fidzu : freedesktop

07 Mar 2014 1:02pm GMT

Brief Glamor Hacks

Eric Anholt started writing Glamor a few years ago. The goal was to provide credible 2D acceleration based solely on the OpenGL API, in particular, to implement the X drawing primitives, both core and Render extension, without any GPU-specific code. When he started, the thinking was that fixed-function devices were still relevant, so that original code didn't insist upon "modern" OpenGL features like GLSL shaders. That made the code less efficient and hard to write.

Glamor used to be a side-project within the X world; seen as something that really wasn't very useful; something that any credible 2D driver would replace with custom highly-optimized GPU-specific code. Eric and I both hoped that Glamor would turn into something credible and that we'd be able to eliminate all of the horror-show GPU-specific code in every driver for drawing X text, rectangles and composited images. That hadn't happened though, until now.

Fast forward to the last six months. Eric has spent a bunch of time cleaning up Glamor internals, and in fact he's had it merged into the core X server for version 1.16 which will be coming up this July. Within the Glamor code base, he's been cleaning some internal structures up and making life more tolerable for Glamor developers.

Using libepoxy

A big part of the cleanup was a transition all of the extension function calls to use his other new project, libepoxy, which provides a sane, consistent and performant API to OpenGL extensions for Linux, Mac OS and Windows. That library is awesome, and you should use it for everything you do with OpenGL because not using it is like pounding nails into your head. Or eating non-tasty pie.

Using VBOs in Glamor

One thing he recently cleaned up was how to deal with VBOs during X operations. VBOs are absolutely essential to modern OpenGL applications; they're really the only way to efficiently pass vertex data from application to the GPU. And, every other mechanism is deprecated by the ARB as not a part of the blessed 'core context'.

Glamor provides a simple way of getting some VBO space, dumping data into it, and then using it through two wrapping calls which you use along with glVertexAttribPointer as follows:

pointer = glamor_get_vbo_space(screen, size, &offset);
glVertexAttribPointer(attribute_location, count, type,
              GL_FALSE, stride, offset);
memcpy(pointer, data, size);
glamor_put_vbo_space(screen);

glamor_get_vbo_space allocates the specified amount of VBO space and returns a pointer to that along with an 'offset', which is suitable to pass to glVertexAttribPointer. You dump your data into the returned pointer, call glamor_put_vbo_space and you're all done.

Actually Drawing Stuff

At the same time, Eric has been optimizing some of the existing rendering code. But, all of it is still frankly terrible. Our dream of credible 2D graphics through OpenGL just wasn't being realized at all.

On Monday, I decided that I should go play in Glamor for a few days, both to hack up some simple rendering paths and to familiarize myself with the insides of Glamor as I'm getting asked to review piles of patches for it, and not understanding a code base is a great way to help introduce serious bugs during review.

I started with the core text operations. Not because they're particularly relevant these days as most applications draw text with the Render extension to provide better looking results, but instead because they're often one of the hardest things to do efficiently with a heavy weight GPU interface, and OpenGL can be amazingly heavy weight if you let it.

Eric spent a bunch of time optimizing the existing text code to try and make it faster, but at the bottom, it actually draws each lit pixel as a tiny GL_POINT object by sending a separate x/y vertex value to the GPU (using the above VBO interface). This code walks the array of bits in the font and checking each one to see if it is lit, then checking if the lit pixel is within the clip region and only then adding the coordinates of the lit pixel to the VBO. The amazing thing is that even with all of this CPU and GPU work, the venerable 6x13 font is drawn at an astonishing 3.2 million glyphs per second. Of course, pure software draws text at 9.3 million glyphs per second.

I suspected that a more efficient implementation might be able to draw text a bit faster, so I decided to just start from scratch with a new GL-based core X text drawing function. The plan was pretty simple:

1. Dump all glyphs in the font into a texture. Store them in 1bpp format to minimize memory consumption.

2. Place raw (integer) glyph coordinates into the VBO. Place four coordinates for each and draw a GL_QUAD for each glyph.

3. Transform the glyph coordinates into the usual GL range (-1..1) in the vertex shader.

4. Fetch a suitable byte from the glyph texture, extract a single bit and then either draw a solid color or discard the fragment.

This makes the X server code surprisingly simple; it computes integer coordinates for the glyph destination and glyph image source and writes those to the VBO. When all of the glyphs are in the VBO, it just calls glDrawArrays(GL_QUADS, 0, 4 * count). The results were "encouraging":

1: fb-text.perf
2: glamor-text.perf
3: keith-text.perf

       1                 2                           3                 Operation
------------   -------------------------   -------------------------   -------------------------
   9300000.0      3160000.0 (     0.340)     18000000.0 (     1.935)   Char in 80-char line (6x13) 
   8700000.0      2850000.0 (     0.328)     16500000.0 (     1.897)   Char in 70-char line (8x13) 
   6560000.0      2380000.0 (     0.363)     11900000.0 (     1.814)   Char in 60-char line (9x15) 
   2150000.0       700000.0 (     0.326)      7710000.0 (     3.586)   Char16 in 40-char line (k14) 
    894000.0       283000.0 (     0.317)      4500000.0 (     5.034)   Char16 in 23-char line (k24) 
   9170000.0      4400000.0 (     0.480)     17300000.0 (     1.887)   Char in 80-char line (TR 10) 
   3080000.0      1090000.0 (     0.354)      7810000.0 (     2.536)   Char in 30-char line (TR 24) 
   6690000.0      2640000.0 (     0.395)      5180000.0 (     0.774)   Char in 20/40/20 line (6x13, TR 10) 
   1160000.0       351000.0 (     0.303)      2080000.0 (     1.793)   Char16 in 7/14/7 line (k14, k24) 
   8310000.0      2880000.0 (     0.347)     15600000.0 (     1.877)   Char in 80-char image line (6x13) 
   7510000.0      2550000.0 (     0.340)     12900000.0 (     1.718)   Char in 70-char image line (8x13) 
   5650000.0      2090000.0 (     0.370)     11400000.0 (     2.018)   Char in 60-char image line (9x15) 
   2000000.0       670000.0 (     0.335)      7780000.0 (     3.890)   Char16 in 40-char image line (k14) 
    823000.0       270000.0 (     0.328)      4470000.0 (     5.431)   Char16 in 23-char image line (k24) 
   8500000.0      3710000.0 (     0.436)      8250000.0 (     0.971)   Char in 80-char image line (TR 10) 
   2620000.0       983000.0 (     0.375)      3650000.0 (     1.393)   Char in 30-char image line (TR 24)

This is our old friend x11perfcomp, but slightly adjusted for a modern reality where you really do end up drawing billions of objects (hence the wider columns). This table lists the performance for drawing a range of different fonts in both poly text and image text variants. The first column is for Xephyr using software (fb) rendering, the second is for the existing Glamor GL_POINT based code and the third is the latest GL_QUAD based code.

As you can see, drawing points for every lit pixel in a glyph is surprisingly fast, but only about 1/3 the speed of software for essentially any size glyph. By minimizing the use of the CPU and pushing piles of work into the GPU, we manage to increase the speed of most of the operations, with larger glyphs improving significantly more than smaller glyphs.

Now, you ask how much code this involved. And, I can truthfully say that it was a very small amount to write:

 Makefile.am        |    2 
 glamor.c           |    5 
 glamor_core.c      |    8 
 glamor_font.c      |  181 ++++++++++++++++++++
 glamor_font.h      |   50 +++++
 glamor_priv.h      |   26 ++
 glamor_text.c      |  472 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
 glamor_transform.c |    2 
 8 files changed, 741 insertions(+), 5 deletions(-)

Let's Start At The Very Beginning

The results of optimizing text encouraged me to start at the top of x11perf and see what progress I could make. In particular, looking at the current Glamor code, I noticed that it did all of the vertex transformation with the CPU. That makes no sense at all for any GPU built in the last decade; they've got massive numbers of transistors dedicated to performing precisely this kind of operation. So, I decided to see what I could do with PolyPoint.

PolyPoint is absolutely brutal on any GPU; you have to pass it two coordinates for each pixel, and so the very best you can do is send it 32 bits, or precisely the same amount of data needed to actually draw a pixel on the frame buffer. With this in mind, one expects that about the best you can do compared with software is tie. Of course, the CPU version is actually computing an address and clipping, but those are all easily buried in the cost of actually storing a pixel.

In any case, the results of this little exercise are pretty close to a tie - the CPU draws 190,000,000 dots per second and the GPU draws 189,000,000 dots per second. Looking at the vertex and fragment shaders generated by the compiler, it's clear that there's room for improvement.

The fragment shader is simply pulling the constant pixel color from a uniform and assigning it to the fragment color in this the simplest of all possible shaders:

uniform vec4 color;
void main()
{
       gl_FragColor = color;
};

This generates five instructions:

Native code for point fragment shader 7 (SIMD8 dispatch):
   START B0
   FB write target 0
0x00000000: mov(8)          g113<1>F        g2<0,1,0>F                      { align1 WE_normal 1Q };
0x00000010: mov(8)          g114<1>F        g2.1<0,1,0>F                    { align1 WE_normal 1Q };
0x00000020: mov(8)          g115<1>F        g2.2<0,1,0>F                    { align1 WE_normal 1Q };
0x00000030: mov(8)          g116<1>F        g2.3<0,1,0>F                    { align1 WE_normal 1Q };
0x00000040: sendc(8)        null            g113<8,8,1>F
                render ( RT write, 0, 4, 12) mlen 4 rlen 0      { align1 WE_normal 1Q EOT };
   END B0

As this pattern is actually pretty common, it turns out there's a single instruction that can replace all four of the moves. That should actually make a significant difference in the run time of this shader, and this shader runs once for every single pixel.

The vertex shader has some similar optimization opportunities, but it only runs once for every 8 pixels - with the SIMD format flipped around, the vertex shader can compute 8 vertices in parallel, so it ends up executing 8 times less often. It's got some redundant moves, which could be optimized by improving the copy propagation analysis code in the compiler.

Of course, improving the compiler to make these cases run faster will probably make a lot of other applications run faster too, so it's probably worth doing at some point.

Again, the amount of code necessary to add this path was tiny:

 Makefile.am        |    1 
 glamor.c           |    2 
 glamor_polyops.c   |  116 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++--
 glamor_priv.h      |    8 +++
 glamor_transform.c |  118 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
 glamor_transform.h |   51 ++++++++++++++++++++++
 6 files changed, 292 insertions(+), 4 deletions(-)

Discussion of Results

These two cases, text and points, are probably the hardest operations to accelerate with a GPU and yet a small amount of OpenGL code was able to meet or beat software easily. The advantage of this work over traditional GPU 2D acceleration implementations should be pretty clear - this same code should work well on any GPU which offers a reasonable OpenGL implementation. That means everyone shares the benefits of this code, and everyone can contribute to making 2D operations faster.

All of these measurements were actually done using Xephyr, which offers a testing environment unlike any I've ever had - build and test hardware acceleration code within a nested X server, debugging it in a windowed environment on a single machine. Here's how I'm running it:

$ ./Xephyr  -glamor :1 -schedMax 2000 -screen 1024x768 -retro

The one bit of magic here is the '-schedMax 2000' flag, which causes Xephyr to update the screen less often when applications are very busy and serves to reduce the overhead of screen updates while running x11perf.

Future Work

Having managed to accelerate 17 of the 392 operations in x11perf, it's pretty clear that I could spend a bunch of time just stepping through each of the remaining ones and working on them. Before doing that, we want to try and work out some general principles about how to handle core X fill styles. Moving all of the stipple and tile computation to the GPU will help reduce the amount of code necessary to fill rectangles and spans, along with improving performance, assuming the above exercise generalizes to other primitives.

Getting and Testing the Code

Most of the changes here are from Eric's glamor-server branch:

git://people.freedesktop.org/~anholt/xserver glamor-server

The two patches shown above, along with a pair of simple clean up patches that I've written this week are available here:

git://people.freedesktop.org/~keithp/xserver glamor-server

Of course, as this now uses libepoxy, you'll need to fetch, build and install that before trying to compile this X server.

Because you can try all of this out in Xephyr, it's easy to download and build this X server and then run it right on top of your current driver stack inside of X. I'd really like to hear from people with Radeon or nVidia hardware to know whether the code works, and how it compares with fb on the same machine, which you get when you elide the '-glamor' argument from the example Xephyr command line above.

07 Mar 2014 9:12am GMT

Like most, I was taken by surprise last weekend, I never expected this to happen, at all.

Given that I was the one to poke a rather big hole in the Raspberry Pi image a year and a half ago, and since i have been playing a bit of a role in freeing ARM GPUs these last few years, I thought I'd say a few words on how I see things, and why I said what I said back then, and why I didn't say other things.

It has become a bit of a long read, but this it's a eventful story that spans about two years.

Getting acquainted.

I talked about the lima driver at linuxtag in may 2012. As my contract work wasn't going any where real, I spent two weeks of codethink time (well, it's not as if I ever did spent just 8h per day working on lima) on getting the next step working with lima, so I had something nice to demo at Linuxtag. During that bringup, I got asked to form a plan of attack for freeing the Raspberry Pi GPU, for a big potential customer. Just after my lima talk at the conference, I downloaded some code and images through the linuxtag wifi, and set about finding the shader compiler on the train on the way back.

I am not one for big micro-managed teams where constant communication is required. I am very big on structure and on finding natural boundaries (which is why you have the term modesetting and the structured approach to developing display drivers today). I tend to split up a massive task along those natural boundaries, and then have clued folks take full control and responsibility of those big tough subtasks. This is why I split the massive task of REing a GPU between the command stream side and the shader compiler. This is the plan of attack that I had formed in the first half of 2011 for Mali (which we are still sticking to today), and I was of course looking to repeat that for the RPi.

On the train, I disassembled glCompileShader from the VideoCore userspace binary, and found the code to be doing surprisingly little. It quickly went down to some routines which were used by pretty much all gl and egl calls. And those lower routines were basically taking in some ids and some data, and then passing it to the kernel. A look at the kernel code then told me that there was nothing but passing data through happening at that side...

There was nothing real going on, as all the nifty bits were running somewhere else.

In the next few days, I talked to some advanced RPi users on IRC, and we figured out that even the bootloader runs on the Videocore and that that brings up the ARM core. A look at the 3 different binary blobs, for 3 different memory divisions between the ARM and the VideoCore, revealed that they were raw blobs, running directly on the videocore. Strings were very clearly visible, and what was immediately clear is that it was mostly differences in addresses between the 3 blobs. Apart from the addresses, nothing was immediately apparent, apart from the fact that even display code was done by the Videocore. I confirmed with Ben Brewer, who was then working on the shaders for Lima, and who has a processor design background.

The news therefor wasn't good. The Raspberry Pi is a completely closed system with a massive black box pulling all the strings. But at least it is consistently closed, and there is only limited scope for making userspace and 'The Blob' getting out of sync, unlike the PowerVR, where userspace, kernel and microcode are almost impossible to keep in sync.

So I wrote up the proposal for the potential customer (you know who you are), basically a few manmonths of busywork (my optimistic estimate doubled, and then doubled again, as I never do manage to keep my own optimistic timelines) to free the userspace shim, and a potential month for Ben for poking at the videocore blobs. Of course, I never heard back from codethink sales, which was expected with news that was this bad.

I decided to stay silent about the Raspberry Pi being such a closed system, at least for a few weeks. For once, this customer was trying to do The Right Thing by talking to the right people, instead of just making big statements, no matter what damage they cause or what morals they breach. I ended up being quite busy in the next few months and I kind of forgot about making some noise. This came back to haunt me later on.

The noise.

So on oktober 24th of 2012, the big announcement came. Here is the excerpt that I find striking:

"[...] the Raspberry Pi is the first ARM-based multimedia SoC with
fully-functional, vendor-provided (as opposed to partial, reverse engineered)
fully open-source drivers, and that Broadcom is the first vendor to open their
mobile GPU drivers up in this way. We at the Raspberry Pi Foundation hope to
see others follow."

While the text of the announcement judiciously talks about "userland" and "VideoCore driver code which runs on the ARM", it all goes massively downhill with the above excerpt. Together wit the massive cheering coming from the seemingly very religious RPi community, the fact that the RPis SoC was a massively closed system was completely drowned out.

Sure, this release was a very good step in the right direction. It allowed people to port and properly maintain the RPi userspace drivers, and took away a lot of the overhead for integration. But the above statement very deliberately brushed the truth about the BCM2835 SoC under the carpet, and then went on to brashly call for other vendors to follow suit, even though those others had chosen very different paths in their system design, and did not depend on a massive all-controlling black box.

I was appalled. Why was this message so deliberately crafted in what should be a very open project? How could people be so shortsighted and not see the truth, even with the sourcecode available?

What was even worse was the secondary message here. To me, it stated "we are perfectly happy with the big binary blob pulling the strings in the background". And with their call to other vendors, they pretty much told them: "keep the real work closed, but create an artificial shim to aid porting!". Not good.

So I went and talked to the other guys on the #lima channel on irc. The feeling amongst the folks in our channel was pretty uniform one of disgust. At first glance, this post looked as a clear and loud message to support open drivers, it only looked like that on the absolute surface. Anyone who would dig slightly deeper would soon see the truth, and the message would turn into "Keep the blob guys!".

It was clear that this message from the RPi foundation was not helping the cause of freeing ARM GPUs at all. So I decided to react to this announcement.

The shouting

So I decided to go post in the broadcom forums, and this is what I wrote:

Erm… Isn't all the magic in the videocore blob? Isn't the userland code you
just made available the simple shim that passes messages and data back and forth
to the huge blob running on the highly proprietary videocore dsp?

- the developer of the lima driver.

Given the specific way in which the original RPI foundation announcement was written, i had expected all from the RPI foundation itself to know quite clearly that this was indeed just the shim driver. The reminder of me being the lima driver developer, should've taken away any doubt about me actually knowing what i was talking about. But sadly, these assumptions were proven quite wrong when Liz Upton replied:

No.

There's some microcode in the Videocore - not something you should confuse with an
ARM-side blob, which could actually prevent you from understanding or modifying
anything that your computer does. That microcode is effectively firmware.

She really had no idea to what extent the videocore was running the show, and then happily went and argued with someone whom most people would label an industry expert. Quite astounding.

Things of course went further downhill from there, with several RPI users showing themselves from their best side. Although I did like the comment about ATI and ATOMBIOS, some people at least hadn't forgotten that nasty story.

All-in-all, this was truly astounding stuff, and it didn't help my feeling that the RPI foundation was not really intending to do The Right Thing, but instead was more about making noise, under the guise of marketing. None of this was helping ARM GPUs or ARM userspace blobs in any way.

More shouting

What happened next was also bad. Instead of sticking to the facts, Dave Airlie went and posted this blog entry, reducing himself to the level of Miss Upton.

A few excerpts:

"Why is this not like other firmware (AMD/NVIDIA etc)?
The firmware we ship on AMD and nvidia via nouveau isn't directly controlling the GPU
shader cores. It mostly does ancillary tasks like power management and CPU offloading.
There are some firmwares for video decoding that would start to fall into the same
category as this stuff. So if you want to add a new 3D feature to the AMD gpu driver
you can just write code to do it, not so with the rPI driver stack."

"Will this mean the broadcom kernel driver will get merged?
No.

This is like Ethernet cards with TCP offload, where the full TCP/IP stack is run on the
Ethernet card firmware. These cards seem like a good plan until you find bugs in their
firmware stack or find out their TCP/IP implementation isn't actually any good. The same
problem will occur with this. I would take bets the GLES implementation sucks, because
they all do, but the whole point of open sourcing something is to allow other to improve
it something that can't be done in this case."

Amazing stuff.

First of all, with the videocore being responsible for booting the bcm2835, and the bcm2835 already being a supported platform in the linux kernel (as of version 3.7), all the damage had been done already. Refusing yet another tiny message passing driver, which has a massive user-base and which will see a lot of testing, then is rather short-sighted. Especially since this would have made it much easier for the massive RPI userbase to use the upstream kernel.

Then there is the fact that this supposed kernel driver would not be a drm driver. It's simply not up to the self-appointed drm maintainer to either accept or refuse this.

And to finish off, a few years ago, Dave forked RadeonHD driver code to create a driver that did things the ATI way (read: much less free, much more dependent on bios bytecode, and with many other corners being implemented the broken ATI way), wasted loads of AMD money, stopped register documentation from coming out, and generally made sure that fglrx still rules supreme today. And all of this for just "marketing reasons", namely the ability to make trump SuSE with noise. With a history like that, you just cannot go and claim the moral high ground on anything anymore.

Like I've stated before, open source software is about making noise, and Dave his blog entry was nothing more and nothing less. Noise breeds more noise in our parts. This is why I decided to not provide a full and proper analysis of the situation back then, as we had lowered ourselves to the level that the RPI foundation had chosen, and nothing I could have said would've improved on that.

Redemption

I received an email from Eben Upton last friday, where he pointed out the big news. I replied that I would have to take a thorough look first, but then also stated that I didn't expect Eben to email me if this hadn't been the real thing. I then congratulated him extensively.

And congratulations really are in order here.

The Raspberry PI is a global sales phenomenon. It created a whole new market, a space where devices like the Cubieboard and Olimex boards also are in now. It made ARM development boards accessible and affordable, and put a linux on ARM in the hands of 2.5 million people. It is so big that the original goal of the Raspberry Pi, namely that of education, is kind of drowned out. But just the fact that so many of these devices were sold already, will have a bigger educational impact than any direct action towards that goal. This gives the RPI foundation a massive amount of power, so much so, that even the most closed SoC around is being opened now.

But in Oktober of 2012, my understanding was that the RPI foundation wasn't interested in wielding that power to reach those goals which I and many others hold dear. And I was really surprised when it now was revealed that they did, as I had personally given up on this ever happening, and I had assumed that the RPI foundation was not intending to go all the way.

What's there?

After the email from Eben, I joined the #raspberrypi-internals channel on freenode to ask the guys who are REing the VideoCore, to get an expert opinion from those actually working on the hardware.

So what has appeared:
* A user manual for the 3D core.
* Some sample code for a different SoC, but code which which runs on the ARM core and not on the videocore.
* This sample code includes some interesting headers which helps the guys who are REing the Videocore.
* There's a big promise of releasing more about the Videocore and at least providing a properly free bootloader.

These GPU docs and code not only means that Broadcom has beaten ARM, Qualcomm, Nvidia, Vivante and Imagination technologies to the post, it also makes broadcom second only to Intel. (yes, in front of AMD, or should I say ATI, as ATI has run most of the show since 2008).

Then there is the extra info on the videocore and the promise of a fully free bootloader. Yes, there still is the massive dependance on the VideoCore for doing all sorts of important SoC things, but releasing this information takes time, especially since this was not part of the original SoC release process and it has to be made up for afterwards. The future is looking bright for this SoC though, and we really might get to a point where the heavily VideoCore based BCM2835 SoC becomes one of the most open SoCs around.

Today though, the BCM2835 still doesn't hold a candle to the likes of the Allwinner A10 with regards to openness. But the mid to long term difference is that most of Allwinners openness so far was accidental (they are just now starting to directly cooperate with the linux-sunxi community), and Allwinner doesn't own all the IP used in their SoC (ARM owns the GPU for instance, and it is being a big old embedded dinosaur about it too). The RPI SoC not only has very active backing from the SoC vendor, that SoC vendor also happens to be the full owner of the IP at the same time.

The RPI future looks really bright!

Whining.

I do not like the 10k bounty on getting Q3A going with the freshly released code. I do not think this is the best way to get a solid gpu driver out, as it mostly encourages a single person to make a quick and dirty port of the freshly released code. I would've preferred to have seen someone from the RPI foundation create a kanban with clearly defined goals, and then let the community work off the different work items, after which those work-items are graded and rewarded. But then, it's the RPI foundations money, and this bounty is a positive action overall.

I am more worried about something else. With the bounty and with the promise of a free bootloader, the crazy guys who are REing the VideoCore get demotivated twice. This 10k bounty rules them out, as it calls for someone to do a quick and dirty hack, and not for long hard labour towards The Right Thing. The promise of a free bootloader might make their current work superfluous, and has the potential to halt REing work altogether. These guys are working on something which is or was at least an order of magnitude harder than what the normal GPU REing projects have or had to deal with. I truly hope that they get some direct encouragement and support from the RPI foundation, and that both parties work together on getting the rest of the VideoCore free.

All in all, this Broadcom release is the best news I have heard since I started on the open ARM GPU path, it actually is the best news I've had since AMD accepted our proposal to free the ATI Radeon (back in june 2007). This release fully makes up for the bad communication of Oktober 2012, and has opened the door to making the BCM2835 the most free SoC out there.

So to Eben and the rest of the guys from the RPI Foundation: Well done! You made us all very happy and proud.

05 Mar 2014 3:32pm GMT

Hi, so I wrote A blog entry asking people to contribute to the PiTiVi fundraiser effort last week. I am happy to see them having already reached 10K Euro, but their goal of course is to get more. I am also happy to say that the GStreamer Project decided to support the fundraiser using some of the money we earned over the years doing Google Summer of Code and organizing the GStreamer Conference, which added 2500€ to the effort. You can read about the GStreamer donation here.

Anyway, I would once again want to ask people to contribute to this effort. There is a proven team behind this fundraiser, so this is not like a kickstarter where people are starting from scratch and you have no idea where they will end up going or what they might achieve. This is an existing project that just needs some polish to get it to critical mass. So visit the fundraising page and make your pledge.

03 Mar 2014 6:46pm GMT

Oort is an experimental programming language I have been working on, on and off (mostly off), since 2007. It is a statically typed, object-oriented, imperative language, where classes, functions and methods can be nested arbitrarily, and where functions and methods are full closures, ie., they can be stored in variables and returned from functions. The control structures are the usual ones: if, for, while, do, goto, etc.

It also has an unusual feature: goto labels are first class.

What does it mean for labels to be first class? It means two things: (1) they are lexically scoped so that they are visible from inside nested functions. This makes it possible to jump from any point in the program to any other location that is visible from that point, even if that location is in another function. And (2) labels can be used as values: They can be passed to and returned from functions and methods, and they can be stored in data structures.

As a simple example, consider a data structure with a "foreach" method that takes a callback function and calls it for every item in the data structure. In Oort this might look like this:

table: array[person_t];

table.foreach (fn (p: person_t) -> void {
        print p.name;
        print p.age;
    });

A note about syntax. In Oort, anonymous functions are defined like this:

fn (<arguments>) -> <return type> {
    ...;
}

and variables and arguments are declared like this:

<name>: <type>

so the code above defines an anonymous function that prints the name and the age of person and passes that function to the foreach method of the table.

What if we want to stop the iteration? You could have the callback return true to stop, or you could have it throw an exception. However, both methods are a little clumsy: The first because the return value might be useful for other purposes, the second because stopping the iteration isn't really an exceptional situation.

With lexically scoped labels there is a direct solution - just use goto to jump out of the callback:

  table.foreach (fn (p: person_t) -> void {
          print p.name;
          print p.age;

          if (p.age > 50)
              goto done;
      });

@done:

Note what's going on here: Once we find a person older than 50, we jump out of the anonymous callback and back into the enclosing function. The git tree has a running example.

Call/cc in terms of goto
In Scheme and some other languages there is a feature called call/cc, which is famous for being both powerful and mind-bending. What it does is, it that it takes the concept of "where we are in the program" and packages it up as a function. This function, called the continuation, is then passed to another, user-defined, function. If the user-defined function calls the continuation, the program will resume from the point where call/cc was invoked. The mind-bending part is that a continuation can be stored in data structures and called multiple times, which means the call/cc invocation can in effect return more than once.

Lexically scoped labels are at least as expressive as call/cc, because if you have them, you can write call/cc as a function:

call_cc (callback: fn (k: fn()->void)) -> void
{
    callback (fn() -> void { 
        goto current_continuation;
    });

@current_continuation:
}

Let's see what's going on here. A function called call_cc() is defined:

call_cc (...) -> void
{
}

This function takes another function as argument:

callback: fn (...) -> void

And that function takes the continuation as an argument:

k: fn()->void

The body of call/cc calls the callback:

callback (...);

passing an anonymous function (the continuation):

    fn() -> void {
        goto current_continuation;
    }

@current_continuation:

that just jumps to the point where call_cc returns. So when callback decides to invoke the continuation, execution will resume at the point where call_cc was invoked. Since there is nothing stopping callback from storing the continuation in a data structure or from invoking it multiple times, we have the full call/cc semantics.

Cooperative thread system
One of the examples on the Wikipedia page about call/cc is a cooperative thread system. With the call_cc function above, we could directly translate the Wikipedia code into Oort, but using the second aspect of the first-class-ness of labels - that they can be stored directly in data structures - makes it possible to write a more straightforward version:

run_list: list[label] = new list[label]();

thread_fork (child: fn() -> void)
{
    run_list.append (me);
    child();
    goto run_list.pop_head();
@me:
}

thread_yield()
{
    run_list.append (me);
    goto run_list.pop_head ();
@me:
}

thread_exit()
{
    if (!run_list.is_empty())
        goto run_list.pop_head();
    else
        process_exit();
}

The run_list variable is a list of labels containing the current positions of all the active threads. The keyword label in Oort is simply a type specifier similar to string.

To create a new thread, thread_fork first saves the position of the current thread on the list, and then it calls the child function. Similarly, thread_yield yields to another thread by saving the position of the current thread and jumping to the first label on the list. Exiting a thread consists of jumping to the first thread if there is one, and exiting the process if there isn't.

The code above doesn't actually run because the current Oort implementation doesn't support genericity, but here is a somewhat uglier version that actually runs, while still demonstrating the principle.

02 Mar 2014 12:00am GMT

As you've probably seen in my previous post, the new Videos UI has part of its interface focused on various channels from online sources, such as the Blip.tv, or videos from the Guardian.

Grilo recently grew support for Lua sources, which means you can write about 100 lines of lua, and integrate videos from an online source into Videos easily.

The support isn't restricted to videos, GNOME Music and GNOME Photos and a number of other applications will also be able to use this to be extended.

Small tutorial by example

Our example is that of a source that would fetch the list of Ogg Theora streams from Xiph.org's streaming directory.

First, define the "source": the name is what will show up in the interface, supported_keys lists the metadata fields that we'll be filling in for each media item, and supported_media mentions we only show videos, so the source can be skipped in music players.

source = { 
  id = 'grl-xiph-example',
  name = 'Xiph Example',
  supported_keys = { 'id', 'title', 'url', 'type' },
  supported_media = 'video',
}

We'll then implement one of the source methods, to browse/list items in that source. First, we cheat a bit and tell the caller that we don't have any more items if you need to skip some. This is usual for sources with few items as the front-end is unlikely to list items 2 by 2. If that's not the case, we fetch the page on the Xiph website and wait for the callback in fetch_cb

function grl_source_browse(media_id)
  if grl.get_options("skip") > 0 then
    grl.callback()
  else
    grl.fetch('http://dir.xiph.org/by_format/Ogg_Theora', 'fetch_cb')
  end
end

Here's the meat of the script, where we parse the web page into media items. Lua doesn't use regular expressions, but patterns. They're different, and I find them easier to grasp. Remember that the minus sign/dash is a reserved character, '%' is the escape character, and '()' enclose the match.

We create a new table called for each one of the streams in the HTML we scraped, with the metadata we said we'd give in the source definition, and send it back to Grilo. The '-1' there is the number of items remaining in the list.

Finally, we call grl.callback() without any arguments to tell it we're done fetching the items.

function fetch_cb(results)
  if not results then
    grl.callback()
  end 

  for stream in results:gmatch('<p class="stream%-name">(.-)</p>') do
    media = {}
    media.url = stream:match('href="(.-)" ')
    media.id = media.url
    media['type'] = 'video'
    media.title = stream:match('<a href.->(.-)</a>')

    grl.callback(media, -1) 
  end 

  grl.callback()
end

We're done! You just need to drop this file in ~/.local/share/grilo-plugins/grl-lua-factory, and you can launch Videos or the test application grilo-test-ui-0.2 to see your source in action.

25 Feb 2014 6:33pm GMT

So the PiTiVi announced the PiTiVi fundraising campaign on Friday. I sincerely hope they are successful, because I think we really need a good non-linear video editor that runs on the Linux desktop, especially one that is built on top of GStreamer and thus sharing the core multimedia infrastructure of the rest of your desktop. The current PiTiVi team got the right skills and enthusiams in my view to truly pull this off, and their project is scoped in a manner that makes me believe they can pull it off. PiTiVi is already functional and this fundraiser is more about accelerating ongoing development as opposed to creating something from scratch. And their funding requirements for reaching the base milestone is rather modest, for example if just the employees of the 3 main linux distribution companies pitched in 3-4 Euro it would be enough to cover the base funding goal.

But I think this fundraiser is important also beyond the PiTiVi project, because it can serve as a precedent that it is possible to do significant crowdfunding around open source development and thus open the gate for more projects accelerating their development using it. There are a lot of great open source projects out there created on a volunteer basis, which is great and like PiTiVi they will flourish even without crowdfunding, but crowdfunding can be a great way for developers of the most interesting projects to be able to focus solely on their project for some time and thus accelerate its development significantly. So in the case of PiTiVi, I am sure the team will be able to achieve all the goals they have outlined in the funding campaign even if the fundraiser raises no money, but the difference here is if they do it in 1 year or 5 years.

So personally I donated 60 Euro to the PiTiVi fundraiser and I hope everyone reading this blog entry will do the same. Lets give the people developing this and other great open source tools our support and help them make their great software even better. This fundraiser is done by people passionate about open source and their project, because to be fair, no matter if the efforts ends up raising closer to 30 000€ or closer to 100 000 € it is in no way what anyone can call a get rich quick scheme, but rather modest amounts that will let two talented open source developers spend time working fulltime on a project we all want.

And remember whenever a major project using GStreamer gets a boost, it gives all GStreamer projects a boost. For instance in my own pet project, Transmageddon, I am gotten a lot of help over the years from general improvements in GStreamer done due to the involvement from PiTiVi developers, and I have even ended up copying code from PiTiVi itself a few times to quickly and easily solve some challenges in had in Transmageddon.

24 Feb 2014 10:09am GMT

There has been much discussion online this weekend of what happens when you introduce an extra "goto fail" line into your code, such as making a mistake using a merge tool to combine your changes into those made in parallel to a code repository under active development by other engineers. (That is the most common cause I've seen of such duplication in source code, and thus the one I see most likely - others guess similarly and discuss that side more in depth - but that's not what this post is about.)

Adam Langley posted a good explanation of this bug, including a brief snippet of code showing the general class of problem:

 1     extern int f();
 2
 3     int g() {
 4             int ret = 1;
 5
 6             goto out;
 7             ret = f();
 8
 9     out:
10             return ret;
11     }

which he pointed out "If I compile with -Wall (enable all warnings), neither GCC 4.8.2 or Clang 3.3 from Xcode make a peep about the dead code." Others pointed out that the -Wunreachable-code option is one of many that neither compiler includes in -Wall by default, since both compilers treat -Wall not as "all possible warnings" but rather more of "the subset of warnings that the compiler authors think are suitable for use on most software", leaving out those that are experimental, unstable, controversial, or otherwise not quite ready for prime time.

Since this has a simple test case, and I've got a few compilers handy on my Solaris x86 machine for doing various builds with, I did some testing myself:

gcc 3.4.3

% /usr/gcc/3.4/bin/gcc -Wall -Wextra -c fail.c
[no warnings or other output]

% /usr/gcc/3.4/bin/gcc -Wall -Wextra -Wunreachable-code -c fail.c
fail.c: In function `g':
fail.c:7: warning: will never be executed

As expected, gcc warned when the specific flag was given.

gcc 4.5.2 & 4.7.3

% /usr/gcc/4.5/bin/gcc -Wall -Wextra -Wunreachable-code -c fail.c
[no warnings or other output]

% /usr/gcc/4.7/bin/gcc -Wall -Wextra -Wunreachable-code -c fail.c
[no warnings or other output]

It turns out this is due to the gcc maintainers removing the support for -Wunreachable-code in later versions.

clang 3.1

% clang -Wall -Wextra -c fail.c
[no warnings or other output]

% clang -Wall -Wunreachable-code -c fail.c
fail.c:7:8: warning: will never be executed [-Wunreachable-code]
        ret = f();
              ^
1 warning generated.

% clang -Wall -Weverything -c fail.c
fail.c:3:5: warning: no previous prototype for function 'g'
      [-Wmissing-prototypes]
int g() {
    ^
fail.c:7:8: warning: will never be executed [-Wunreachable-code]
        ret = f();
              ^
2 warnings generated.

So clang also finds it with -Wunreachable-code, which is also enabled by -Weverything, but not -Wall or -Wextra. (I didn't see a similar -Weverything flag for gcc.)

Solaris Studio 12.3

% cc -c fail.c
"fail.c", line 7: warning: statement not reached

% lint -c fail.c

statement not reached
    (7)

Both Studio's default compiler flags and old-school lint static analyzer caught this by default. Though, as I noted last year, warnings about some unreachable code chunks will be seen in some releases but not others, as the information available to the compiler about the control flow evolves.

As anyone who has compiled much software with more than one of the above (including just different versions of the same compiler) can attest, the warnings generated on real code bases by various compilers will almost always be different. There's many cases where gcc & clang warn about things Studio doesn't, and vice versa, as every compiler & analyzer has been fed different test cases over the years of bad code that developers wanted them to find, or specific problems they needed to solve. This is why when compiling the Solaris kernel, we run two compilation passes on all the sources - once with Studio cc to both get its code analysis and to make the binaries we ship, and once with gcc just to get its code analysis, plus running it through Oracle's internal parfait static analyser as well.

Having a growing body of warnings doesn't help either, if you never do anything about them. This is why Solaris kernel and core utility code have policies on not introducing new warnings and we've been making efforts in X.Org to clean up warnings, so that you can see new issues when you introduce them, not lose them in a sea of thousands of existing bits of noise.

Of course, it's too late to stop the bug that caused this discussion from slipping into the code base, and easy to second guess after the fact how it may have been prevented. We have lots of tools at our disposal and they continue to grow and improve, including human code review (though human review is much less reliable and repeatable than most tools, humans are much more flexible at finding things the automated tools weren't prepared to catch), and we need to use multiple ones (more on the most sensitive code, such as security protocols) to improve our chances of finding and fixing the bugs before we integrate them. Hopefully we can learn from the ones that slip through how to improve our checks for the future, such as adding -Wunreachable-code compiler flags where appropriate.

24 Feb 2014 2:03am GMT

The FOSDEM organizers have captured more than 16h of video for 22 DevRooms and they are still working hard on getting all of these videos cut and transcoded and put on their site. This is a mammoth task, and some talks in the graphics devroom are still up in the air because of this.

Luckily, some people from the sunxi community took the livestream of sunxi related talks, and produced some quick dumps of it. I have now copied the Mali driver talk over to my fd.o account so that the sunxi server doesn't become too overloaded. Slides are also available.

This talk mentions where i am at with my mesa driver, why i am taking the route i am taking, the importance of SoC communities, and how the lack thereof hampers driver development, and also talks about the company ARM and their stance towards the open driver.

Enjoy!

19 Feb 2014 12:00pm GMT

For a long time connecting your TV or other external monitors to your laptop has always been a hassle with cables and drivers. Your TV had an HDMI-port, but your laptop only DVI, your projector requires VGA and your MacBook can only do DP. Once you got a matching adapter, you noticed that the cable is far to short for you to sit comfortably on your couch. Fortunately, we're about to put an end to this. At least, that was my impression when I first heard of Miracast.

Miracast is a certification program of the Wifi-Alliance based on their Wifi-Display specification. It defines a protocol to connect external monitors via wifi to your device. A rough description would be "HDMI over Wifi" and in fact the setup is modeled closely to the HDMI standard. Unlike existing video/audio-streaming protocols, Miracast was explicitly designed for this use-case and serves it very well. When I first heard of it about one year ago, I was quite amazed that it took us until late 2012 to come up with such a simple idea. And it didn't take me long until I started looking into it.

For 4 months now I have been hacking on wifi, gstreamer and the kernel to get a working prototype. Despite many setbacks, I didn't loose my fascination for this technology. I did complain a lot about the hundreds of kernel dead-locks, panics and crashes during development and the never-ending list of broken wifi-devices. However, to be fair I got the same amount of crashes and bugs on Android and competing proprietary Miracast products. I found a lot of other projects with the same goal, but the majority was closed-source, driver-specific, only a proof-of-concept or limited to sink-side. Nevertheless, I continued pushing code to the OpenWFD repository and registered as speaker for FOSDEM-2014 to present my results. Unfortunately, it took me until 1 week before FOSDEM to get the wifi-P2P link working realiably with an upstream driver. So during these 7 days I hacked up the protocol and streaming part and luckily got a working demo just in time. I never dared pushing that code to the public repository, though (among others it contains my birthday, which is surprisingly page-aligned, as magic mmap offset) and I doubt it will work on any setup but mine..

The first day after FOSDEM I trashed OpenWFD and decided to start all over again writing a properly integrated solution based on my past experience. Remembering the advice of a friend ("Projects with 'Open' in their name are just like countries named 'Democratic Republic of …'") I also looked for a new name. Given the fact that it requires a miracle to get Wifi-P2P working, it didn't take me long to come up with something I liked. I hereby proudly announce: MiracleCast

MiracleCast

The core of MiracleCast is a daemon called miracled. It runs as system-daemon and manages local links, performs peer-discovery on request and handles protocol encoding and parsing. The daemon is independent of desktop environments or data transports and serves as local authority for all display-streaming protocols. While Miracast will stay the main target, other competing technologies like Chromecast, Airtame and AirPlay can be integrated quite easily.

The miraclectl command-line tool can be used to control the daemon. It can create new connections, modify parameters or destroy them again. It also supports an interactive mode where it displays events from miracled when they arrive, displays incoming connection attempts and allows direct user-input to accept or reject any requests.

miracled and miraclectl communicate via DBus so you can replace the command-line interface with graphical helpers. The main objects on this API are Links and Peers. Links describe local interfaces that are used to communicate with remote devices. This includes wifi-devices, but also virtual links like your local IP-Network. Peers are remote devices that were discovered on a local link. miracled hides the transport-type of each peer so you can use streaming protocols on-top of any available link-type (given the remote side supports the same). Therefore, we're not limited to Wifi-P2P, but can use Ethernet, Bluetooth, AP-based Wifi and basically any other transport with an IP layer on top. This is especially handy for testing and development.

Local processes can now register Sources or Sinks with miracled. These describe capabilities that are advertised on the available links. Remote devices can then initiate a connection to your sink or, if you're a source, you can connect to a remote sink. miracled implements the transmission protocol and hides it behind a DBus interface. It routes traffic from remote devices to the correct local process and vice versa. Regardless of whether the connection uses Miracast, Chromecast or plain RTSP, the same API is used.

Current Status

The main target still is Miracast! While all the APIs are independent of the protocol and transport layer, I want to get Miracast working as it is a nice way to test interoperability with Android. And for Miracast, we first need Wifi-P2P working. Therefore, that's what I started with. The current miracled daemon implements a fully working Wifi-P2P user-space based on wpa_supplicant. Everyone interested is welcome to give it a try!

Everything on top, including the actual video-streaming is highly experimental and still hacked on. But if you hacked on Miracast, you know that the link-layer is the hard part. So after 1 week of vacation (that is, 1 week hacking on systemd!) I will return to MiracleCast and tackle local sinks.

As I have a lot more information than I could possible summarize here, I will try to keep some dummy-documentation on the wiki until I the first project release. Please feel free to contact me if you have any questions. Check out the git-repository if you want to see how it works! Note that MiracleCast is focused on proper desktop integration instead of fast prototyping, so please bear with me if API design takes some time. I'd really appreciate help on making Wifi-P2P work with as many devices as possible before we start spending all our efforts on the upper streaming layers.

During the next weeks, I will post some articles that explain step by step how to get Wifi-P2P working, how you can get some Miracast protoypes working and what competing technologies and implementations are available out there. I hope this way I can spread my fascination for Miracast and provide it to as many people as possible!

17 Feb 2014 8:09pm GMT

Unit testing is a very powerful approach to quickly find issues that may have been introduced in your software. I have always been very interested in unit testing, even more since my first professional job at Panda Security was implementing a whole new unit testing system for a desktop antivirus.

In ModemManager we had some unit testing support, but it was really only focused on making sure that our AT response parsers worked correctly. These tests are of course very important, not saying they aren't, but they only cover a very small subset of the implementation.

Supporting completely different devices from multiple vendors with completely different behaviors, while still providing a unified interface for all of them is a very challenging task. In particular, making changes to fix the behavior of one device may lead to broken behavior with others, and the AT response parser unit tests really are not up to the task of finding those issues. So, in order to improve that, we have now included a nice black box system testing environment along with the common unit tests, which can not only simulate AT-based modems, but also let us play with the ModemManager DBus interface directly. And all this by just running make check!

Keep on reading if you want to know how all this was setup

Every test using the new black box system testing will run a common test setup method before the actual test (and a common teardown method after having run it). This setup method will take care of launching a private DBus session using the excellent GTestDBus implementation in GLib/GIO. Once the new bus is ready to use, the test setup will also request a Ping() to the standard org.freedesktop.DBus.Peer interface in ModemManager, which in turn will make the daemon get started by DBus. Once the test fixture is setup, the test itself will be able to make use of the ModemManager process running in the private session, without any interference with the ModemManager that may already be running in the standard system-level bus.

Each test will then setup the simulation of the modem, by launching a separate thread running a Unix-domain socket service. This socket will have an abstract address, and will allow other processes to get connected to send/receive data. In addition to the socket service, the simulator will also read a dictionary of AT requests and responses from a text file included in the test context. This pair of socket and AT chat build together the simulation of an AT port of a modem: AT requests will arrive through the socket, and the simulator will reply the corresponding AT response gathered from the AT chat dictionary. If the dictionary doesn't have the response expected for a given request, it will just reply "ERROR".

But the private ModemManager instance doesn't know anything about the new modem simulator being available, as there is no real physical port being created that ModemManager could get notified about via udev. So, once the simulator is in place, the test will report the abstract address of the socket via the SetProfile() method in the new org.freedesktop.ModemManager.Test interface. This method will just tell ModemManager that a given new virtual AT port is available in a given abstract socket address, and ModemManager will go on creating a new AT virtual port object internally and treat it as if it were a new TTY reported by udev.

As soon as ModemManager knows about the new virtual AT port, it will start probing it and creating a whole Modem object internally. Of course, for this to work well, the simulated modem needs to be able to reply correctly to most AT requests sent by ModemManager. The current implementation provides a generic AT chat dictionary for 3GPP (GSM, UMTS, HSPA, LTE…) devices, and the overall idea is that tests can load first the generic one to get a basic subset of responses, and then load a vendor-specific one with vendor-specific responses (overriding the generic ones if needed).

And of course, the last step is the test itself. Once every previous step has been successfully executed, the tester can now play with the standard ModemManager interfaces in DBus, querying for modems, requesting PIN unlock, enabling or disabling the device, and so on.

The currently available setup is not fully featured yet, it just provides some basic building blocks to be able to extend the black box system tests further more. The real work comes now, adding new behavior tests and writing new AT chat dictionaries to simulate different devices. If you want to play yourself with this setup, get the latest code from git master!

Filed under: FreeDesktop Planet, GNOME Planet, GNU Planet, Planets, Uncategorized Tagged: AT, ModemManager, unit testing

14 Feb 2014 10:13am GMT

So as usual FOSDEM was a blast and as usual the hallway track was great too. The beer certainly helped with that ... Big props to the entire conference crew for organizing a stellar event and specifically to Luc and the other graphics devroom people.

I've also uploaded the slides for my Kernel GPU Driver Testing talk. My OCD made me remove that additional dot and resurrect the missing 'e' in one of the slides even. FOSDEM also had live-streaming and rendering videos should eventually show up, I'll add the link as soon as it's there.

Update: FOSDEM staff published the video of the talk!

13 Feb 2014 11:32pm GMT

The slides and video of my talk from Steam Dev Days has been posted. It's basically the Haswell refresh (inside joke) of my SIGGRAPH talk from last year.

13 Feb 2014 4:33pm GMT

FOSDEM is over, and it has been a great time! I talked to many people (thanks to full devrooms Graph Databases and Config management was crazy, JavaScript as well…) and there might be some cool new things to come soon, which we discussed there
I also got some good and positive feedback on the projects I work on, and met many people from Debian, Kubuntu, KDE and GNOME (haven't seen some of them for almost 3 years) - one of the best things of being at FOSDEM is, that you not only see people "of your own kind" - for example, for me as Debian developer it was great to see Fedora people and discuss things with them, something which rarely happens at Debian conferences. Also, having GNOME and KDE closely together again (litterally, their stands were next to each other…) is something I missed since the last Desktop Summit in 2011.

My talks were also good, except for the beamer-slides-technical-error at the beginning, which took quite some time (I blame KScreen ).

In case you're interested in the slides, here they are: slides for FOSDEM'14 AppStream/Listaller talks.

The slides can likely be understood without the talk, they are way too detailed (usually I only show images on slides, but that doesn't help people who can't see the talk ^^)

I hope I can make it to FOSDEM'15 as well - I've been there only once, but it already is my favourite FOSS-conference (and I love Belgian waffles)

12 Feb 2014 7:21pm GMT

So thanks to the new GStreamer 1.x VAAPI package for Fedora I was able to do a hardware encode with Transmageddon for the first time today. This has been working in theory for a while, but due to me migrating Transmageddon from GStreamer 0.10.x to GStreamer 1.x at the wrong time compared to the gstreamer-vaapi development timeline I wasn't able to test it before.

Bellow is the GStreamer pipeline that Transmageddon use now if you have the Intel hardware encoder packages installed. Click on the image for the full image.

I am also close to being able to release the new version of Transmageddon now. Most recent bugs found have turned out to be in various GStreamer elements, so I am starting to feel confident about the current pipeline building code in Transmageddon. I think that during the GStreamer Hackfest in Munich next Month I will make the new release with the nice new features such as general support for multiple audio streams, DVD ripping support and language tag setting support.

10 Feb 2014 4:21pm GMT

So we had the DevConf conference here in Brno this weekend. One of the projects I am really excited about is Cockpit. Cockpit is a new server administration tool developed by Red Hat engineers which aims at providing a modern looking and userfriendly interface for your servers. There has been many such efforts over the years, but what I feel makes this one special is that it got graphical designers and interface designers involved, to ensure that the user experience is kept in focus instead of being taken hostage by underlaying APIs or systems. Too many such interfaces, be they web based or not tend to both feel and look clunky, for instance sometimes exposing features not because anyone realistically ever would want them, but because the underlying library happen to have a call for it.

Cockpit should also hopefully put the final nail in the coffin for the so called 'server desktop'. The idea that you need to be able to run a graphical shell using X on your server adds a lot of pain with little gain in my opinion. The Fedora Server product should hopefully become a great showpiece for how nice a Linux server can be to use and configure when you have something like Cockpit available.

There was some nice videos showing what is already in Cockpit shown at the conference so hopefully they will be available online soon. In the meantime I recommend taking a look at the Cockpit web page.

10 Feb 2014 3:26pm GMT