Toots for rmader@mastodon.social account

Written by Robert Mader on 2025-01-16 at 12:22

I expect 1. and 2. to benefit developers because they allow issue report quality to increase a lot in certain areas.

3. should help in terms of stability - user services should of course usually not crash or panic, but we're often dealing with odd hardware and experimental drivers etc., so having e.g. the #pipewire server get restarted automatically after one of its plugins caused a crash is, well, very helpful.

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Written by Robert Mader on 2025-01-16 at 12:12

I'm very happy with the initial results I get from #postmarketos switching to #systemd and think it will help a lot improving the platform going forward. My current favorites after playing around a bit over the last days:

1. Much better logging. Running journalctl -e is so much more informative and powerful than what we previously had.

2. Stacktraces of crashes via coredumpctl by default.

3. More reliable and less racy user services (hello Gnome camera indicator).

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Written by Robert Mader on 2024-12-10 at 15:46

So everybody wins from my mistake and I wonder why my #db app doesn't tell me about such options. Not sure how usual cases like this are - but I guess we could improve the train experience quite a bit, just with a bit of software and much less privacy-invasive than the car counter-part (which exists for more than a decade now if I'm not mistaken?)

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Written by Robert Mader on 2024-12-10 at 15:40

Interesting #db / train experience: I just forgot to change trains, noticing half an hour late. Turns out the train I was supposed to take has "exceptionally high demand" and I'd probably would have had to sit on the floor. Now I took the next alternative route and

1. it has "low demand" meaning I now have plenty of space and a proper table.

2. it is scheduled to arrive on the exact same minute.

3. the inspector didn't look up from his scanning device, suggesting the software told him it was ok.

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Written by Robert Mader on 2024-11-25 at 21:33

3. And of course my own bits :) EGL 1.5 support for all drivers. Some drivers until now were stuck only exposing EGL 1.4 requiring some unnecessary extra work for app/toolkit/engine developers. In some rare cases - where devs refused to do that - this actually unbreaks apps on affected drivers such as Panfrost and V3D.

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Written by Robert Mader on 2024-11-25 at 21:21

2. Lots of fixes for the i915g driver. That's the gallium driver for very old Intel devices - i.e. the driver that's still part of Mesa using a more modern infrastructure. The old driver got removed a while ago while this replacement was in a pretty rough shape. Now you should be able to run Gnome on 20y(?) old HW again :P

I mainly like this one because it shows so nicely how some caring person can keep old HW running in an evolving environment.

2/3

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Written by Robert Mader on 2024-11-25 at 21:14

The #mesa 24.3 release is, as usual, pretty neat. Some random personal highlights:

1. #Rusticl for freedreno. While not enabled by default yet, this finally brings OpenCL support to QC devices. How useful that is remains to be seen, given that Vulkan also slowly evolves as compute platform - it could come in pretty handy for image related tasks, though, especially on #linuxmobile devices.

1/3

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Written by Robert Mader on 2024-11-22 at 15:02

And what's really cool here: the matrix will be part of the tuning file which can be created and edited without rebuilding libcamera, making that process more inviting.

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Written by Robert Mader on 2024-11-22 at 14:59

For #linuxmobile #postmarketos #mobian folks interested in cameras: there's a first version of patches for #libcamera softwareISP color correction matrix (CCM) support now: https://patchwork.libcamera.org/cover/22041/

Together with autofocus (AF) this probably the main missing feature to get a somewhat reasonable image quality on devices like the #pixel3a or #fairphone5 with open drivers / close to #mainlinelinux.

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Written by Robert Mader on 2024-10-28 at 11:17

Only reason it hasn't been done by others already seems to be just lack of time - so let's try to share work among more shoulders, especially as it's a task that's likely going to be quite rewarding :)

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Written by Robert Mader on 2024-10-28 at 11:13

For #linuxmobile / #postmarketos / #mobian etc. folks: there's a rather beginner friendly task to improve battery life for qcom devices like the #oneplus6, #pixel3a etc. by making sure sensors are idle when not needed.

If you have some spare cycles, motivation, basic C literacy (or want to learn it) and know how to build and deploy/test a package with pmbootstrap (or want to learn it) - this one could be for you.

The details are here: https://gitlab.postmarketos.org/postmarketOS/pmaports/-/issues/2455#note_453587

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Written by Robert Mader on 2024-10-22 at 20:53

The new #pipewire 1.0.9 release backports a bunch of fixes for cameras - if your distro ships 1.0, I strongly recommend to pick up that update :)

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Written by Robert Mader on 2024-10-17 at 16:57

Notably focus is missing on the Pixel3a rear camera - and the image is zoomed because we're still figuring out the right register values for the mode used by default by Gnome Camera / Snapshot (1080p).

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Written by Robert Mader on 2024-10-17 at 16:54

[#]postmarketos just landed an update for the #pixel3a enabling the rear camera \o/

That, AFAIK, makes it the first #exandroid (close to mainline kernel) device were both cameras work OOTB.

To set expectations right here: there's still a lot of work in various components in the stack before the camera experience comes even close to what you get on the same devices running Android (kernels).

Short comparison with my Pixel 6a running #lineageos - the rear cameras on both devices use the IMX363:

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Written by Robert Mader on 2024-10-16 at 09:08

Those using the experimental nvidia-vaapi-driver will additionally need VaapiOnNvidiaGPUs.

If things go well I hope we can enable them by default in the next months, 🤞

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Written by Robert Mader on 2024-10-16 at 08:58

[#]chromium on #Linux nightly (upcoming 132) now has better #V4L2 hardware decoders support - used by #arm devices instead of VA-API. It's still disabled by default, but the flags to enable it have been unified. To enable it you'll need:

• AcceleratedVideoDecoder (enabled by default for VA-API)

• AcceleratedVideoDecodeLinuxGL (only if you use GL, not VK)

• AcceleratedVideoDecodeLinuxZeroCopyGL (only EGL, not GLX: use video formats like NV12 directly)

https://chromium-review.googlesource.com/c/chromium/src/+/5872600

[#]linuxmobile

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Written by Robert Mader on 2024-10-03 at 18:17

Similarly, we'll need a bunch of simple VCM drivers for focus.

If you're interested, maybe take a look at https://gitlab.com/sdm845-mainline/linux/-/issues/32#note_2141816416, https://gitlab.com/sdm670-mainline/linux/-/issues/2 and similar issues.

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Written by Robert Mader on 2024-10-03 at 18:15

To follow up on a recent post of mine (https://mastodon.social/@rmader/113234428076202804): if you want to see working cameras on more devices using a #mobilelinux distro of you choice, consider helping with sensor driver upstreaming. Apparently it a bunch of cases this really isn't all to difficult and the main work you need to do is combine an existing driver with data from downstream kernels, test that it works - et voilà, a big part of the work is done!

[#]postmarketos #mobian

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Written by Robert Mader on 2024-09-26 at 12:43

For those running #postmarketos edge on a device with working camera - the number of which is raising fast enough to make me lose track - and you want to play around with the great new #gnomecamera / #gnomesnapshot #gnome47 release: you'll need to install gst-plugins-rs manually until some build issues are fixed.

The release features heavily improved rendering performance, mainly thanks to improvements in #gtk4 and the #gstreamer gtk4paintablesink (also for apps using the aperture library)

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Written by Robert Mader on 2024-09-09 at 11:10

Hm, looks like I was wrong about de- and encoding parts and it's actually hard to speed those up with opencl. One claim I read was that modern codecs are just too branchy and CPU ends up being better - does anyone know more about that, specifically regarding AV1?

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