Category Archives: Red Hat

Fedora Workstation 26 and beyond

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Felt it been to long since I did another Fedora Workstation update. We spend a lot of time trying to figure out how we can best spend our resources to produce the best desktop possible for our users, because even though Red Hat invests more into the Linux desktop than any other company by quite a margin, our resources are still far from limitless. So we have a continuous effort of asking ourselves if each of the areas we are investing in are the right ones that give our users the things they need the most, so below is a sampling of the things we are working on.

Improving integration of the NVidia binary driver
This has been ongoing for quite a while, but things have started to land now. Hans de Goede and Simone Caronni has been collaboring, building on the work by NVidia and Adam Jackson around glvnd. So if you set up Simones NVidia repository hosted on negativo17 you will be able to install the Nvidia driver without any conflicts with the Mesa stack and due to Hans work you should be fairly sure that even if the NVidia driver stops working with a given kernel update you will smoothly transition back to the open source Nouveau driver. I been testing it on my own Lenovo P70 system for the last week and it seems to work well under X. That said once you install the binary NVidia driver that is what your running on, which is of course not the behaviour you want from a hybrid graphics system. Fixing that last issue requires further collaboration between us and NVidia.
Related to this Adam Jackson is currently working on a project he calls glxmux. glxmux will allow you to have more than one GLX implementation on the system, so that you can switch between Mesa GLX for the Intel integrated graphics card and NVidia GLX for the binary driver. While we can make no promises we hope to have the framework in place for Fedora Workstation 27. Having that in place should allow us to create a solution where you only use the NVidia driver when you want the extra graphics power which will of course require significant work from Nvidia to enable it on their side so I can’t give a definite timeline for when all the puzzle pieces are in place. Just be assured we are working on it and talking regularly to NVidia about it. I will let you know here as soon as things come together.

On the Wayland side the Jonas Ådahl is working on putting the final touches on Hybrid Graphics support

Fleet Commander ready for take-off
Another major project we been working on for a long time in Fleet Commander. Fleet Commander is a tool to allow you to manage Fedora and RHEL desktops centrally. This is a tool targeted at for instance Universities or companies with tens, hundreds or thousands of workstation installation. It gives you a graphical browser based UI (accessible through Cockpit) to create configuration profiles and deploy across your organization. Currently it allows you to control anything that has a gsetting associated with it like enabling/disabling extensions and setting configuration settings in GTK+ and GNOME applications. It allows you to configure Network Manager settings so if your updating the company VPN or proxy settings you can easily push those changes out to all user in the organization. Or quickly migrate Evolution email settings to a new email server. The tool also allows you to control recommended applications in the Software Center and set bookmarks in Firefox. There is also support for controlling settings inside LibreOffice.

All this features can be set and controlled on either a user level or a group level or organization wide due to the close integration we have with FreeIPA suite of tools. The data is stored inside your organizations LDAP server alongside other user information so you don’t need to have the clients connect to a new service for this, and while it is not there in this initial release we will in the future also support Active Directory.

The initial release and Fleet Commander website will be out alongside Fedora Workstation 26.

PipeWire
I talked about PipeWire before, when it was still called Pinos, but the scope and ambition for the project has significantly changed since then. Last time when I spoke about it the goal was just to create something that could be considered a video equivalent of pulseaudio. Wim Taymans, who you might know co-created GStreamer and who has been a major PulseAudio contributor, has since expanded the scope and PipeWire now aims at unifying linux Audio and Video. The long term the goal is for PipeWire to not only provide handling of video streams, but also handle all kinds of audio. Due to this Wim has been spending a lot of time making sure PipeWire can handle audio in a way that not only address the PulseAudio usecases, but also the ones handled by Jack today. A big part of the motivation for this is that we want to make Fedora Workstation the best place to create content and we want the pro-audio crowd to be first class citizens of our desktop.

At the same time we don’t want to make this another painful subsystem transition so PipeWire so we will need to ensure that PulseAudio applications can still be run without modification.

We expect to start shipping PipeWire with Fedora Workstation 27, but at that point only have it handle video as we need this to both enable good video handling for Flatpak applications through a video portal, but also to provide an API for applications that want to do screen capture under Wayland, like web browser applications offering screen sharing. We will the bring the audio features onboard in subsequent releases as we also try to work with the Jack and PulseAudio communities to make this a joint effort. We are also working now on a proper website for PipeWire.

Red Hat developer integration
A feature we are quite excited about is the integration of support for the Red Hat developer account system into Fedora. This means that you should be able to create a Red Hat developer account through GNOME Online accounts and once you have that account set up you should be able to easily create Red Hat Enterprise Linux virtual machines or containers on your Fedora system. This is a crucial piece for the developer focus that we want the workstation to have and one that we think will make a lot of developers life easier. We where originally hoping to have this ready for Fedora Workstaton 26, but atm it looks more likely to hit Fedora Workstation 27, but we will keep you up to date as this progresses.

Fractional scaling for HiDPI systems
Fedora Workstation has been leading the charge in supporting HiDPI on Linux and we hope to build on that with the current work to enable fractional scaling support. Since we introduced HiDPI support we have been improving it step by step, for instance last year we introduced support for dealing with different DPI levels per monitor for Wayland applications. The fractional scaling work will take this a step further. The biggest problem it will resolve is that for certain monitor sizes the current scaling options either left things to small or to big. With the fractional scaling support we will introduce intermediate steps, so that you can scale your interface 1.5x times instead of having to go all the way to 2. The set of technologies we are developing for handling fractional scaling should also allow us to provide better scaling for XWayland applications as it provides us with methods for scaling that doesn’t need direct support from the windowing system or toolkit.

GNOME Shell performance
Carlos Garnacho has been doing some great work recently improving the general performance of GNOME Shell. This comes on top of his earlier performance work that was very well received. How fast/slow GNOME shell is often a subjective thing, but reducing overhead where we can is never a bad thing.

Flatpak building
Owen Taylor has been working hard on putting the pieces in place for start large scale Flatpak building in Fedora. You might see a couple of test flatpaks appear in a Fedora Workstation 26 timeframe, but the goal is to have a huge Flatpak catalog ready in time for Fedora Workstation 27. Essentially what we are doing is making it very simple for a Fedora maintainer to build a Flatpak of the application they maintain through the Fedora package building infrastructure and push that Flatpak into a central Flatpak registry. And while of course this is mainly meant to be to the benefit of Fedora users there is of course nothing stopping other distributions from offering these Flatpak packaged applications to their users also.

Atomic Workstation
Another effort that is marching forward is what we call Atomic Workstation. The idea here is to have an immutable OS image kinda like what you see on for instance Android devices. The advantage to this is that the core of the operating system gets tested and deployed as a unit and the chance of users ending with broken systems decrease significantly as we don’t need to rely on packages getting applied in the correct order or scripts executing as expected on each individual workstation out there. This effort is largely based on the Project Atomic effort, and the end goal here is to have a image based OS install and Flatpak based applications on top of it. If you are very adventerous and/or want to help out with this effort you can get the ISO image installer for Atomic Workstation here.

Firmware handling
Our Linux Firmware project is still going strong with new features being added and new vendors signing on. As Richard Hughes recently blogged about the latest vendor joining the effort is Logitech who now will upload their firmware into the service so that you can keep your Logitech peripherals updated through it. It is worthwhile pointing out here how we worked with Logitech to make this happen, with Richard working on the special tooling needed and thus reducing the threshold for Logitech to start offering their firmware through the service. We have other vendors we are having similar discussions and collaborations with so expect to see more. At this point I tend to recommend people get a Dell to run Linux, due to their strong support for efforts such as the Linux Firmware Service, but other major vendors are in the final stages of testing so expect more major vendors starting to push firmware updates soon.

High Dynamic Range
The next big thing in the display technology field is HDR (High Dynamic Range). HDR allows for deeper more vibrant colours and is a feature seen on a lot of new TVs these days and game consoles like the Playstation 4 support it. Computer monitors are appearing on the market too now with this feature, for instance the Dell UP2718Q. We want to ensure Fedora and Linux is a leader here, for the benefit of video and graphics artists using Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise Linux. We are thus kicking of an effort to make sure this technology mature as quickly as possible and be fully supported. We are not the only ones interested in this so we will hopefully be collaborating with our friends at Intel, AMD and NVidia on this. We hope to have the first monitors delivered to our office within a few weeks.

Codecs
While playback these days have moved to streaming where locally installed codecs are of less importance for the consumption usecase, having a wide selection of codecs available is still important for media editing and creation usecases, so we want you to be able to load a varity of old media files into you video editor for instance. Luckily we are at a crossroads now where a lot of widely used codecs have their essential patents expire (mp3, ac3 and more) while at the same time the industry focus seems to have moved to royalty free codec development moving forward (Opus, VP9, Alliance for Open Media). We have been spending a lot of time with the Red Hat legal team trying to clear these codecs, which resulted in mp3 and AC3 now shipping in Fedora Workstation. We have more codecs on the way though, so this effort is in no way over. My goal is that over the course of this year the situation of software patents being a huge issue when dealing with audio and video codecs on Linux will be considered a thing of the past. I would like to thank the Red Hat legal team for their support on this issue as they have had to spend significant time on it as a big company like Red Hat do need to do our own due diligence when it comes to these things, we can’t just trust statements from random people on the internet that these codecs are now free to ship.

Battery life
We been looking at this for a while now and hope to be able to start sharing information with users on which laptops they should get that will have good battery life under Fedora. Christian Kellner is now our point man on battery life and he has taken up improving the Battery Bench tool that Owen Taylor wrote some time ago.

QtGNOME platform
We will have a new version of the QtGNOME platform in Fedora 26. For those of you who have not yet heard of this effort it is a set of themes and tools to ensure that Qt applications runs without any major issues under GNOME 3. With the new version the theming expands to include the accessibility and dark themes in Adwaita, meaning that if you switch to one of these themes under GNOME shell it will also switch your Qt applications over. We are also making sure things like cut’n paste and drag and drop works well. The version in Fedora Workstation 26 is a big step forward for this effort and should hopefully make Qt applications be first class citizens under your Fedora Workstation desktop.

Wayland polish
Ever since we switched the default to Wayland we have kept the pressure up and kept fixing bugs and finding solutions for corner cases. The result should be an improved Wayland experience in Fedora Workstation 26. A big thanks for Olivier Fourdan, Jonas Ådahl and the whole Wayland community for their continued efforts here. Two major items Jonas is working on for instance is improving fractional scaling, to ensure that your desktop scales to an optimal size on HiDPI displays of various sizes. What we currently have is limited to 1x or 2x, which is either to small or to big for some screens, but with this work you can also do 1.5x scaling. He is also working on preparing an API that will allow screen sharing under Wayland, so that for instance sharing your slides over video conferencing can work under Wayland.

Red Hat job opening for Linux Graphics stack developer

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So we have a new job available for someone interested in joing our team and work on improving the Linux graphics stack. The focus of this job will be on GPU compute related work, but you should also expect to be spending time on improving the graphics driver stack in general. We are looking for someone at the Principal Engineer level, but I do recommend that even if you don’t feel you are quite at that level yet you should apply because to be fair the amount of people with the kind of experience we are looking for are few and far between, so in the end there is a chance we will hire two more junior developers instead if we have candidates with the right profile.

We are quite flexible on working location for this job, so for the right candidate working remotely is definitely a possibility. And of course if you are interested in joining us at one of our offices that is an option too, for instance we have existing team members working out of our Boston (USA), Brno(Czech Republic), Brisbane (Australia) and Munich (Germany) offices.

GPU Compute is rapidly growing in importance and use so this is your chance to be in the middle of it and work for what I personally think is one of the best companies in the world to work for.

So be sure to submit an application though the Red Hat hiring portal.

Welcoming Ubuntu to GNOME and Wayland

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So as most of you probably know Mark Shuttleworth just announced that they will be switching to GNOME 3 and Wayland again for Ubuntu. So I would like to on behalf of the Red Hat Desktop and Fedora teams to welcome them and say that we look forward to keep working with great Canonical and Ubuntu people like Allison Lortie and Robert Ancell on projects of shared interest around GNOME, Wayland and hopefully Flatpak.

It is worth mentioning that even as we been competing with Unity and Ubuntu we have also been collaborating with them, most recently on working with them to integrate the features they wanted from GNOME Software like the user reviews, but of course now sharing a bigger set of technologies collaboration will be even easier.

I am personally happy to see this convergence of efforts happening because I have for a long time felt that the general level of investment in the Linux desktop has not been great enough to justify the plethora of Linux desktops out there, so by now having reached a position where Canonical, Endless, Red Hat and Suse again share one desktop technology stack and along with consulting companies like Centricular, CodeThink, Collabora and Igalia helping push parts of the stack forward we are at least all pulling in the same direction.
This change should also make life easier for ISV who now have a more clear target if they want to try to integrate their UI with the Linux desktop as ‘the linux desktop’ becomes a more meaningful term with this change.

And to state the obvious, we will continue our effort around Fedora Workstation to continue to lead on innovation and engineering and setting the direction for where Desktop Linux goes in the future.

Hacker News feedback on what they want from their Desktop – We got it

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So there is a thread on Hacker News based on a question from a Canonical employee asking for feedback on what people want from the next version of Ubuntu. I always try to read such threads even when they are not about Fedora or Red Hat. I fact I often read such articles and threads about non-Linux systems too to help understand what people are looking for and thus enable us to prioritize what we do with Fedora Workstation even better.

Fedora Workstation

Over the last few years I do feel we managed to nail down what the major pain points are and crossed them out one by one or gotten people assigned to work on them. So a lot of the items people asked for in that thread we already have in Fedora Workstation or have already in our roadmap. So I thought it would be nice to write them up and maybe encourage people to take a look at Fedora Workstation if you haven’t done so already. The list below is my trying to go through the long thread and pick up important and recurring topics, so I hope I got most of them, but if I missed something feel free to add a comment and I will try to answer.

1. Handling of DPI scaling and HiDPI
This has been something we been working on for quite a while. I think we where the first distribution to implemented general HiDPi and put a lot of engineering time into updating Wayland and GNOME to make it happen. That said things are not perfect yet. But we are working on resolving those. Jonas Ådahl and Rui Matos are currently trying to resolve the two main issues we still see. The first item is non-integer UI scaling. Currently we only offer integer scaling meaning that we only offer 2x scaling. This is to much however so we are working on a solution to offer fractional scaling like 1.5 for instance. We are certain to have that ready for Fedora Workstation 27, but there is a small hope we can finalize it already for Fedora Workstation 26. The other item is dealing with applications relying on XWayland because they do not support DPI scaling across two or more monitors, unlike native Wayland applications. We are dealing with that in two ways, one being working with upstreams to get their applications Wayland native like the work we been doing with LibreOffice and Firefox. We are also trying to come up with a scaling solution for XWayland using applications, but we haven’t been able to come up with a solution there yet.

2. Multitouch gestures like 3-finger swipe to change workspace.
This is another item we have put significant effort into. Over the last few years we made sure that we went from almost no touch support in the desktop to now supporting touch throughout the stack. The one big remaining item that was holding items like proper gestures back is that until kernel 4.12 is out the Synaptics touchpads are using PS/2. This causes only 2 touches to be reported, which is not great when you want 3 fingers gestures. With the new kernel, we will be using a different bus for those Synaptics touchpads, and we will have proper 5 fingers support. Benjamin Tissoires on our team has spent 4 years to get this code upstream but it’s finally here. We plan on backport this code to Fedora Workstation 26. Of course application developers will need to make use of the infrastructure in their applications for this feature to be fully realized everywhere.

Multitouch

3. Battery life
This is something we realize is a major issue and it has been on our agenda for a long time. It is a really hard issue to resolve because it is tied into a lot of things outside of control, like hardware used and in some cases third party drivers. That said, as many of you might know we recently set up a Laptop team here inside the bigger Red Hat desktop team and battery life is one of their top priorities. Christian Kellner is our point man on battery life and he has taken over the GNOME Battery bench tool that was originally created by Owen Taylor when we starting looking at battery life. He is currently working on improving GNOME battery bench and talking to hardware vendors to figure out what we can do. We are also actively speaking with NVidia to ensure that we can provide good battery life for hybrid graphics users when the binary NVidia driver is installed. We hope to agree with them on interfaces that should allow us to provide top notch battery life for such systems, but we are beholden to changes in the binary drivers to make that happen so it is also an example of the limits of what we can do on our own here.

GNOME Battery bench

GNOME Battery bench

4. UEFI issues
There where people on the Hacker News thread talking about issues with UEFI. Once again this is an area where we have a dedicated engineer assigned to UEFI and making sure it works great. In fact Peter Jones who is our UEFI point man is on the UEFI standards commitee doing ongoing work to ensure the standard is open source friendly and well supported by Linux. It is also worth mentioning that we created the Linux Vendor Firmware Service to make updating UEFI firmware and easy process. So if you see firmware updates offered in GNOME Software for your laptop or other devices that is because of the work we put into this service. We expect to have most of the major vendors signed up by the end of the year, so if your system is currently not supported that is hopefully a temporary thing. So this is both something that works well under Fedora and RHEL due to having someone dedicated to the effort and it is another example us doing the heavy lifting to make things actually happen.

UEFI firmware updates

UEFI Firmware updates

5. We got Wayland
A lot of people in the thread asked about Wayland support and well, we got Wayland! And this is another area where we dedicated serious engineering resources to it and are continuing to do so. For instance in addition to the above mentioned multi-DPI system work we are working on items such as HDR (High dynamic range) and next generation hybrid graphics support in Wayland. We are also working with NVidia to ensure their binary driver works well with Wayland.

Wayland Graphics

6. Something like Redshift
Some time ago we picked up on the growing popularity of tools such as Redshift and f.lux and this was another often repeated request in that Hacker News thread. Well we once again invested our resources into this and thus in the newly released GNOME 3.24 there is built in support for this feature, called Night Light. We drove this feature work and it will of course be available alongside GNOME 3.24 in Fedora Workstation 26.

GNOME Night light

Nightlight

7. Improved GPU driver update
This is another item we be spending significant time and resources on. We have a team dedicated to work on the linux graphics stack, which includes people like the graphics subsystem kernel maintainer and RADV creator Dave Airlie, Nouveau maintainer Ben Skeggs, core X, Mesa and Wayland dev Adam Jackson, Freedreeno creator and maintainer Rob Clark and more. This team is pushing the linux graphics stack forward alongside their colleagues at Intel, AMD and NVidia. The one thing we recently been working on for instance is dealing with the NVidia binary driver which has been a pain for a long time due to the file level conflict with Mesa. We didn’t want to do a workaround or hack, so what we did was work with NVidia on their glvnd proposal to make that a reality. This included supporting glvnd in Mesa in addition to the NVidia driver, but also working with the OS level tools to ensure fallbacks and autodetection worked fine. We got the basics of glvnd support already in Fedora and are polishing it up. Hans de Goede who took over that work from Adam Jackson has recently be working with the fine folks at rpmfusion and negativo17 to make sure we have some good packages available taking full advantage of his work, and thus enabling easy install and upgrade of these drivers. We are also planning to start offering a COPR with the latest and greatest Mesa drivers going forward to ensure you can always have the latest drivers available if you want to test and try them out.

NVidia driver install

NVidia driver install

8.Improved printer support
Even in this digital work printing is still important and thus we got people dedicated to this task too. So Marek Kasik is working on ensuring we keep CUPS working well and Felipe Borges recently wrote a blog entry talking about the redesigned printer control panel. So this is another area we are spending serious resources on and continuously trying to improve.

New Printer panel

New Printer Panel

9. Improve Bluetooth
Bastien Nocera on our team is probably the person who has done the single most to make sure desktop bluetooth is working at all. We decided to boost that effort by having Christian Kellner work on this too, so he has been working on patches for various bluetooth related issues with Bastien providing guidance and code review. We are also working on coming up with some kind of bluetooth testing harness to allow us to catch regressions more easily and verify support on new hardware. Christian focus currently is improving the handling of Bluetooth Audio.

Summary
If you are contemplating giving Fedora a try I think the items above illustrate one thing very strongly and that is how many of these issues we are the primary force behind, so by using Fedora you are not only getting access to them first and at the same time have some assurance that the integration work has been done right, but you are also supporting the effort of moving these technologies forward and also putting yourself in a position to more directly interact with the engineers working on these and a long slew of other important technologies in the desktop and beyond. And our efforts are not just limited to writing code, like for example our current effort to clear the legal hurdles blocking Linux systems from supporting various media codecs. So if you haven’t already I strongly suggest you go to the Get Fedora website and grab our convenient Fedora installer or an ISO image. And as I said initially if you have other pressing items I didn’t cover here, feel free to post a comment and I will be happy to try to answer any questions I get.

Hybrid Graphics and Fedora Workstation 25

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When we started the Fedora Workstation effort one thing we wanted to do was to drain the proverbial swamp of make sure that running Linux on a laptop is a first rate experience. As you see from my last blog entry we have been working on building a team dedicated to that task. There are many facets to this effort, but one that we kept getting asked about was sorting out hybrid graphics. So be aware that some of this has been covered in previous blog entries, but I want to be thorough here. So this blog will cover the big investments of time and effort we are putting into Wayland and X Windows, GNOME Shell and Nouveau (the open source driver for NVidia GPU hardware).

A big part of this story is also that we are trying to make it easier to run the NVidia binary driver on Fedora in general which is actually a fairly large undertaking as there are a lot challenges with trying to do that without requiring any manual configuration from the user and making sure it works fully in the hybrid graphics usecase. This is one of the most requested areas of improvement for Fedora. Many users are trying to run Fedora on their existing laptops or other hardware. Rather than allow this gap to be a reason for people to not run Fedora, we want to provide a better experience. Of course users will have the freedom to make their own choice about installing these drivers, using information provided by Software.

Hybrid graphics is the term used for when you have a laptop with two GPUs, usually one Intel and one NVidia GPU, but there are also some laptops available which comes with Intel/AMD CPU + AMD GPU. The purpose of hybrid graphics is to have your (Intel) Integrated GPU be your ‘day to day GPU’ for running your desktop yet not drawing to much power, but then if you want to for instance play a game on your system you can activate your secondary GPU which got a lot more power, but which also draws more electricity.

What complicated this even more was the fact that most users who wanted to use this setup wanted to use it in combination with the binary NVidia driver, in order to get top performance from their second GPU, which is not surprising since that is the whole point of switching to it. The main challenge with this was that the Mesa and binary NVidia driver both provided an OpenGL implementation that due to the way things works in the X Window System ended up overwriting each other, basically breaking the overwritten driver. The solution for this was a system called Bumblebee which employed some clever hacks to work around this issue, but Bumblebee is a solution to a problem we shouldn’t have to begin with.

Of course dealing with the OpenGL stack wasn’t the only challenge here. For instance different display outputs ended up being connected to different GPUs, with one of the most common setups being that the internal screen is connected to your Intel GPU and your external HDMI and DisplayPort connections are connected to your NVidia or AMD GPU. One some systems there where hardware connectors allowing you to display using either GPU to any screen, but a setup we see becoming more common is that the drivers for both card needs to be initialized in all cases, allowing the display connected GPU to slave itself to the other GPU to allow rendering on one GPU and displaying on the other. Within Mesa this is fairly straightforward to handle, so if both Intel and NVidia as rendering using Mesa things are fairly straightforward. What makes this a lot more challenging here is the NVidia binary driver, so once you install the binary driver we need to find a way to bridge and interoperate between these two stacks.

And of course that is just the highlights, like anything complex like this there are a long laundry list of items from the point where you can checkbox having a feature to it working really well and seamless.

What to expect in Fedora Workstation 25
Lets start with a word of caution here, we are working on a tight deadline here to get all the pieces lined up, so I can not be 100% sure what will make it for the day of release. What we are confident about though is that we will have all the low level plumbing sorted so that we can improve this over the course of the Fedora 25 lifecycle. As always I hope the community will join us in testing and developing this, to ensure we have even the corner cases worked out for Fedora Workstation 26.

The initial step we took and this is quite some time ago was that Dave Airlie worked on making sure we could handle two GPUs within the Mesa stack. As a bit of wordplay on the NVidia solution being called Optimus the open source Mesa solution was named Prime. This work basically allowed you to use Mesa for your Intel card and use Mesa (Nouveau) for your NVidia card and launch applications on the NVidia card while the screen was connected to the Intel card. You can choose which one is used by setting the DRI_PRIME=1 environment variable.

The second step was Adam Jackson collaborating with NVidia on something called libglvnd. Libglvnd stands for GL Vendor Neutral Dispatch and it is basically a dispatch layer that allows your OpenGL calls to be dispatched to more than one OpenGL implementation. Nvidia created this specification and have been steadily working on supporting it in their binary driver, but Adam Jackson stepped up to help review their patches and work on supporting glvnd in the Mesa drivers. This means that for Fedora Workstation 25 you should for the first time ever be able to have both the binary NVidia driver and Mesa installed without any file conflicts. So the X server now has the infrastructure to route your OpenGL call to the correct stack when that DRI_PRIME variable is set. That said there is a major catch here, due to the way things currently work once the NVidia binary driver is installed it expects to be rendering the screen all the time. So we need for the short term to figure out a way to allow it to do that, and in the long run we need to work with NVidia to figure out how the Intel open source driver can collaborate with the Nvidia driver to allow us to only use the Intel driver at times (to save on power for instance). We are still pushing hard on trying to have the short term fix in place, but as I write this we haven’t fully nailed this down yet.

The third step is work that Ben Skeggs has been doing on dealing with the monitor handling here, which includes adding MST support to Nouveau, because a lot of external ports and docking stations have not been working with these hybrid graphics setups due to the external screens all being routed through the NVidia chip. These patches just got accepted upstream and we will be including them in Fedora Workstation 25.

The fourth step has been work that Hans de Goede has been doing around Prime, fixing the modesetting driver and fixing cursor handling with hybrid graphics. In some sense the work Hans has been doing, and check his blog entry linked, is part of that washlist I talked about, the many smaller items that needs to work smoothly for this to go from ‘checkbox works’ to ‘actually works’. He is also working with the DNF team to allow us to control the kernel updates if you use the binary NVidia driver, meaning that we will only bump up your kernel driver when we have the binary NVidia driver module ready too. If for any reason the binary Nvidia driver doesn’t work we want to have graceful fallback to Nouveau.

Fifth step has been Jonas Ådahls work on enabling the binary NVidia driver for Wayland. He has put together a set of patches to be able to support NVidias EGLStreams interface, which means that starting from Fedora Workstation 25 you will be able to use Wayland also with NVidias binary driver.
You can see his work in progress patches here. Jonas will also be looking at implementing hybrid graphics support in Wayland, so we ensure that also for this usecase Wayland is on par with X for Fedora Workstation 26.

The sixth step has been work done by Bastien Nocera to ensure we expose this functionality in the user interface. The idea is that you should be able to configure on a per application basis which GPU they are being launched on. It also means that you can now get all your GPU information in the GNOME about screen also when you have dual-GPU systems. More details in his blog post here.

gnome-shell-discrete-gpu-menu

Choosing discete GPU in GNOME Shell

The seventh step is the work that Simone Caronni from Negativo17 has been doing on working with us on packaging the binary NVidia driver in a way that makes all this work. You can find his repo here on Negativo17, but Simone has also been working with Kalev Lember and Richard Hughes to ensure the driver show up correctly in GNOME Software once you have the repository enabled.

NVidia driver in GNOME Software

NVidia driver in GNOME Software


The plan is to offer the driver in Fedora Workstation 25 as third party software, but we haven’t yet made the formal proposal due to wanting to be sure we ironed out all important bugs first, both on our side and on NVidia side.

So as you can see from all of this there are a lot of components involved and since we are trying to support both X and Wayland with all of this the job hasn’t exactly been easy. There are for sure some things that will not be ready in time for Fedora Workstation 25, for instance if you want to use the binary NVidia driver we will not be able to make that work with XWayland. So native Wayland applications will be fine, including games using SDL on top of Wayland, but due to how the stack is architected we haven’t gotten around to implementing bridging OpenGL from Xwayland down to the binary NVidia driver. With Nouveau it should work however. This corner case we will have to figure out for Fedora Workstation 26, but for now we have decided that if we detect a Optimus system we will default you to X instead of Wayland.

Get involved
As always we love for more people to join us in this effort and one good way to get started with that is to join our Hybrid graphics test day on Thursday the 3rd of November!

H264 in Fedora Workstation

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So after a lot of work to put the policies and pieces in place we are now giving Fedora users access to the OpenH264 plugin from <a href="http://www.cisco.comCisco.
Dennis Gilmore posted a nice blog entry explaining how you can install OpenH264 in Fedora 24.

That said the plugin is of limited use today for a variety of reasons. The first being that the plugin only supports the Baseline profile. For those not intimately familiar with what H264 profiles are they are
basically a way to define subsets of the codec. So as you might guess from the name Baseline, the Baseline profile is pretty much at the bottom of the H264 profile list and thus any file encoded with another profile of H264 will not work with it. The profile you need for most online videos is the High profile. If you encode a file using OpenH264 though it will work with any decoder that can do Baseline or higher, which is basically every one of them.
And there are some things using H264 Baseline, like WebRTC.

But we realize that to make this a truly useful addition for our users we need to improve the profile support in OpenH264 and luckily we have Wim Taymans looking at the issue and he will work with Cisco engineers to widen the range of profiles supported.

Of course just adding H264 doesn’t solve the codec issue, and we are looking at ways to bring even more codecs to Fedora Workstation. Of course there is a limit to what we can do there, but I do think we will have some announcements this year that will bring us a lot closer and long term I am confident that efforts like Alliance for Open Media will provide us a path for a future dominated by royalty free media formats.

But for now thanks to everyone involved from Cisco, Fedora Release Engineering and the Workstation Working Group for helping to make this happen.

Fedora Workstation Phase 1 – Homestretch

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When we set of to do the Fedora Workstation we had some clear idea about where we wanted to take it, but we also realized there was a lot of cleaning up needed in our stack to make our vision viable. The biggest change we felt was needed to enable us was the move towards using application bundles as the primary shipping method for applications as opposed to the fine grained package universe that RPMS represent. That said we also saw the many advantages the packages brought in terms of easing security updates and allowing people to fine tune their system, so we didn’t want to throw the proverbial baby out with the bathwater. So we started investigating the various technologies out there, as we where of course not alone in thinking about these things. Unfortunately nothing clearly fit the bill of what we wanted and trying to modify for instance Docker to be a good technology for running desktop applications turned out to be nonviable. So we tasked Alex Larsson with designing and creating what today is known as xdg-app. Our requirements list looked something like this (in random order):

a) Easy bundling of needed libraries
b) A runtime system to reduce the application sizes to something more manageable and ease providing security updates.
c) A system designed to be managed by a desktop session as opposed to managed by sysadmin style tools
d) A security model that would let us gradually move towards sandboxing applications and alleviate the downsides of library bundling
e) An ability to reliably offer online updates of applications
f) Reuse as much of the technology created by others as possible to lower maintenance overhead
g) Design it in a way that makes supporting the applications cross multiple distributions possible and easy
h) Provide a top notch developer story so that this becomes a big positive for application developers and not another pain point.

As we investigated what we needed other requirements become obvious, like the need to migrate from X to Wayland in order to build a modern composited windowing system that renders using GL, instead of an aging one that has a rendering interface that is no longer used for the most part, and to be able to provide the level of system security we wanted. There was also the need to design new systems like Pinos for handling video and add new functionality to PulseAudio for dealing with sandboxed applications, creating libinput to have great input handling in Wayland and also let us share the input subsystem between X and Wayland. And of course we wanted our new packaging system tightly integrated into GNOME Software so that install, updating and running these applications became smooth and transparent to the user.

This would be a big undertaking and it turned out to be an even bigger effort than we initially thought, as there was a lot of swamp draining needed here and I am really happy that we have a team capable of pulling these things off. For instance there is not really many other people in the Linux community other than Peter Hutterer who could have created libinput, and without libinput there is no way Wayland would be a viable alternative to X (and without libinput neither would Mir which is a bit ironic for a system that was created because they couldn’t wait for Wayland :).

So going back to the title of this blog entry I feel that we are now finally exiting what I think of as Phase 1, even if we never formally designated it as such, of our development roadmap. For instance we initially hoped to have Wayland feature complete in a Fedora 22 timeframe, but it has taken us extra time to get all the smaller details right, so instead we are now having what we consider the first feature complete Wayland ready with Fedora Workstation 24. And if things go as we expect and hope that should become our default system starting from Fedora Workstation 25. The X Window session will be shipping and available for a long time yet I am sure, but not defaulting to it will mark a clear line in the sand for where the development focus is going forward.

At the same time Xdg-app has started to come together nicely over the last few Months with a lot of projects experimenting with it and bugs and issues being quickly resolved. We also taking major steps towards bringing xdg-app into the mainstream by Alex now working on making Xdg-apps OCI compliant, basically meaning that xdg-apps conform to the Open Container Initative requirements defined by Opencontainers.org. Our expectation is that the next Xdg-app development release will include the needed bits to be OCI compliant. Another nice milestone for Xdg-app was that it recently got added to Debian, meaning that Xdg-apps should be more easily runable in both Fedora its downstreams and in Debian and its downstreams.

Another major piece of engineering that is coming to a close is moving major applications such as Firefox, LibreOffice and Eclipse to GTK3. This was needed both to get these applications able to run natively on Wayland, but it also enabled us to make them work nicely for HiDPI. This has also played out into how GTK3 have positioned itself which to be a toolkit dedicated to pushing the Linux desktop forward and helping that quickly adapt and adopt to changes in the technology landscape. This is why GTK3 is that toolkit that has been leading the charge on things like HiDPI support and Wayland support. At the same time we know some of the changes in GTK3 have been painful for application developers, especially the changes in how theming works, but with the bulk of the migration to using CSS for theming now being complete we expect that even for applications that use GTK3 in ‘weird ways’ like Firefox, LibreOffice and Eclipse, things should be stable.

Another piece of the puzzle we have wanted to improve is the general Linux hardware story. So since Red Hat joined Khronos last year the Red Hat Graphics team, with Dave Airlie and Adam Jackson leading the charge, has been able to participate in preparing the launch of Vulkan through doing review and we even managed to sneak in a bit of code contribution by Adam Jackson ensuring that there was a vendor neutral Vulkan loader available so that we didn’t end up in a situation where every vendor had to provide their own.

We have also been contributing to the vendor neutral OpenGL dispatcher. The dispatcher is basically a layer that routes an applications OpenGL rendering to the correct implementation, so if you have a system with a discrete GPU system you can for instance control which of your two GPUs handle a certain application or game. Adam Jackson has also been collaborating closely with NVidia on getting such a dispatch system complete for OpenGL, so that the age old problem of the Mesa OpenGL library and the proprietary NVidia OpenGL library conflicting can finally be resolved. So NVidia has of course handled the part in their driver and they where also the ones designing this, but Adam has been working on getting the Mesa parts completed. We think that this will make the GPU story on Linux a lot nicer going forward. There are still a few missing pieces before we have the discrete graphics card scenario handled in a smooth way, but we are getting there quickly.

The other thing we have been working on in terms of hardware support, which is still ongoing is improving the Red Hat certification process to cover more desktop hardware. You might ask what that has to do with Fedora Workstation, but it actually is a quite efficient way of improving the quality of Linux support for desktop hardware in general as most of the major vendors submit some of their laptops and desktops to Red Hat for certification. So the more issues the Red Hat certification process can detect the better Linux support on such hardware can become.

Another major effort where we have managed to cover a lot of our goals and targets is GNOME Software. Since the inception of Fedora Workstation we taken that tool and added functionality like UEFI firmware updates, codecs and font handling, GNOME Extensions handling, System upgrades, Xdg-app handling, users reviews, improved application metadata, improved handling of 3rd party repositories and improved general performance with the move from yum to hawkeye. And I think that the Software store has become a crucial part of what you expect of a desktop these days, with things like the Google Play store, the Apple Store and the Microsoft store to some degree defining their respective products more than the heuristics of the shell of Android, iPhone, MacOS or Windows. And I take it as an clear recognition of the great work Richard Hughes had done with GNOME Software that this week there is a special GNOME Software hackfest in London with participants from Fedora/Red Hat, Ubuntu/Canonical, Codethink and Endless.

So I am very happy with where we are at, and I want to say thank you to all long term Fedora users who been with us through the years and also say thank you and welcome to all the new Fedora Workstation users who has seen all the cool stuff we been doing and decided to join us over the last two years; seeing the strong growth in our userbase during this time has been a great source of joy for us and been a verification that we are on the right track.

I am also very happy about how the culmination of these efforts will be on display with the upcoming Fedora Workstation 24 release! Of course it also means it is time for the Fedora Workstation Working group to start planning what Phase 2 of reaching the Fedora Workstation vision should be :)

Fedora Workstation and the quest for stability and robustness

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One of the things that makes me really happy in terms of the public reception to the Fedora Workstation is all the people calling out how stable and solid it is, as this was and is one of our big goals from the start of the Fedora Workstation effort.

From the start we wanted to bury the old idea of Fedora being only for people who didn’t mind risking a lot of instability in return for being on the so called bleeding edge. We also wanted to bury the related idea that by using Fedora you where basically alpha testing highly unstable and unfinished software for Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Yet at the same time we did want to preserve and build upon the idea that Fedora is a great operating system if you want to experience a lot of the latest and greatest new developments as they are happening. At first glance those two goals might seem a bit contradictory, but we decided that we should be able to do both by both adjusting our policies a bit and also by relying more on the Fedora retrace server as our bug fixing prioritization tool.

So in terms of policies the division of Fedora into a distinct server and workstation images and also the clearer separation of the spins, allowed us to start making decisions without worrying so much how they affected other usecases than our own. Because sometimes what from a user perspective seems like a bug or something being broken was non-workstation policy decisions getting in the way of the desktop behaving as expected, for instance firewall rules hindering basic desktop functions.

Secondly we incorporated a more careful approach into what and when we brought in new stuff, meaning we still try to keep on top of major upstream developments and be a leading edge system, but at the same time we do a little mental exercise for each decision to make sure its a decision that makes us ‘leading edge’ and not ‘bleeding edge’. And if we really want something in, but it isn’t 100% ready for prime time yet we do what we have done with Wayland or the GTK3 port of LibreOffice, we make it available as an option for early adopters, but we default to the safer choice while we work out the last wrinkles. (Btw, if you are interested in progress on Wayland, Kevin Martin, sent out an emailing with a link to a good Wayland development status just before the Holidays.

The final piece of the puzzle is regularly checking and identifying important bugs from the Fedora retrace server. Because like almost all developers we get way more bug reports than we realistically can ever address, so having the data from the retrace server allows us to easily identify the crashes that affect the most users, and just as importantly lets us filter out the bug reports that are likely caused by users installing weird stuff on their system. When we started using retrace various desktop modules tended to dominate the top 3 pages when sorting bugs based on count, but due to a continuous effort over the last few years desktop modules appearing in the top crashers list are few and far between and when they do appear we make sure to get fixes done quickly for them. So if you ever wonder if the data collected by these kind of systems are actually helping developers working on the software you use better, I can say that it is true for Fedora for sure.

That said I thought it could be interesting to explain a bit the challenges we have with tracking our progress in this area. So lets start by looking at a graph I pulled from the retrace server.
fedora-bug-statistics
Looking at that graph one could say that it is clear that we have made great strides in improving system stability and I do believe that is the case, however the graphs doesn’t truly prove that inconclusively, they are just an indication. The reason they are not hard evidence is that there are a lot of things you need to take into consideration when reading them. First of all they are not adjusted based on total user population, which means that if you win or lose a lot of users between releases it can create an appearance of increased instability or decreased instability which is actually due to increase or decrease in user population, not in ‘how well does the system run on an individual users system’. So from what we see through other metrics our user population has been increasing since we launched the Fedora Workstation which means we shouldn’t be getting any ‘help’ in these graphs from a declining user population.

A second reason is that there are a lot of false positives being reported here, for instance we had an issue for a long while that the Intel graphics drivers generating a ton of this crash reports without it actually being crashes as such. So while they did represent bugs that should ideally be fixed they where not issues you might actually have noticed as a user of the system. So we spent some effort between Fedora Workstation 21 and Fedora Workstation 22 to reduce the amount of noise caused by this, which was an useful effort for us in terms of reducing noise in our retrace server, but from a user perspective it didn’t really make a tangible difference. And even with our efforts there are a still a lot of kernel issues showing up here which are not impacting users in a way that they are likely to perceive as the system being unstable.

A third item that might in a given release skewer the statistics is that we currently don’t differentiate between Fedora Workstation and spins in the statistics, which means that there might be issues caused by one of the spins generating a lot of bug reports against a module, but that might be a bug or an API usage issue that is not triggered by the Workstation edition and thus those items appearing or disappearing might affect the statistics, but as a user of the Fedora Workstation you would never experience it.

So keeping this is mind the retrace server is an important tool for us and one that at least gives us a decent indication of how we are doing with quality. But we can always do better so we will keep reviewing the reports we get through the ABRT and retrace systems and I also do strong recommend any application or library maintainers out there to look into what major issues are reported against their own modules.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.2 – A major desktop milestone

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So many of you have probably seen that RHEL 7.2 is out today. There are many important updates in this release, some of them detailed in the official RHEL 7.2 press release.

One thing however which you would only discover if you start digging into the 7.2 update is that its the first time in RHEL history that we are doing a full scale desktop update in a point release. We shipped RHEL 7.0 with GNOME 3.8 and in RHEL 7.2 we are updating it to GNOME 3.14. This brings in a lot of new major features into RHEL, like the work we did on improved HiDPI support, improved touch and gesture support, it brings GNOME Software to RHEL, the improved system status area and so on. We plan on updating the desktop further in later RHEL 7.x point releases.

This change of policy is of course important to the many RHEL Workstation customers we have, but I also hope it will make RHEL Workstation and also the CentOS Workstation more attractive options to those in the community who have been looking for a LTS version of Fedora. This policy change gives you the rock solid foundation of RHEL and the RHEL kernel and combines it with a very well tested yet fairly new desktop release. So if you feel Fedora is moving to quickly, yet have felt that RHEL on the other hand has been moving to slowly, we hope that with this change to RHEL we have found a sweet compromise.

We will of course also keep doing regular applications updates in RHEL 7.x, just like we started with in RHEL 6.x. Giving you up to date versions of things like LibreOffice, Firefox, Thunderbird and more.

The Steam Machines has arrived! And you should get one!

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So yesterday, the 10th of November, was the official launch day of the Steam Machines. The hardware are meant to be dedicated game machines for the living room taking advantage of the Steam ecosystem, to take on the Xbox One and PS4.

But for us in the Linux community these machines are more than that, they are an important part of helping us break into a broader market by paving the way for even more games and more big budget games coming to our platform. Playing computer games is not just a niche, it is a mainstream activity these days, and not having access to games on our platform has cost us quite a few users and potential contributors over the years. I have for instance met a lot of computer science students who ended up not using Linux as the main operating system during their studies simply due to the lack of games on the platform. Instead Linux got de-regulated to that thing in a VM only run when you needed it for an assignment.

Steam for Linux and SteamOS can and will be important pieces of breaking through that. SteamOS and the Steam Macines are also important for the Linux community for another reason. They can help funnel more resources from hardware companies into Linux drivers and support. I know for instance that all the 3 major GPU vendors have increased their Linux drivers investments due to SteamOS.

So I want to congratulate Valve on the launch of the first Steam Machines and strongly recommend everyone in the community to get a Steam machine for their home!

People who have had a good chance to test the hardware has recommended me to get one of the Alienware SteamOS systems, so I am passing that recommendation onwards.

As a sidenote we are also working on a few features in Fedora Workstation to make it a better host for Steam and Steam games. This includes our work on the GL Dispatch and Optimus support as covered in a previous blog and libratbag, our new library for handling gaming mice under Linux. And finally we are working on a few bug fixes in Fedora to make it an even better host for the Steam client related to C++ ABI issues.