14 DAY TRIAL // Softpedia was informed today by Collabora's Mark Filion about the contributions made by a total of eight Collabora engineers to the recently released Linux 4.8 kernel series.
On October 2, 2016, Linus Torvalds proudly announced the availability of the Linux 4.8 kernel series, which brought many interesting new features, improvements to existing functionality and technologies, lots of bug fixes, and updated drivers. But the Linux kernel 4.8 release couldn't be possible without the contributions made by various developers from different open source companies.
Collabora is well known for contributing multiple patches to the mainline Linux kernel during its entire two-month development cycle, and this time, its engineers managed to make a new record and add no less than 101 patches to Linux kernel 4.8. The contributions were made by Gustavo Padovan, Thierry Escande, Enric Balletbo i Serra, Helen Koike, Tomeu Vizoso, Bob Ham, Nicolas Dufresne, and Frederic Dalleau.
"Linux Kernel 4.8 is out and once more Collabora engineers did a significant contribution to the Kernel. For this latest release, Collabora provided 101 patches from 8 engineers, our biggest contribution to date for a single kernel release! We’ve also seen the first contribution from Frederic Dalleau since he joined Collabora," says Gustavo Padovan in a blog announcement.
Here's what Collabora's engineers added to Linux kernel 4.8
You're probably wondering right now what exactly Collabora's engineers added to the Linux 4.8 kernel to make it better, and we're happy to report that they managed to add support for the Alea I Random Number Generator, improve audio support on the RK3288 ARM architecture System on Chip (SoC) from Rockchip, address a memory leak on the Bluetooth stack, and add Explicit Synchronization for Buffer Sharing.
Moreover, they added fence_array support, removed many of the legacy functions from drm_irq.c, added various improvements to the ASoC subsystem, in particular for the TPA6130A2 and MAX9877 drivers, enhance the uvcvideo driver by improving the bytes per line calculation on YUV planes, add multiple improvements to the NFC digital layer, as well as a new helper for the ChromeOS Embedded Controller.
Last but not least, Collabora's engineers made the enabling of clocks to happen in the correct order for Analogix/Rockchip Display Port driver, and improved the use of DRM Core APIs on the Rockchip driver. Check out the changelog attached below for all the technical details, and don't hesitate to download Linux kernel 4.8 if you want to enjoy its new features.