on another planet and it runs Linux. At 3:34 am on April 19, the NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter took off from the surface of Mars, rose to an altitude of 10 feet for 30 seconds and then safely landed back down. The event marked the first time in the mankind’s history that an aircraft achieved a “powered, controlled flight” on another planet. NASA confirmed at 3:46 am the flight succeeded after receiving data from the helicopter via the Perseverance Mars rover. This engineering feat was done with Linux, open-source software, and a NASA-built program based on the Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s (JPL) open-source F prime framework.

• Dgraph GraphQL database users detail graph use cases

  Users of Dgraph Labs' graph database technology as varied as a nonprofit Christian missionary platform and a financial data services firm are employing graph systems in a variety of applications they say are not achievable with traditional databases. Dgraph Labs is one of a number of vendors that offer a graph database, including Neo4j, TigerGraph and Amazon with its Neptune platform. The Dgraph graph database has its base in an open source project. The vendor, based in Palo Alto, Calif., also provides the Dgraph Cloud service, a managed database as a service (DBaaS).

• Facebook's massive data leak starts to have important knock-on effects – and potentially serious ones for Ireland

  Instead, it seems to think that by constantly repeating the word “privacy” like a mantra, people will believe that it is doing enough to protect sensitive personal data. For example, last week, it issued a press release entitled “ How We Combat Scraping“. It ended with a section “What You Can Do to Help Keep Your Data Safe”, which used the word “privacy” six times, and basically implied that the data breach was somehow users’ fault, and that they really ought to be more careful in future.