fidzu : freedesktop

If you remember, back in 2016, I did the work to get a "Launch on Discrete GPU" menu item added to application in gnome-shell.

This cycle I worked on adding support for the NVIDIA proprietary driver, so that the menu item shows up, and the right environment variables are used to launch applications on that device.

Behind the scenes

There were a number of problems with the old detection code in switcheroo-control:
- it required the graphics card to use vga_switcheroo in the kernel, which the NVIDIA driver didn't do
- it could support more than 2 GPUs
- and it didn't really actually know which GPU was going to be the "main" one

And, on top of all that, gnome-shell expected the Mesa OpenGL stack to be used, so it only knew the right environment variables to do that, and only for one secondary GPU.

So we've extended switcheroo-control and its API to do all this.

(As a side note, commenters asked me about the KDE support, and how it would integrate, and it turns out that KDE's code just checks for the presence of a file in /sys, which is only present when vga_switcheroo is used. So I would encourage KDE to adopt the switcheroo-control D-Bus API for this)

Closing

All this will be available in Fedora 32, using GNOME 3.36 and switcheroo-control 2.0. We might backport this to Fedora 31 after it's been tested, and if there is enough interest.

13 Dec 2019 4:13pm GMT

Unlike the tradition of my past few talks at Linux Plumbers or Kernel conferences, this time around in Lisboa I did not start out with a rant proposing to change everything. Instead I celebrated roughly 10 years of upstream graphics progress and finally achieving paradise. But that was all just prelude to a few bait-and-switches later fulfill expectations on what's broken this time around in upstream, totally, and what needs to be fixed and changed, maybe.

The LPC video recording is now released, slides are uploaded. If neither of that is to your taste, read below the break for the written summary.

Mission Accomplished

10 or so years ago upstream graphics was essentially a proof of concept for the promised to come. Kernel display modeset just landed, finally bringing a somewhat modern display driver userspace API to linux. And GEM, the graphics execution manager landed, bringing proper GPU memory management and multi client rendering. Realistically a lot needed to be done still, from rendering drivers for all the various SoC, to an atomic display API that can expose all the features, not just what was needed to light up a linux desktop back in the days. And lots of work to improve the codebase and make it much easier and quicker to write drivers.

There's obviously still a lot to do, but I think we've achieved that - for full details, check out my ELCE talk about everything great for upstream graphics.

Now despite all this justified celebrating, there is one sticking point still:

NVIDIA

The trouble with team green from an open source perspective - for them it's a great boon - is that they own the GPU software stack in two crucial ways:

• NVIDIA defines how desktop GL works. Not so relevant anymore, and at least the core profile is a solid spec and has fully open source test suite from Khronos by now. But the compatibility profile, which didn't throw out all the legacy features from the GL1.x days in the 90s, does not have any of the interactions with all the new features specced out and covered with tests - NVIDIA's binary driver is that standard, and that since roughly 20 years.

• More relevant today is CUDA, not quite as long as desktop GL, but for a market that's growing at a rather brisk pace. CUDA is the undisputed king of the general purpose GPU compute hill. Anything and everything that matters runs on top of it, often exclusively.

Together these create a huge software moat around the high margin hardware business. All an open stack would achieve is filling in that moat and inviting competition to eat the nice surplus. In other words, stupid to even attempt, vendor lock-in just pays too well.

Now of course the reverse engineered nouveau driver still exists. But if you have to pay for reverse engineering already, then you might as well go with someone else's hardware, since you're not going to get any of the CUDA/GL goodies.

And the business case for open source drivers indeed exists so much that even paying for reverse engineering a full stack is no problem. The result is a vibrant community of hardware vendors, customers, distros and consulting shops who pay the bills for all the open driver work that's being done. And in userspace even "upstream first" works - releases happen quickly and often enough, with sufficiently smooth merge process that having a vendor tree is simply not needed. Plus customer's willingness to upgrade if necessary, because it's usually a well-contained component to enable new hardware support.

In short without a solid business case behind open graphics drivers, they're just not going to happen, viz. NVIDIA.

Not Shipping Upstream

Unfortunately the business case for "upstream first" on the kernel side is completely broken. Not for open source, and not for any fundamental reasons, but simply because the kernel moves too slowly, is too big, drivers aren't well contained enough and therefore customer will not or even can not upgrade. For some hardware upstreaming early enough is possible, but graphics simply moves too fast: By the time the upstreamed driver is actually in shipping distros, it's already one hardware generation behind. And missing almost a year of tuning and performance improvements. Worse it's not just new hardware, but also GL and Vulkan versions that won't work on older kernels due to missing features, fragementing the ecosystem further.

This is entirely unlike the userspace side, where refactoring and code sharing in a cross-vendor shared upstream project actually pays off. Even in the short term.

There's a lot of approaches trying to paper over this rift with the linux kernel:

• Stable kernel ABI for driver modules, so that you can upgrade the core kernel and drivers independently. Google Android is very much aiming this solution at their huge vendor tree problem. Traditionally enterprise distros do the same. This works, safe that stable kernel-internal ABI is not a notion that's very popular with kernel maintainers …

• If you go with an "upstream first" approach to shipping graphics drivers you first need to polish your driver, refactor out common components, and push it to upstream. Only to then pay a second team to re-add all the crap so you can ship your driver on all the old kernels, where all the helpers and new common code don't exist.

• Pay your distro or OS vendor to just backport the new helpers before they even have landed in an upstream release. Which means instead of a backporting team for the driver on your payroll you now pay for backporting the entire subsystem - which in many cases is cheaper, but an even harder sell to beancounters. And sometimes not possible because other driver teams from competitors might not be on board and insist on not breaking the stable driver ABI for a given distro release kernel.

Also, there just isn't a single LTS kernel. Even upstream has multiple, plus every distro has their own flavour, plus customers love to grow their own variety trees too. Often they're not even coordinated on the same upstream release. Cheapest way to support this entire madness is to completely ignore upstream and just write your own subsystem. Or at least not use any of the helper libraries provided by kernel subsystems, completely defeating the supposed benefit of upstreaming code.

No matter the strategy, they all boil down to paying twice - if you want to upstream your code. And there's no added return for the doubled bill. In conclusion, upstream first needs a business case, like the open source graphics stack in general. And that business case is very much real, except for upstreaming, it's only real in userspace.

In the kernel, "upstream first" is a sham, at least for graphics drivers.

Thanks to Alex Deucher for reading and commenting on drafts of this text.

10 Dec 2019 12:00am GMT

At ELC Europe in Lyon I held a nice little presentation about the state of upstream graphics drivers, and how absolutely awesome it all is. Of course with a big focus on SoC and embedded drivers. Slides and the video recording

Key takeaways for the busy:

• The upstream DRM graphics subsystem really scales down to tiny drivers now, with the smallest driver coming in at just around 250 lines (including comments and whitespace), 10'000x less than the biggest!

• Batteries all included - there's modular helpers for everything. As a rule of thumb even minimal legacy fbdev drivers ported to DRM shrink by a factor of 2-4 thanks to these helpers taking care of anything that's remotely standardized in displays and GPUs.

• For shipping userspace drivers go with a dual-stack: Open source GL and Vulkan drivers for those who want that, and for getting the kernel driver merged into upstream. Closed source for everyone else, running on the same userspace API and kernel driver.

• And for customer support backport the entire subsystem, try to avoid backporting an individual driver.

In other words, world domination is assured and progressing according to plan.

03 Dec 2019 12:00am GMT

I got contacted by a user with a HP X2 10 p018wm 2-in-1 about the device waking up 10-60 seconds after suspend. I have access to a HP X2 10 p002nd myself which in essence is the same HW and I managed to reproduce the problem there. This is when the fun started:

1. There were a whole bunch of ACPI related errors in dmesg. It turns out that these affect almost all HP laptop models and we have a multiple bugs open for this. Debugging these pointed to the hp-wmi driver. I wrote 2 patches fixes 2 different kind of errors and submitted these upstream. Unfortunately this does not help with the suspend/resume issue, but it does fix all those errors people have been complaining about :)

2. I noticed some weird messages in dmesg with look like a PCI bus re-enumeration is started during suspend when suspending by closing the lid and then the re-enumeration continues after resume. This turns out to be triggered by this piece of buggy AML code which
is used for monitor hotplug notification on gfx state changes (the i915 driver ACPI opregion also tracks the lid state for some reason):

Method (GNOT, 2, NotSerialized)
{
...
CEVT = Arg0
CSTS = 0x03
If (((CHPD == Zero) && (Arg1 == Zero)))
{
If (((OSYS > 0x07D0) || (OSYS < 0x07D6)))
{
Notify (PCI0, Arg1)
}
Else
{
Notify (GFX0, Arg1)
}
}
...
}

Notice how "If (((OSYS > 0x07D0) || (OSYS < 0x07D6)))" is always true, the condition is broken the "||" clearly should have been a "&&" this is causing the code to send a hotplug notify to the PCI root instead of to the gfx card, triggering a re-enumeration. Doing a grep for this on my personal DSDT collection shows that 55 of the 93 DSDTs in my collection have this issue!

Luckily this can be easily fixed by setting CHPD to 1 in the i915 driver, which is something which we should do anyways according to the
opregion documentation. So I wrote a patch doing this and submitted it upstream. Unfortunately this also does not help with the suspend/resume issue.

3. So the actual spurious wakeups are caused by HP using an external embedded controller (EC) on the "legacy-free" platform which they use for these laptops. Since these are not designed to use an external EC they lack the standard interface for this, so HP has hooked the EC up over I2C and using an ACPI GPIO event handler as EC interrupt.

These devices use suspend2idle (s2idle) instead of good old firmware handled S3, so the EC stays active during suspend. It does some housekeeping work which involves a round-trip through the AML code every minute. Normally EC wakeups are ignored durin s2idle by some special handling in the kernel, but this is only done for ECs using the standardized ACPI EC interface, not for this bolted on the
side model. I've started a discussion on maybe extending our ACPI event handling to deal with this special case.

For now as a workaround I ended up writing 2 more patches to allow blacklisting wakeup by ACPI GPIO event handlers on select models. This breaks wakeup by opening the LID, the user needs to wake the laptop with the powerbutton. But at least the laptop will stay suspended now.

27 Nov 2019 3:06pm GMT

There have been questions about the Fedora 30 Flicker Free Boot Change in various places, here is a FAQ which hopefully answers most questions:

1) I get a black screen for a couple of seconds during boot?

1.1) If you have an AMD or Nvidia GPU driving your screen, then this is normal. The graphics drivers for AMD and Nvidia GPUs reset the hardware when loading, this will cause the display to temporarily go black. There is nothing which can be done about this.

1b) If you have a somewhat older Intel GPU (your CPU is pre Skylake) then the i915 driver's support to skip the mode-reset is disabled by default (for now) to fix this add "i915.fastboot=1" to your kernel commandline. For more info on modifying the kernel cmdline, see question 7.

1c) Do "ls /sys/firmware/efi/efivars" if you get a "No such file or directory" error then your system is booting in classic BIOS mode instead of UEFI mode, to fix this you need to re-install and boot the livecd/installer in UEFI mode when installing. Alternatively you can try to convert your existing install, note this is quite tricky, make backups first!

1d) Your system may be using the classic VGA BIOS during boot despite running in UEFI mode. Often you can select BIOS mode compatility in your BIOS settings aka the CSM setting. If you can select this on a per component level, set the VIDEO/VGA option to "UEFI only" or "UEFI first", alternatively you can try completely disabling the CSM mode. On some systems you can disable the classic VGA BIOS by disabling / unselecting the "Legacy Option ROMs" option.

2) The vendor-logo/firmware-splash looks squashed or has the wrong size?

Your system may be using the classic VGA BIOS during boot despite running in UEFI mode, see answer 1d.

3) I get a black background instead of the firmware splash while Fedora is booting?

Do "ls /sys/firmware/acpi/bgrt" if you get a "No such file or directory" error then try answers 1c and 1d . If you do have a /sys/firmware/acpi/bgrt directory, but you are still getting the Fedora logo + spinner on a black background instead of on top of the firmware-splash, please file a bug about this and drop me a mail with a link to the bug.

4) Getting rid of the vendor-logo/firmware-splash being shown while Fedora is booting?

If you don't want the firmware-splash to be used as background during boot, you can switch plymouth to the spinner theme, which is identical to the new bgrt theme, except that it does not use the firmware-splash as background, to do this execute the following command from a terminal: "sudo plymouth-set-default-theme -R spinner"

Note that the kernel will restore the vendor-logo early on at boot in case it got damaged by e.g. option ROM messages. If you are switching to the spinner theme you may also want to add "video=efifb:nobgrt" to your kernel commandline. See 7 below for how to edit the kernel commandline.

5) Keeping the firmware-splash as background while unlocking the disk?

If you prefer this, it is possible to keep the firmware-splash as background while the diskcrypt password is shown. To do this do the following:

1. 
   
2. "sudo mkdir /usr/share/plymouth/themes/mybgrt"
   
3. "sudo cp /usr/share/plymouth/themes/bgrt/bgrt.plymouth /usr/share/plymouth/themes/mybgrt/mybgrt.plymouth"
   
4. edit /usr/share/plymouth/themes/mybgrt/mybgrt.plymouth, change DialogClearsFirmwareBackground=true to DialogClearsFirmwareBackground=false, change DialogVerticalAlignment=.382 to DialogVerticalAlignment=.6
   
5. "sudo plymouth-set-default-theme -R mybgrt"
   

Note if you do this the disk-passphrase entry dialog may be partially drawn over the vendor-logo part of the firmware-splash, if this happens then try increasing DialogVerticalAlignment to e.g. 0.7 .

6) Get detailed boot progress instead of the boot-splash ?

To get detailed boot progress info press ESC during boot.

7) Always get detailed boot progress instead of the boot-splash ?

To always get detailed boot progress instead of the boot-splash, remove "rhgb" from your kernel commandline:

Edit /etc/default/grub and remove rhgb from GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX and then if you are booting using UEFI (see 1c) run:
"grub2-mkconfig -o /etc/grub2-efi.cfg"
else (if you are booting using classic BIOS boot) run:
"grub2-mkconfig -o /etc/grub2.cfg".

27 Nov 2019 10:02am GMT

The Lenovo Thinkpad 8 and also the Asus T100CHI both have an USB3 micro-B connector, but using a standard USB3 OTG (USB 3 micro-B to USB3-A receptacle) cable results in only USB2 devices working. USB3 devices are not recognized.

Searching the internet learns that many people have this problem and that the solution is to find a USB3 micro-A to USB3-A receptacle cable. This sounds like nonsense to me as micro-B really is micro-AB and is supposed to use the ID pin to automatically switch between modes dependent on the used cable.; and this does work for the USB-2 parts of the micro-B connector on the Thinkpad. Yet people do claim success with such cables (with a more square micro-A connector, instead of the trapezoid micro-B connector). The only problem is such cables are not for sale anywhere.

So I guessed that this means is that they have swapped the Rx and Tx superspeed pairs on the USB3 only part of the micro-B connector, and I decided to cut open one of my USB3 micro-A to USB3-A receptacle cables and swap the superspeed pairs. Here is what the cable looks like when it it cut open:



If you are going to make such a cable yourself, to get this picture I first removed the outer plastic isolation (part of it is still there on the right side in this picture). Then I folded away the shield wires till they are all on one side (wires at the top of the picture). After this I removed the metal foil underneath the shield wires.

Having removed the first 2 layers of shielding this reveals 4 wires in the standard USB2 colors: red, black, green and white. and 2 separately shielded cable pairs. On the picture above the separately shielded pairs have been cut, giving us 4 pairs, 2 on each end of cable; and the shielding has been removed from 3 of the 4 pairs, you can still see the shielding on the 4th pair.

A standard USB3 cable uses the following color codes:

• 
  
• Red: Vbus / 5 volt
• 
  
• White: USB 2.0 Data -
• 
  
• Green: USB 2.0 Data +
• 
  
• Black: Ground
• 
  
• Purple: Superspeed RX -
• 
  
• Orange: Superspeed RX +
• 
  
• Blue: Superspeed TX -
• 
  
• Yellow: Superspeed TX -
• 
  

So to swap RX and TX we need to connect purple to blue / blue to purple and orange to yellow / yellow to orange, resulting in:



Note the wires are just braided together here, not soldered yet. This is a good moment to carefully test the cable. Also note that the superspeed wire pairs must be length matched, so you need to cut and strip all 8 cables at the same length! If everything works you can put some solder on those braided together wires, re-test after soldering, and then cover them with some heat-shrink-tube:



And then cover the entire junction with a bigger heat-shrink-tube:



And you have a superspeed capable cable even though no one will sell you one.

Note that the Thinkpad 8 supports ACA mode so if you get an ACA capable "Y" cable or an ACA charging HUB then you can charge and use the Thinkpad 8 USB port at the same time. Typically ACA "Y" cables or hubs are USB2 only. So the superspeed mod from this blogpost will not help with those. The Asus T100CHI has a separate USB2 micro-B just for charging, so you do not need anything special there to charge + connect an USB device.

15 Nov 2019 8:10pm GMT

It has been a while since my last post, but there is a simple reason for that: on August 5th, I had to move from Brazil to Canada. Why did I move? Thanks to Harry Wentland recommendation, I got an interview for a software engineering position at AMD (Markham), and I got hired to work on the display team. From now on, I suppose that I'll be around the DRM subsystem for a long time :). Even though I'm now employed by AMD this post reflect my personal thoughts only and should not be construed to represent AMD in any way.

I have a few updates about my work with the community since I have been busy with my relocation and adaptation. However, my main updates came from XDC 2019 [1] and I want to share it here.

XDC 2019 - Montréal (Concordia University Conference)

This year I had the great luck joining XDC again. However, at this time, I was with Harry Wentland, Nicholas Kazlauskas, and Leo Li (we worked together at AMD). We put effort into learning from other people's experiences, and we tried to know what the compositor developers wanted to see in our driver. We also used this opportunity to try to explain a little bit more about our hardware features. In particular, we had conversations about Freesync, MST, DKMS, and so forth. Thinking of that, I'll share my view of the most exciting moments that we had.

VKMS

As usual, I tried my best to understand what people want to see in VKMS soon or later. For example, from the XDC 2018, I focused on fixing some bugs but mainly in add writeback support cause it could provide a visual output (this work is almost done, see [2]). This year I collected feedback from multiple people (special thanks to Marten, Lyude, Hiler, and Harry), and from these conversations I tend to work in the following tasks:

1. Finish the writeback feature and enable visual output;
2. Add support for adaptive refresh rate;
3. Add support for "dynamic connectors", which can enable the MST test.

Additionally, Martin Peres gave a talk that he shared his views for the CI and test. In his presentation, he suggested using VKMS to validate the API, and I have to admit that I'm really excited about this idea. I hope that I can help with this.

Freesync

The amdgpu drivers support a technology named Freesync [3]. In a few words, this feature allows the dynamic change of the refreshes rate, which can bring benefits for games and for power saving. Harry Wayland talked about that feature and you can see it here:

After Harry's presentation, many people asked interesting questions related to this subject, this situation caught my attention, and for this reason, I added the VRR to my roadmap in the VKMS. Roman Gilg, from KDE, was one of the developers that asked for a protocol extension in Wayland for support Freesync; additionally, compositor developers asked for mechanisms that enable them to know in advance if the experience of a specific panel will be good or not. Finally, there were some discussions about the use of Freesync for power saving and in an application that requires time-sensitive.

IGT and CI

This year I kept my tradition of asking thousands of questions to Hiler with the goal of learning more about IGT, and as usual, he was extremely kind and gentle with my questions (thanks Hiler). One of the concepts that Hiler explained to me, it is the use of podman (https://podman.io/) for prepare IGT image, for example, after a few minutes of code pair with him I could run IGT on my machine after executing the following commands:

sudo su
podman run --privileged registry.freedesktop.org/drm/igt-gpu-tools/igt:master
podman run --privileged registry.freedesktop.org/drm/igt-gpu-tools/igt:master \
                        igt_runner -t core_auth
podman run --privileged registry.freedesktop.org/drm/igt-gpu-tools/igt:master \
                        igt_runner -t core_auth /tmp
podman run --privileged -v /tmp/results:/results \
  registry.freedesktop.org/drm/igt-gpu-tools/igt:master igt_runner -t core_auth /results

We also had a chance to discuss CI with Martin Peres, and he explained his work for improving the way that the CI keep track of bugs. In particular, he introduced a fantastic tool named cibuglog, which is responsible for keep tracking of test failures and using this data for building a database. Cibuglog has many helpful filters that enable us to see test problems associated with a specific machine and bugs in the Bugzilla. The huge insights from cibuglog it is the idea of using data for helping with bug tracking. Thanks Martin, for showing us this amazing tool.

Updates

I just want to finish this post with brief updates from my work with free software, starting with kw and finish with VKMS.

Kernel Workflow (kw)

When I started to work with VKMS, I wrote a tool named kworkflow, or simply kw, for helping me with basic tasks related to Kernel development. These days kw reborn to me since I was looking for a way to automate my work with amdgpu; as a result, I implemented the following features:

• Kernel deploy in a target machine (any machine reachable via IP);
• Module deploy;
• Capture .config file from a target machine;

Unfortunately, the code is not ready for merging in the main branch, I'm working on it; I think that in a couple of weeks, I can release a new version with these features. If you want to know a little bit more about kw take a look at https://siqueira.tech/doc/kw/

VKMS

I was not working in VKMS due to my change of country; however, now I am reworking part of the IGT test related to writeback, and as soon as I finish it, I will try to upstream it again. I hope that I can also have the VKMS writeback merged into the drm-misc-next by the end of this month. Finally, I merged the prime supported implemented by Oleg Vasilev (huge thanks!).

References

[1] "First discussion in the Shayenne's patch about the CRC problem". URL: https://xdc2019.x.org. ⤴

[2] "Introduces writeback support". URL: https://patchwork.freedesktop.org/series/61738/. ⤴

[3] "FreeSync". URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FreeSync. ⤴

10 Nov 2019 2:00am GMT

As mentioned in an earlier blogpost, I have been working on fixing many games showing a small image centered on a black background when they are run fullscreen under Wayland. In that blogpost I was moslty looking at how to solve this for native Wayland games. But for various reasons almost all games still use X11, so instead I've ended up focussing on fixing this for games using Xwayland.

Xwayland now has support for emulating resolution changes requested by an app through the randr or vidmode extensions. If a client makes a resolution change requests this is remembered and if the client then creates a window located at the monitor's origin and sized to exactly that resolution, then Xwayland will ask the compositor to scale it to fill the entire monitor.

For apps which use _NET_WM_FULLLSCREEN (e.g. SDL2, SFML or OGRE based apps) to go fullscreen some help from the compositor is necessary. This is currently implemented in mutter. If you are a developer of another compositor and have questions about this, please drop me an email.

I failed to get this all upstream in time for Fedora 31 final. But now it is all upstream, so 've backported the changes and created an update with the changes. This update is currently in updates-testing, to install this update run the following command:

sudo dnf upgrade --enablerepo=updates-testing --advisory=FEDORA-2019-103a594d07

05 Nov 2019 8:41am GMT

I recently went to XDC 2019, where I gave yet another talk about Zink. I kinda forgot to write a blog-post about it, so here's me trying to make up for it… or something like that. I'll also go into some more recent developments as well.

My presentation was somewhat similar to the talk I did at SIGGRAPH this year, but with a bit more emphasis on the technical aspect, as the XDC audience is more familiar with Mesa internals.

If you're interested, you can find the slides for the talk here. The talk goes through the motivation and basic approach. I don't think I need to go through this again, as I've already covered that before.

As for the status, Zink currently supports OpenGL 2.1 and OpenGL ES 2.0. And there's no immediate plans on working on OpenGL 3.0 and OpenGL ES 3.0 until Zink is upstream.

Which gets us to the more interesting bit; that I started working on upstreaming Zink. So let's talk about that for a bit.

Upstreaming Zink

So, my current goal is to get Zink upstream in Mesa. The plan outline in my XDC talk is slightly outdated by now, so here I'll instead say what's actually happened so far, and what I hope will follow.

Before I could add the driver itself, I decided to send all changes outside of the driver as a set of merge-requests:

• glBitmap R8 textures
• loader/dri3: do not blit outside old/new buffers
• gallium/u_blitter: set a more sane viewport-state
• nir: initialize uses_discard to false
• lowering passes from Zink

The last one is probably the most interesting one, as it moves a lot of fixed-function operations into the state-tracker, so individual drivers won't have to deal with them. Unless they choose to, of course.

But all of these has already been merged, and there's just one final merge-request left:

• Introduce Zink: OpenGL on Vulkan

This merge-request adds the driver in its current state. It consists of 163 commits at the time of writing, so it's not a thing of beauty. But new drivers usually aren't, so I'm not too worried.

When this is merged, Zink will finally be a "normal" part of Mesa… Well, sort of anyway. I don't think we'll enable Zink to be built by default for a while. But that'll just be a matter of adding zink to the -Dgallium-drivers meson-option.

Testing on CI

The current branch only adds building of Zink to the CI. There's no testing being done yet. The reasons for this is two-fold:

1. We need to get a running environment on CI. Rather of bringing up some hardware-enabled test-runner, I intend to try to set up SwiftShader as a software rasterizer instead, as that supports Vulkan 1.1 these days.
2. We need some tests to run. Zink currently only supports OpenGL 2.1, and sadly the conformance test suite doesn't have any tests for OpenGL versions older than 3.0. Piglit has some, but a full piglit-run takes significantly more time, which makes it tricky for CI. So right now, it seems the OpenGL ES 2.0 conformance tests are our best bet. We'll of course add more test-suites as we add more features.

So, there's some work to be done here, but it seems like we should be able to get something working without too much hassle.

Next steps

After Zink is upstream, it will be maintained similarly to other Mesa drivers. Practically speaking, this means that patches are sent to the upstream repo rather than my fork. It shouldn't make a huge difference for most users.

The good thing is that if I go away on vacation, or are for some other reason unavailable, other people can still merge patches, so we'd slightly reduce the technical bus-factor.

I'm not stopping developing Zink at all, but I have other things going on in my life that means I might be busy with other things at times. As is the case for everyone! :wink:

In fact, I'm very excited to start working on OpenGL 3.x and 4.x level features; we still have a few patches for some 3.x features in some older branches.

The future is bright! :sunny:

24 Oct 2019 2:22pm GMT

As some of you running Fedora 31 may already have noticed, I have some good news to share. As part of my recent work on plymouth I've implemented a feature request which was first requested in 2012: support for an indicator that capslock is active while entering the disk unlock password for machines using full diskencryption. Besides the capslock indicator I've also added support for an indicator of the configured keyboard layout, since this sometimes also causes confusion:



And here is what it looks like when capslock is pressed:



If you're running Fedora 31 with full diskencryption then you may notice that the above screenshots are slightly different then what you have now. I've pushed an update to Fedora 31 updates-testing today which implements a few small tweaks to the theme after feedback from the design-team on the initial version. For those of you still on Fedora 30, this is coming to Fedora 30 too, it should show up in updates-testing with the next updates push.

23 Oct 2019 6:27pm GMT

First of all, as always my opinions are my own, not those of my employer.

Since I have 2 children I was happy to learn that the Netherlands would be one of the first countries to get Disney+ streaming.

So I subscribed for the testing period, problem all devices in my home run Fedora. I started up Firefox and was greeted with an "Error Code 83", next I tried Chrome, same thing.

So I mailed the Disney helpdesk about this, explaining how Linux works fine with Netflix, AmazonPrime video and even the web-app from my local cable provider. They promised to get back to me in 24 hours, the eventually got back to me in about a week. They wrote: "We are familiar with Error 83. This often happens if you want to play Disney + via the web browser or certain devices. Our IT department working hard to solve this. In the meantime, I want to advise you to watch Disney + via the app on a phone or tablet. If this error code still occurs in a few days, you can check the help center ..." this was on September 23th.

So I thought, ok they are working on this lets give them a few days. It is almost a month later now and nothing has changed. Their so called help-center does not even know about "Error Code 83" even though the internet is full of people experiencing this. Note that this error also happens a lot on other platforms, it is not just Linux.

Someone on tweakers.net has done some digging and this is a Widevine error: "the response is: {"errors":[{"code":"platform-verification-failed","description":"Platform verification status incompatible with security level"}]}". Widevine has 3 security levels and many devices, including desktop Linux and many Android devices only support the lowest security setting (software encryption only). In this case e.g. Netflix will not offer full HD or 4k resolutions, but otherwise everything works fine, which is a balance between DRM and usability which I can accept. Disney+ OTOH seems to have the drm features kranked up to maximum draconian settings and simply will not work on a lot of android devices, nor on Chromebooks, nor on desktop Linux.

So if you care about Linux in any way, please do not subscribe to Disney+, instead send them a message letting them know that you are boycotting them until they get their Linux support in order.

22 Oct 2019 9:48am GMT

Upcoming in libinput 1.15 is a small feature to support Wacom tablets a tiny bit better. If you look at the higher-end devices in Wacom's range, e.g. the Cintiq 27QHD you'll notice that at the top right of the device are three hardware-buttons with icons. Those buttons are intended to open the config panel, the on-screen display or the virtual keyboard. They've been around for a few years and supported in the kernel for a few releases. But in userspace, they events from those keys were ignored, casted out in the wild before eventually running out of electrons and succumbing to misery. Well, that's all changing now with a new interface being added to libinput to forward those events.

Step back a second and let's look at the tablet interfaces. We have one for tablet tools (styli) and one for tablet pads. In the latter, we have events for rings, strips and buttons. The latter are simply numerically ordered, so button 1 is simply button 1 with no special meaning. Anything more specific needs to be handled by the compositor/client side which is responsible for assigning e.g. keyboard shortcuts to those buttons.

The special keys however are different, they have a specific function indicated by the icon on the key itself. So libinput 1.15 adds a new event type for tablet pad keys. The events look quite similar to the button events but they have a linux/input-event-codes.h specific button code that indicates what they are. So the compositor can start the OSD, or control panel, or whatever directly without any further configuration required.

This interface hasn't been merged yet, it's waiting for the linux kernel 5.4 release which has a few kernel-level fixes for those keys.

17 Oct 2019 11:23pm GMT

For a few years now, libinput has provided button scrolling. Holding a designated button down and moving the device up/down or left/right creates the matching scroll events. We enable this behaviour by default on some devices (e.g. trackpoints) but it's available on mice and some other devices. Users can change the button that triggers it, e.g. assign it to the right button. There are of course a couple of special corner cases to make sure you can still click that button normally but as I said, all this has been available for quite some time now.

New in libinput 1.15 is the button lock feature. The button lock removes the need to hold the button down while scrolling. When the button lock is enabled, a single button click (i.e. press and release) of that button holds that button logically down for scrolling and any subsequent movement by the device is translated to scroll events. A second button click releases that button lock and the device goes back to normal movement. That's basically it, though there are some extra checks to make sure the button can still be used for normal clicking (you will need to double-click for a single logical click now though).

This is primarily an accessibility feature and is likely to find it's way into the GUI tools under the accessibility headers.

17 Oct 2019 10:56pm GMT

A few weeks back, I was at XDC and gave a talk about various current and past input stack developments (well, a subset thereof anyway). One of the slides pointed out libinput's bus factor and I'll use this blog to make this a bit more widely known.

If you don't know what the bus factor is, Wikipedia defines it as:

The "bus factor" is the minimum number of team members that have to suddenly disappear from a project before the project stalls due to lack of knowledgeable or competent personnel.

libinput has a bus factor of 1.

Let's arbitrarily pick the 1.9.0 release (roughly 2 years ago) and look at the numbers: of the ~1200 commits since 1.9.0, just under 990 were done by me. In those 2 years we had 76 contributors in total, but only 24 of which have more than one commit and only 6 contributors have more than 5 commits. The numbers don't really change much even if we go all the way back to 1.0.0 in 2015. These numbers do not include the non-development work: release maintenance for new releases and point releases, reviewing CI failures [1], writing documentation (including the stuff on this blog), testing and bug triage. Right now, this is effectively all done by one person.

This is... less than ideal. At this point libinput is more-or-less the only input stack we have [2] and all major distributions rely on it. It drives mice, touchpads, tablets, keyboards, touchscreens, trackballs, etc. so basically everything except joysticks.

Anyway, I'm largely writing this blog post in the hope that someone gets motivated enough to dive into this. Right now, if you get 50 patches into libinput you get the coveted second-from-the-top spot, with all the fame and fortune that entails (i.e. little to none, but hey, underdogs are big in popular culture). Short of that, any help with building an actual community would be appreciated too.

Either way, lest it be said that no-one saw it coming, let's ring the alarm bells now before it's too late. Ding ding!

[1] Only as of a few days ago can we run the test suite as part of the CI infrastructure, thanks to Benjamin Tissoires. Previously it was run on my laptop and virtually nowhere else.
[2] fyi, xf86-input-evdev: 5 patches in the same timeframe, xf86-input-synaptics: 6 patches (but only 3 actual changes) so let's not pretend those drivers are well-maintained.

16 Oct 2019 5:56am GMT

GStreamer Conference 2019 in Lyon France

So the GStreamer Conference 2019 is approaching being held in Lyon, France between 31st October and 1st November 2019. This year is special as it marks the GStreamer projects 20th year of existence. I still remember seeing the announcement of GStreamer 0.0.9 which Erik Walthinsen sent to the GNOME announe mailing list. Back then I felt that multimedia support where one of the big gaps around the Linux operating system that needed filling (no, XAnim was nice for its time, but it was not a long term solution :) and GStreamer seemed like the perfect project to fill it. So I joined the GStreamer IRC channel determined to try to help the project succeed however I could. A little over a year later we all met for the first time at GUADEC in Copenhagen, even posing for this exciting team photo.

GStreamer Team at GUADEC Copenhagen in 2001 (we all looked slightly younger and fresher back then.)

Anyway, 20 years later there will be a talk and presentation by GStreamer co-founder Wim Taymans (wearing blue shirt and black pants in picture above) at the GStreamer Conference commemorating 20 years of GStreamer. Detailing taking the project from idealistic spare time effort to the multimedia industry juggernaut it is today.

Of course the conference is not going to be focused on the past, as there is a long line up of great talks talking about modern streaming with DASH, HDR support in GStreamer, latest developments around GStreamer and Rust, Virtual reality, Vulkan and more. Actually on the 'and more' topic, Wim Taymans will also do a presentation on PipeWire, the next generation audio and video server, at the GStreamer Conference this year, hopefully demoing some of the great improvements in things like our pro-audio Jack emulation support.
So if you haven't already, make your way to the GStreamer Conference 2019 website and register for the 10th annual GStreamer Conference!

For those going be aware that there will also be a joint GStreamer fall hackfest and PipeWire hackfest in the two days following the GStreamer Conference. So be sure to sign up for those if interested. They will be co-located with participants flowing freely between the two events.

07 Oct 2019 3:57pm GMT

We are laboring on getting Fedora Workstation 31 out the door next Month, with the beta release being made available last week. So here are some of the highlights of this upcoming release which I and the team hope you will enjoy. Many of these items I already covered in my June blogpost about Fedora Workstation 31, so if you read that one consider this one a status update as there will be some repeats.

Wayland improvements
Fedora has been leading the migration to Wayland since day one and we are not planning to stop. XWayland on demand has been an effort a lot of people contributed to this cycle. The goal is to only need XWayland for legacy X applications, not have it started and running all the time as that is a waste of system resources and also having core functionality still depend on X under Wayland makes the system more fragile. XWayland-on-demand has been a big effort with contributions from a lot of people and companies. One piece of this was the Systemd user session patches that was originally written by Iain Lane from Canonical. They had been lingering for a bit so Benjamin Berg took those patches on for this cycle and helped shepherd them over the finish line and get them merged upstream. This work wasn't a hard requirement for Wayland-on-demand, but since it makes it a lot easier to do different things under X and Wayland which in turn makes moving towards XWayland-on-demand a little simpler to implement. That work will also allow (in future releases) us to do things like only start services under GNOME that are actually needed for your hardware, so for instance if you don't have a bluetooth adapter in your computer there is no reason to run the bits of GNOME dealing with bluetooth. So expect further resource savings coming from this work over time.

Carlos Garnacho then spent time going through GNOME Shell removing any lingering X dependencies while Olivier Fourdan worked on cleaning up the control center. This work has mostly landed, but it is hidden behind an experimental flag (gsettings set org.gnome.mutter experimental-features "[...,'autostart-xwayland']") in Fedora 31 as we need to mature it a bit more before its ready for primetime. But we hope and expect to have it running by default in Fedora Workstation 32.

One example of something that was still requiring X that is now gone is the keyboard and mouse accessibility features in GNOME 3, which Olivier Fourdan got re-implemented and improved for this release. So if anyone out there reading this rely on the hover click accessibility feature then that is actually a lot nicer in Fedora Workstation 31. As seen in the screenshot below you now have this nice little pie animation filling up as it prepares to click which is a huge improvement over how it used to work.

Click on hover in action

Another item we feel is an important part of reducing the need for XWayland is having Firefox running natively on Wayland. Martin Stransky and Jan Horak has been working tirelessly on trying to ensure Firefox works well on Wayland and in the Fedora 31 Beta it is running on Wayland by default. However there are a few bugs discovered that Martin and Jan are trying hard to fix atm so we can keep this default for the GA release, but if they miss the deadline we will ship the X backend version in F31 and then move to the Wayland version later on.

In Fedora Workstation 31 Wayland is still disabled by default if you use the Nvidia binary driver. The reason for this is due to lack of acceleration under XWayland, meaning that any application depending on GLX, like a lot of games, will just get software GL rendering with the binary NVidia driver. This isn't something we can resolv on our own, Nvidia has to do the work since its their closed source driver, but we been discussing it regularly with them and we been told now that they are looking at the work Adam Jackson some time ago which was specifically aimed at helping them bring their X.org driver to XWayland. We don't have a timeline yet, but it is being actively looked at and hopefully a proper date can be provided soon. I am actually running Fedora Workstation 31 using the NVidia driver myself at the moment on this laptop, and for those interested in helping dogfood this setup, in preparation for hopefully being able to enable Wayland on NVidia in Fedora Workstation 32, it is fairly simple thing to do. Under /usr/lib/udev/rules.d/ you find a file called 61-gdm.rules, just edit that file and comment out (#) the line that reads 'DRIVER=="nvidia", RUN+="/usr/libexec/gdm-disable-wayland"' and you will revert to a standard setup where your standard session is a Wayland session, but with a x.org session available as a fallback. The more people that run this and report issues the better as it helps us make this rock solid before releasing it upon the world.

Atomic kernel modesetting
Jonas Ådahl has been hard at work this cycle on adding support for atomic mode setting. This work is not done, but the first parts of it has landed, but it has major long term advantages for us. I asked Jonas to provide a short description of the work and what it will eventually achieve as I don't we articulated that anywhere else yet:

There are two ways for a display server to control the configuration and content of monitors - the old classic Kernel Mode Setting (classic KMS), and newer atomic Kernel Mode Setting (atomic KMS). The main difference between these two modes of operations is that with atomic KMS, the display server posts transactions containing configuration KMS that are then processed atomically by the kernel, while when using the classic KMS, the display server posts configurations command by command, where each monitor is configured by posting multiple commands. The benefits with atomic KMS are for example that the display server will up front know whether a configuration is valid (e.g. enough memory bandwidth), or that the display server can configure multiple aspects of the hardware atomically.

During the cycle leading up to Fedora Workstation 31 the foundations for how mutter (the window manager powering GNOME Shell) can make use of the new atomic KMS API was put in place. What was done was to introduce an internal transactional API for configuring monitors. This will eventually allow us to have much more control over how more advanced monitor features are utilized. For example it will be possible to place client windows directly in hardware overlay planes, meaning we can more often completely bypass full frame compositing when only the content of a single window changes. Another example for what this enables us to do is with color management; we will be able to do seamless switching between managing window color profiles using OpenGL and for instance gamma ramps. Yet another example of what this work opens the door for is framebuffer modifiers, which will among other things potentially result in higher performance with very high resolution monitors.
Finally an important aspect of the work done related to the new internal KMS API is that it aims to be thread safe, meaning eventually it will be possible to put KMS processing completely in a separate thread. This means that together with e.g. moving input device processing to its own thread it will be possible to get very short latency between mouse movement and the cursor
being moved on screen.

QtGNOME improvements
Jan Grulich has continued improved the QtGNOME module to make sure Qt apps integrate as well as possible into Fedora Workstation. His latest updates ensures that the theming keeps up to date with latest upstream changes in Adwaita, that we have a fully working dark theme, that accessibility theming work and that it works with Flatpaks. Below is a screenshot showing Okular running allowing you to see how the QtGNOME module affects the look and feel of Qt applications.

Firmware improvements
The LVFS firmware service keeps going from strength to strength. Richard Hughes presented on it during the Open Firmware Conference recently and was approached by a lot of vendors afterwards both thanking him and Red Hat for the effort, but also asking about getting more of their hardware supported. New vendors are coming onboard at rapid pace, for instance Acer joined recently and are planning to support more of their hardware on the LVFS going forward. It is also worth mentioning the GNOME Firmware tool that can now be downloaded from flathub and which works great on Fedora Workstation 31.

OpenH264 Greatly Improved
The much improved version of OpenH264 will be available soon for Fedora users. This new version adds support for the High and Advanced profiles of H264 which is what most videos found online or produced by your camera would be using. This means you can add H264 playback support to your Fedora Workstation without having to search online for 3rd party repositories like you have had to do up to now. We also are trying to ensure this will be usable by Firefox for video playback eventually. This was work we partnered with Endless, Cisco to hire the multimedia experts at Centricular to do, so another great example of cross company collaboration to bring improved functionality to the community.

Fedora Toolbox
Debarshi Ray has been working on many small improvements and better robustness for Fedora Toolbox going into Fedora Workstation 31. Fedora Toolbox for those not aware of it yet, is our tool to make doing development using pet containers simple and convenient, providing ease of use features on top of traditional container tools and integration with GNOME terminal and the GNOME Shell. The version shipping in F31 will be the last shell script based one as once Fedora Workstation 31 is out we will be going all in on rewritting Fedora Toolbox in Go, in preparation for future development and expansion. I strongly recommend trying it out as it will help open your eyes to the possibilities that using pet containers for development gives you. For instance you can easily set up a RHEL based pet container on your Fedora system to do development work that is mean to be deployed on a RHEL system or grab our special AI/ML development container for easy access to TensorFlow and similar tools.

Improved Classic mode
Another notable change in this release is the updates to GNOME Classic mode. GNOME Classic mode is a set of extensions to GNOME 3 that makes it look and behave a lot more like GNOME 2, which still has many fans out there. With this release we collected feedback from a group of Classic mode users and tried to improve the experience further, mostly be removing some remaining GNOME 3'isms that didn't really fit the GNOME Classic user experience, like the overview and the hot corner. The session manager is now also easily accessible in the bottom corner. The theming also got cleaned up a little to remove the last bit of the 'black' GNOME 3 theming. That said I think it is important to remember that this is still GNOME 3 in the end, we are really just showcasing the power of extensions to tweak the user experience in quite fundamental ways here.

Improved GNOME Classic mode

Better support for non-English users
Fedora Workstation is used all over the globe, but we have not been happy about how our support for picking languages other than English has worked so far. The thing is that if you choose one or more languages at install time, things tended to just work fine, but if you wanted to add a new language afterwards it required jumping onto the command line and figuring out how to install the needed langpacks. In Fedora Workstation 31 Sundeep Anand have worked hard to improve this, so if you choose a new language in the GNOME Control center in Fedora Workstation 31, the required langpacks should be installed automatically for you.

Fleet Commander
Fleet Commander 0.14.1 is out just in time for Fedora Workstation 31. Fleet Commander is a tool for doing large scale deployments of Fedora and RHEL workstations, allowing you to set system wide profiles. So for instance if you have a GNOME Shell extension everyone in your organization or a specific team inside your organization should have enabled, you can deploy a profile with Fleet commander ensuring that extension is enabled for those users. Basically any setting within GNOME can be set using this, including network configuration options. There is also support for Firefox and LibreOffice settings in Fleet Commander. The big feature addition of 0.14.1 is that Fleet Commander now can be used with Active Directory, which means that even if your company or university use Active Directory for their user management, you can now deploy Fedora and RHEL profiles without needing FreeIPA. Fleet Commander is pretty much finished at this point, at least as far as any piece of software can ever be finished. Oliver Gutierrez Suarez is working on finishing up some last bits of Firefox support currently, but we don't have any major Fleet Commander items on his todo list after that, so if you been waiting to test it out there are on new major features you need to wait on anymore, it is all there. If you are doing large scale linux desktop deployments I definitely recommend checking out Fleet commander. You will find that Fleet Commander definitely makes Fedora a great choice for doing large scale Linux desktop deployments.

Pipewire
We are not doing a lot of changes to Pipewire for Fedora Workstation 31. Mostly some bugfixes and minor improvements to the video infrastructure it already provides in Fedora 30 for Flatpaks and web browsers. We are planning major changes for Fedora Workstation 32 though, where we in fact plan to ship Pipewire as a tech preview for both Jack and PulseAudio users. The way it will work is that the system will still default to PulseAudio, but we will provide either a script or a UI option to switch over to Pipewire (and back again). There is also a plan to have a core set of ProAudio applications available as Flatpaks for Fedora Workstation 32 tested and verified to work perfectly with Pipewire, the current apps planned to be included are Ardour, Carla, a2jmidid, Hydrogen, Qtractor and Patroneo, but if there is interested contributors joining the effort we could have even more. Then for Fedora Workstation 33 the idea is to ship with Pipewire as the default audio handler, but with some way for users to switch back to PulseAudio if they have a need. Not unlike how the setup is currently with Wayland and X.org in Fedora. Wim Taymans will also be attending the Sonoj conference in Cologne Germany at the end of October to discuss Pipewire with many members of the Linux ProAudio community and hopefully help prepare them for a future where Fedora Workstation is the perfect home for ProAudio users and developers.

Sysprof
Christian Hergert spent some cycles this round on improving the Sysprof tool as it was becoming clear that to keep improving GNOME Shell and general desktop performance going forward we needing better data and ability to find the bottlenecks. Tools like sysprof often ends up being the unsung heroes of the system, but as we continue improving the overall GNOME performance and resource usage of the next few years the revamped sysprof tool will be a big part of that story.

Much improved Sysprof tool

Silverblue
A lot of the items we work on are part of our vision around Silverblue, a Linux desktop OS built on the idea of an immutable core image. We often mention the theoretic advantage that such a setup with an immutable OS brings, but actually as I upgraded from F30 and F31 beta on my RPM based laptop (I got a separate machine where I run Silverblue) I hit the exact kind of issue that Silverblue can help us and our users avoid. What happened was that after my upgrade I suddenly had no Wayland session anymore, just the fallback X.org session. After quite a bit of fault searching I discovered that the reason for this was that I had been testing Valves ACO shader compiler on F30. These packages had a newer version number than the F31 packages and thus where not overwritten as part of the upgrade. Unfortunately the EGL package that came as part of that repository did not work well on F31 and thus the Wayland session failed. Once I did a distro sync and forced all packages to be the actual F31 versions things worked correctly, but it did illustrate the challenges with systems where different parts of the core can and will get updated at different times. With a single well tested core OS image these kind of problems will not happen. That said being able to test such things as ACO is valuable and useful and luckily OStree and Silverblue do offer functionality for installing such things in a clean and non-damaging way through what is known as package layering. When you install new packages like that on using package layering they will only last until your next reboot, after you reboot your back to a clean original state system. Of course if you really want to keep some experimental packages around there are other things you can do too, like overriding, but for simple testing like I did with ACO, package layering will provide you with a simple and safe way to do that.

We realize that Silverblue is a major change in how a Linux distro is 'supposed' to work, so we are taking our time with it to ensure we do it right and that we have made sure applications and tools work in a way that functions well on an immutable OS. So if you are interested I do recommend that you grab the Fedora 31 Silverblue image and give it a spin, but we are still working on polishing the experience so don't expect it to be a seamless experience at this point in time. Of course as things like Flatpaks, Fedora Toolbox and a host of smaller issues get improved upon we do believe this will be such an overall improvement over an 'old fashioned' linux distro that you will be asking yourself why the Linux world didn't do this years ago.

Improved performance
A lot of work has gone into improving the general performance of GNOME 3.34. The GNOME shell team has been very active and is a great example of a large numbers of developers working together from different backgrounds. So this release features a lot of great performance work by Daniel van Vugt from Canonical and by Georges Stavracas from Endless for instance. The Red Hat team has focused on providing patch review and feedback and working on bigger long term changes and enablers, like Christian Hergerts work on Sysprof, Jonas Ådahl work on atomic mode setting and Benjamin Bergs work on systemd-user session support. All in all I think you will find that Fedora Workstation 31 with GNOME 3.34 provides a faster and smoother experience, an experience we will continue to build upon going forward as some of these long term efforts starts paying off.

Performance is better than ever

Summary
So this has been a roundup of some of the core items you should look forward to in Fedora Workstation 31. There are other items coming too in this release, like the Miracast GNOME Network Display application that Benjamin Berg has written, more Fedora Flatpaks available than ever before and more. We also have a lot of interesting items coming up in Fedora Workstation 32 like Bastien Noceras work improving low memory handling. So stay tuned.

23 Sep 2019 5:45pm GMT