New opportunities in the Red Hat Desktop team

Posted on May 20, 2021 by uraeus

So we are looking to hire quite a few people into the Desktop team currently. First of all we are looking to hire two graphics engineers to help us work on Linux Graphics drivers. The first of those two jobs is now online on the Red Hat jobs site. This is a job in our core graphics team focusing on RHEL, Fedora and upstream around the Intel, AMD and NVidia open source drivers. This is an opportunity to join a team of incredibly talented engineers working on everything from the graphics system of the Linux kernel and on the userspace bits like Vulkan, OpenGL and Wayland. The job is listed as Senior Engineer, but for the right candidate we have flexibility there. We also have flexibility for people who want to work remotely, so as long as there is a Red Hat office in your home country you can work remotely for us. The second job, which we hope to have up soon, will be looking more at ARM graphics and be tied to our automotive effort, but we will be looking at the applications for either position in combination so feel free to apply for the already listed job even if you are more interested in the second one as we will discuss both jobs with potential candidates.

The second job we have up is for – Software Engineer – GPU, Input and Multimedia which is also for joining our Graphics team. This job is targetted at our office in Brno, Czechia and is a great entry level position if you are interested in the field of graphics. The job listing can be found here and outlines the kind of things we want you to look at, but do expect initially your job will be focused on helping the rest of the team manage their backlog and then grow from there.

The last job we have online now is for the automotive team, where we are looking for someone at the Senior/Principal level to join our Infotainment team, working with car makers around issues related to multimedia and help identifying needs and gaps and then work with upstream communities to figure out how we can resolve those issues. The job is targeted at Madrid, Spain as it is where we hope to center some of the infotainment effort and it makes things easier in terms of hardware access and similar, but for the right candidate we might be open to looking for candidates wanting to work remote or in another Red Hat office. You can find this job listing here.

We expect to be posting further jobs for the infotainment team within a week or two, so I will update once they are up.

What to look for in Fedora Workstation 34

Posted on March 15, 2021 by uraeus

As we are heading towards April and the release of Fedora Workstation 34 I wanted to post an update on what we are working on for this release and what we are looking at going forward. 2020 was a year where we focused a lot on polishing what we had and getting things past the finish line and Fedora Workstation 34 is going to be the culmination of that effort in many ways.

Wayland:
The big ticket item we have wanted to close off on was Wayland, because while Wayland has been production ready for most of us for a while, there was still some cases it didn’t cover as well as X.org. The biggest of this was of course the lack of accelerated XWayland support with the binary NVidia driver. Fixing that issue of course wasn’t something we could do ourselves, but we have been working diligently with our friends at NVidia to help ensure everything was in place for them to enable that support in their driver, so I have been very happy to see the public reports confirming that NVidia will have accelerated 3D in the summer release of their driver. The other Wayland area we have put a lot of effort into has been the work undertaken by Jonas Ådahl to get headless display support working with Wayland. This is a critical feature for people who for instance want a desktop instance on their servers or in the cloud, who want a desktop they access through things like VNC or RDP to use for sysadmin related tasks. Jonas spent a lot of time laying the groundwork for this over the course of last year and we are now in the final stages of merging the patches to enable this feature in GNOME and Wayland in preparation for Fedora Workstation 34. Once those two items are out we consider our Wayland rampup/rollout to be complete, so while there of course will continue to be bugfixes and new features implemented, that will be part of a natural evolution of Wayland and not part of a ‘close gaps with X11’ effort like now.

PipeWire
Another big ticket item we are hoping to release fully in Fedora Workstation 34 is PipeWire. PipeWire as most of you know is the engine we use to deal with handling video streams in a secure and shareable away in Fedora Workstation, so when you interact with your web camera(s) or do screen casting or make screenshots it is all routed and handled by PipeWire. But in Fedora Workstation 34 we are aiming to also switch to using PipeWire for audio, to replace both PulseAudio and Jack. For those of you who had read any previous blog post from me you will know what an important step forward this will be as we would finally be making the pro-audio community first class citizens in Fedora Workstation and Linux in general. When we decided to try to switch to PipeWire in Fedora Workstation 34 I have to admit I was a little skeptical about if we would be able to get all things ready in time as there are so many things that needs to be tested and fixed when you switch out such a critical component. Up to that point we had a lot of people interested in PipeWire, but only limited community involvement, but I feel the announcement of bringing in PipeWire for Fedora Workstation 34 galvanized the community around the project and we now have a very active community around PipeWire in #pipewire on the freenode IRC network. Not only is Wim Taymans getting a ton of help with testing and verification, but we also see a stead stream of patches coming in, with for instance improved Bluetooth audio support being contributed, in fact I believe that PipeWire will be able to usher in better bluetooth audio support in Fedora than we ever had before, with great support for high quality Bluetooth audio codecs like LDAC.

I am especially happy to see so many of the key members of the pro-audio Linux community taking part in this effort and is of course also happy to see many pro-audio folks testing Fedora Workstation for the first time due to this effort. The community is working closely with Wim to test and verify as many important ProAudio applications as possible and work to update Fedora packaging as needed to ensure they can transition from Jack to PipeWire without dependency conflicts or issues. One last item to mention here is that you might have seen that Red Hat is getting into the automotive space, I can’t share a lot of details about that effort, but one thing I can say is that PipeWire will be a core part of it and thus we will soon be looking to hire more engineers to work on PipeWire, so if that is of interest to you be sure to track my twitter feed or blog as I will announce our job openings there as they become available. For the community at large this should be great too as it means that we can get a lot of synergy between automotive and the desktop around audio and video handling.

It is still somewhat of an open question if we end up actually switching to PipeWire in Fedora Workstation 34, but things are looking good at this point in time and worst case scenario it will be in place for Fedora Workstation 35.

Toolbox
Toolbox is another effort that is in a great spot now. Toolbox is our tool for making working with pet containers a breeze for developers. The initial version was prototyped quickly by writing it as a shell script, but we spent time last year getting it rewritten in Go in order to make it possible to keep expanding the project and allow us to implement all the things we envision for it. With that done feature work is now in focus again and Ondřej Michal has done some great work making it possible to set up RHEL containers in Toolbox. This means that you can run Fedora on your laptop and get the latest and greatest features that way, but you can do your development in a RHEL pet container, so you get an environment identical to what you applications will see once they are deployed into the cloud or onto company hardware. This gives you the best of both worlds in my opinion, the fast moving Fedora Workstation that brings the most out of our laptop and desktop hardware, but still easy access to the RHEL platform for development and testing. You can even test this today on Fedora Workstation 33, just open a terminal and type ‘toolbox create --distro rhel --release 8.3‘. The resulting toolbox will then be based on RHEL and not Fedora and thus perfect for doing RHEL targeted development. You will need to use the subscription-manager tool to register it (be sure to register on developer.redhat.com for your free RHEL developer subscription. Over time we hope to integrate this into GNOME Online accounts like we do for the RHEL virtual machines you can set up with GNOME Boxes, so that once you set up your RHEL account you can create RHEL virtual machines and RHEL containers easily on Fedora Workstation.

Toolbox pet container with RHEL UBI

Flatpak
Owen Taylor has been doing some incredible work behind the scenes for the last year trying to ensure the infrastructure we have in RHEL and Fedora provides a great integrated Flatpak experience. As we move forward we expect Flatpaks to be the primary packaging format that Fedora users consume their applications in, but to make that a reality we needed to ensure the experience is good both for Fedora maintainers and for the end users. So one of the big ticket items Owen been working on is getting incremental updates working in Fedora. If you have used applications from Flathub you probably noticed that their updates are small and nimble despite being packaged as Flatpak containers, while the Fedora flatpaks causes big updates each time. The reason for this is that the Fedora flatpaks are shipping as OCI (Open Container Initiative) images, while the Flatpaks on Flathub are shipping as OStree repositories (if you don’t know OStree, think of it as git for binaries). So shipping the Flatpaks as OCI images has advantages in the form of being the same format we at Red Hat use for our kubernetes/docker/openshift containers and thus it allows us to reuse a lot of the work that Red Hat as put into ensuring we can provide and keep such containers up to date and secure, but the downside until now has been that these containers where shipped in a way which cause each update, no matter how small the change, to be a full re-download of the whole image. Well Owen Taylor and Alex Larsson worked together to resolve this and came up with a method to allow incremental updates of such containers and thus bring the update sizes in line with what you see on Flathub for Flatpaks. This should be deployed in time for Fedora Workstation 34 and we also hope to eventually deploy it for kubernetes/docker containers too. Finally to make even more applications available we are doing work to enable people to get access to Flathub.org out of the box in Fedora when you enable 3rd party repositories in initial setup, so that your our of the box application selection will be even bigger.

Flathub webpage

GNOME 40
Another major change in Fedora Workstation 34 is GNOME40 which contains a revamp of the GNOME 3 user interface. This was a collaborative effort between a lot of GNOME 3 stakeholders with Allan Day representing Red Hat. This was also an effort by the GNOME design community to up their game and thus as part of the development process the GNOME Foundation paid a professional company to do user testing on the proposed changes and some of the alternatives. This means that the changes where verified to actually be experienced as an improvement for the experienced GNOME user participants and that it felt intuitive for new users of GNOME. One advantage we have in Fedora is that since we don’t do major tweaking of the GNOME user interface which means once Fedora Workstation 34 ships you are set to enjoy the new GNOME experience from day one. For long time GNOME users I hope and expect that the updates will be a welcome refresh and at the same time that the changes provide a more easy onramp for new GNOME and Fedora Workstation users. Some of the early versions did lead some long term fans of how multimonitor support in GNOME3 worked to be a bit concerned, but be assured that multi monitor is a critical usecase in our opinion and something we have been looking at and will be looking at keep improving. In fact Allan Day wrote a great blog post about GNOME40 multimonitor support recently to explain what we are doing and how we see it evolving going forward.

Input
Another area where we keep putting in a lot of effort is input. Thanks to Peter Hutterer and Benjamin Tissoires we keep making sure Fedora Workstation and the world of Linux keeps having access to the newest and best in input. The latest effort they are working on has been to enable haptic touchpads. Haptics touchpads should be familiar among people who tried Apple hardware, but they are expected to appear in force on laptops in general this year, so we have been putting in the effort to ensure that we can support this new type of device as they come out. So if you see laptops you want with haptic touchpads then Fedora Workstation should be ready for it, but of course until these devices are commonplace and we had a chance to test and verify I can make no guarantees.

Another major effort that we undertook in relation to input was move the GNOME input to a separate thread. Carlos Garnacho worked on this patch to make that happen. This should provide a smoother experience with Fedora Workstation 34 as it means the mouse should not stall due to the main thread running Wayland being busy. This was done as part of the overall performance work we been continuously doing over the last years to ensure to address performance issues and make Fedora and GNOME have the best performance and performance related behaviour possible.

Lenovo Laptops
So one of the major announcements of last year was Lenovo Laptops with Fedora Linux pre-installed. There are currently two models available with Linux, the X1 Carbon and the Lenovo P1. Between them they cover the two most commons requests we see, a ultralight weight laptop with the X1 and a more powerful ‘portable workstation’ model with the P1. We are working on a couple of more models and also to get them sold globally, which was key goal of the effort. Be aware that both models are on sale as I am writing this (hopefully still true when you read this), so it is a good time to grab a great laptop with a great OS.

Lenovo P1

Vision
So one thing I wanted to do to is tie the work we do in Fedora Workstation together by articulating what we are trying to achieve. Fedora has for the longest time been the place where Linux as an operating system is evolving and being developed. There are very few major innovations that has come to Linux that hasn’t been developed and incubated in Fedora by Fedora contributors, including of course Red Hat. This include things like the Linux Vendor Firmware Service, Wayland, Flatpak, SilverBlue, PipeWire, SystemD, flicker free boot, HiDPI support, gaming mouse support and so much more. We have always done this work in close cooperation with the upstreams we are collaborating with, which is why the patch delta in any given Fedora release is small. We work hard to get improvements into the upstream kernel and into GNOME and so on right away, to avoid needing to ship downstream patches in Fedora. That of course saves us from having to maintain temporary forks, but more importantly it is the right way to collaborate with an open source community.

So looking back to when we launched Fedora Workstation we realized that being at the front like that had come at the cost of not being stable and user friendly. So the big question we tried to ask ourselves when launching Fedora Workstation and the question that still drives a lot of our decision making and focus is : how can we preserve being the heart and center of Linux OS development, but at the same time provide end users with a stable and well functioning system? To achieve that we have done lot of changes over the last years, ranging from some policy changes in terms of how and when we brought changes into Fedora, but maybe even more importantly we focused on a lot on figuring out ways to reduce the challenges caused by a rapidly evolving OS, like the introduction of Flatpaks to allow applications to be developed and released without strong ties to the host system libraries and with the concepts we are maturing in Silverblue around image based operating systems or how we are looking at pet container development with Toolbox. All of these things combined remove a lot of the fragility we seen in Linux up to this point and instead let us treat the rapidly evolving linux landscape as a strength.

So where we are today is that I think we are very close to realizing the vision of being able to let Fedora be the place where exiting new stuff happens, yet at the same time provide the robustness and polish that end users need to be able to use it as their daily driver, it has been my daily driver for many years now and by the rapid growth of users we seen in Fedora over the last 5 years I think that is true for a lot of other people too. The goal is to allow the wider community around Linux, especially the developers, sysadmins and creators relying on Linux to do their work, to come to Fedora and interact and collaborate with the developers working on the OS itself to the benefit of all. You all are probably better judges than me to if we are succeeding with that, but I do take the increased chatter and adoption of Fedora by a lot of people doing Linux related podcasts, news sites and so on as a sign that we are succeeding. And PipeWire for me is a perfect example of how this can look, where we want to bring in the pro-audio creators to Fedora Workstation and let them interact and work closely with Wim Taymans and the PipeWire development team to make the experience even better for themselves and their fellow creators and at the same time give them a great stable platform to create their music on.

PipeWire Late Summer Update 2020

Posted on September 4, 2020 by uraeus

Wim Taymans talking about current state of PipeWire

Wim Taymans did an internal demonstration yesterday for the desktop team at Red Hat of the current state of PipeWire. For those still unaware PipeWire is our effort to bring together audio, video and pro-audio under Linux, creating a smooth and modern experience. Before PipeWire there was PulseAudio for consumer audio, Jack for Pro-audio and just unending pain and frustration for video. PipeWire is being done with the aim of being ABI compatible with ALSA, PulseAudio and JACK, meaning that PulseAudio and Jack apps should just keep working on top of Pipewire without the need for rewrites (and with the same low latency for JACK apps).

As Wim reported yesterday things are coming together with both the PulseAudio, Jack and ALSA backends being usable if not 100% feature complete yet. Wim has been running his system with Pipewire as the only sound server for a while now and things are now in a state where we feel ready to ask the wider community to test and help provide feedback and test cases.

Carla running on PipeWire

Carla as shown above is a popular Jack applications and it provides among other things this patchbay view of your audio devices and applications. I recommend you all to click in and take a close look at the screenshot above. That is the Jack application Carla running and as you see PulseAudio applications like GNOME Settings and Google Chrome are also showing up now thanks to the unified architecture of PipeWire, alongside Jack apps like Hydrogen. All of this without any changes to Carla or any of the other applications shown.

At the moment Wim is primarily testing using Cheese, GNOME Control center, Chrome, Firefox, Ardour, Carla, vlc, mplayer, totem, mpv, Catia, pavucontrol, paman, qsynth, zrythm, helm, Spotify and Calf Studio Gear. So these are the applications you should be getting the most mileage from when testing, but most others should work too.

Anyway, let me quickly go over some of the highlight from Wim’s presentation.

Session Manager

PipeWire now has a functioning session manager that allows for things like

Metadata, system for tagging objects with properties, visible to all clients (if permitted)
Load and save of volumes, automatic routing
Default source and sink with metadata, saved and loaded as well
Moving streams with metadata

Currently this is a simple sample session manager that Wim created himself, but we also have a more advanced session manager called Wireplumber being developed by Collabora, which they developed for use in automotive Linux usecases, but which we will probably be moving to over time also for the desktop.

Human readable handling of Audio Devices

Wim took the code and configuration data in Pulse Audio for ALSA Card Profiles and created a standalone library that can be shared between PipeWire and PulseAudio. This library handles ALSA sound card profiles, devices, mixers and UCM (use case manager used to configure the newer audio chips (like the Lenovo X1 Carbon) and lets PipeWire provide the correct information to provide to things like GNOME Control Center or pavucontrol. Using the same code as has been used in PulseAudio for this has the added benefit that when you switch from PulseAudio to PipeWire your devices don’t change names. So everything should look and feel just like PulseAudio from an application perspective. In fact just below is a screenshot of pavucontrol, the Pulse Audio mixer application running on top of Pipewire without a problem.

Pavucontrol, the Pulse Audio mixer on Pipewire

Creating audio sink devices with Jack
Pipewire now allows you to create new audio sink devices with Jack. So the example command below creates a Pipewire sink node out of calfjackhost and sets it up so that we can output for instance the audio from Firefox into it. At the moment you can do that by running your Jack apps like this:
PIPEWIRE_PROPS="media.class=Audio/Sink" calfjackhost
But eventually we hope to move this functionality into the GNOME Control Center or similar so that you can do this setup graphically. The screenshot below shows us using CalfJackHost as an audio sink, outputing the audio from Firefox (a PulseAudio application) and CalfJackHost generating an analyzer graph of the audio.

The CalfJackhost being used as an audio sink for Firefox

Creating devices with GStreamer
We can also use GStreamer to create PipeWire devices now. The command belows take the popular Big Buck Bunny animation created by the great folks over at Blender and lets you set it up as a video source in PipeWire. So for instance if you always wanted to play back a video inside Cheese for instance, to apply the Cheese effects to it, you can do that this way without Cheese needing to change to handle video playback. As one can imagine this opens up the ability to string together a lot of applications in interesting ways to achieve things that there might not be an application for yet. Of course application developers can also take more direct advantage of this to easily add features to their applications, for instance I am really looking forward to something like OBS Studio taking full advantage of PipeWire.
gst-launch-1.0 uridecodebin uri=file:///home/wim/data/BigBuckBunny_320x180.mp4 ! pipewiresink mode=provide stream-properties="props,media.class=Video/Source,node.description=BBB"

Cheese playing a video provided by GStreamer through PipeWire.

How to get started testing PipeWire
Ok, so after seeing all of this you might be thinking, how can I test all of this stuff out and find out how my favorite applications work with PipeWire? Well first thing you should do is make sure you are running Fedora Workstation 32 or later as that is where we are developing all of this. Once you done that you need to make sure you got all the needed pieces installed:
sudo dnf install pipewire-libpulse pipewire-libjack pipewire-alsa
Once that dnf command finishes you run the following to get PulseAudio replaced by PipeWire.

cd /usr/lib64/


sudo ln -sf  pipewire-0.3/pulse/libpulse-mainloop-glib.so.0 /usr/lib64/libpulse-mainloop-glib.so.0.999.0

sudo ln -sf  pipewire-0.3/pulse/libpulse-simple.so.0 /usr/lib64/libpulse-simple.so.0.999.0

sudo ln -sf  pipewire-0.3/pulse/libpulse.so.0 /usr/lib64/libpulse.so.0.999.0    
sudo ln -sf  pipewire-0.3/jack/libjack.so.0 /usr/lib64/libjack.so.0.999.0

sudo ln -sf  pipewire-0.3/jack/libjacknet.so.0 /usr/lib64/libjacknet.so.0.999.0

sudo ln -sf  pipewire-0.3/jack/libjackserver.so.0 /usr/lib64/libjackserver.so.0.999.0

sudo ldconfig
(you can also find those commands here

Once you run these commands you should be able to run
pactl info
and see this as the first line returned:
Server String: pipewire-0

I do recommend rebooting, to be 100% sure you are on a PipeWire system with everything outputting through PipeWire. Once that is done you are ready to start testing!

Our goal is to use the remainder of the Fedora Workstation 32 lifecycle and the Fedora Workstation 33 lifecycle to stabilize and finish the last major features of PipeWire and then start relying on it in Fedora Workstation 34. So I hope this article will encourage more people to get involved and join us on gitlab and on the PipeWire IRC channel at #pipewire on Freenode.

As we are trying to stabilize PipeWire we are working on it on a bug by bug basis atm, so if you end up testing out the current state of PipeWire then be sure to report issues back to us through the PipeWire issue tracker, but do try to ensure you have a good test case/reproducer as we are still so early in the development process that we can’t dig into ‘obscure/unreproducible’ bugs.

Also if you want/need to go back to PulseAudio you can run the commands here

Also if you just want to test a single application and not switch your whole system over you should be able to do that by using the following commands:
pw-pulse
or
pw-jack

Next Steps
So what are our exact development plans at this point? Well here is a list in somewhat priority order:

Stabilize – Our top priority now is to make PipeWire so stable that the power users that we hope to attract us our first batch of users are comfortable running PipeWire as their only audio server. This is critical to build up a userbase that can help us identify and prioritize remaining issues and ensure that when we do switch Fedora Workstation over to using PipeWire as the default and only supported audio server it will be a great experience for users.
Jackdbus – We want to implement support for the jackdbus API soon as we know its an important feature for the Fedora Jam folks. So we hope to get to this in the not to distant future
Flatpak portal for JACK/audio applications – The future of application packaging is Flatpaks and being able to sandbox Jack applications properly inside a Flatpak is something we want to enable.
Bluetooth – Bluetooth has been supported in PipeWire from the start, but as Wims focus has moved elsewhere it has gone a little stale. So we are looking at cycling back to it and cleaning it up to get it production ready. This includes proper support for things like LDAC and AAC passthrough, which is currently not handled in PulseAudio. Wim hopes to push an updated PipeWire in Fedora out next week which should at least get Bluetooth into a basic working state, but the big fix will come later.
Pulse effects – Wim has looked at this, but there are some bugs that blocks data from moving through the pipeline.
Latency compensation – We want complete latency compensation implemented. This is not actually in Jack currently, so it would be a net new feature.
Network audio – PulseAudio style network audio is not implemented yet.

First Lenovo laptop with Fedora now available on the web!

Posted on August 31, 2020 by uraeus

This weekend the X1 Carbon with Fedora Workstation went live in North America on Lenovos webstore. This is a big milestone for us and for Lenovo as its the first time Fedora ships pre-installed on a laptop from a major vendor and its the first time the worlds largest laptop maker ships premium laptops with Linux directly to consumers. Currently only the X1 Carbon is available, but more models is on the way and more geographies will get added too soon. As a sidenote, the X1 Carbon and more has actually been available from Lenovo for a couple of Months now, it is just the web sales that went online now. So if you are a IT department buying Lenovo laptops in bulk, be aware that you can already buy the X1 Carbon and the P1 for instance through the direct to business sales channel.

Also as a reminder for people looking to deploy Fedora laptops or workstations in numbers, be sure to check out Fleet Commander our tool for helping you manage configurations across such a fleet.

I am very happy with the work that has been done here to get to this point both by Lenovo and from the engineers on my team here at Red Hat. For example Lenovo made sure to get all of their component makers to ramp up their Linux support and we have been working with them to both help get them started writing drivers for Linux or by helping add infrastructure they could plug their hardware into. We also worked hard to get them all set up on the Linux Vendor Firmware Service so that you could be assured to get updated firmware not just for the laptop itself, but also for its components.

We also have a list of improvements that we are working on to ensure you get the full benefit of your new laptops with Fedora and Lenovo, including working on things like improved power management features being able to have power consumption profiles that includes a high performance mode for some laptops that will allow it to run even faster when on AC power and on the other end a low power mode to maximize battery life. As part of that we are also working on adding lap detection support, so that we can ensure that you don’t risk your laptop running to hot in your lap and burning you or that radio antennas are running to strong when that close to your body.

So I hope you decide to take the leap and get one of the great developer laptops we are doing together with Lenovo. This is a unique collaboration between the worlds largest laptop maker and the worlds largest Linux company. What we are doing here isn’t just a minimal hardware enablement effort, but a concerted effort to evolve Linux as a laptop operating system and doing it in a proper open source way. So this is the culmination of our work over the last few years, creating the LVFS, adding Thunderbolt support to Linux, improving fingerprint reader support in Linux, supporting HiDPI screens, supporting hidpi mice, creating the possibility of a secure desktop with Wayland, working with NVidia to ensure that Mesa and Nvidia driver can co-exist through glvnd, creating Flatpak to ensure we can bring the advantages of containers to the desktop space and at the same way do it in a vendor neutral way. So when you buy a Lenovo laptop with Fedora Workstation, you are not just getting a great system, but you are also supporting our efforts to take Linux to the next level, something which I think we are truly the only linux vendor with the scale and engineering ability to do.

Of course we are not stopping here, so let me also use this chance to talk a bit about some of our other efforts.

Toolbox
Containers are popular for deploying software, but a lot of people are also discovering now that they are an incredible way to develop software, even if that software is not going to be deployed as a Flatpak or Kubernetes container. The term often used for containers when used as a development tool is pet containers and with Toolbox project we are aiming to create the best tool possible for developers to work with pet containers. Toolbox allows you to have always have a clean environment to work in which you can change to suit each project you work on, however you like, without affecting your host system. So for instance if you need to install a development snapshot of Python you can do that inside your Toolbox container and be confident that various other parts of your desktop will not start crashing due to the change. And when your are done with your project and don’t want that toolbox around anymore you can easily delete it without having to spend time to figure out which packages you installed can now be safely uninstalled from your host system or just not bother and have your host get bloated over time with stuff you are not actually using anymore.

One big advantage we got at Red Hat is that we are a major contributor to container technologies across the stack. We are a major participant in the Open Container Initiative and we are alongside Google the biggest contributor to the Kubernetes project. This includes having created a set of container tools called Podman. So when we started prototyping Toolbox we could base it up on podman and get access to all the power and features that podman provides, but at the same make them easier to use and consumer from your developer laptop or workstation.

Our initial motivation was also driven by the fact that for image based operating systems like Fedora Silverblue and Fedora CoreOS, where the host system is immutable you still need some way to be able to install packages and do development, but we quickly realized that the pet container development model is superior to the old ‘on host’ model even if you are using a traditional package based system like Fedora Workstation. So we started out by prototyping the baseline functionality, writing it as a shell script to quickly test out our initial ideas. Of course as Toolbox picked up in popularity we realized we needed to transition quickly to a proper development language so that we wouldn’t end up with an unmaintainable mess written in shell, and thus Debarshi Ray and Ondřej Míchal has recently completed the rewrite to Go (Note: the choice of Go was to make it easier for the wider container community to contribute since almost all container tools are written in Go).

Leading up towards Fedora Workstation 33 we are trying figure out a few things. One is how we can make giving you access to a RHEL based toolbox through the Red Hat Developer Program in an easy and straightforward manner, and this is another area where pet container development shines. You can set up your pet container to run a different Linux version than your host. So you can use Fedora to get the latest features for your laptop, but target RHEL inside your Toolbox to get an easy and quick deployment path to your company RHEL servers. I would love it if we can extend this even further as we go along, to for instance let you set up a Steam runtime toolbox to do game development targeting Steam.
Setting up a RHEL toolbox is already technically possible, but requires a lot more knowledge and understanding of the underlaying technologies than we wish.
The second thing we are looking at is how we deal with graphical applications in the context of these pet containers. The main reason we are looking at that is because while you can install for instance Visual Studio code inside the toolbox container and launch it from the command line, we realize that is not a great model for how you interact with GUI applications. At the moment the only IDE that is set up to be run in the host, but is able to interact with containers properly is GNOME Builder, but we realize that there are a lot more IDEs people are using and thus we want to try to come up with ways to make them work better with toolbox containers beyond launching them from the command line from inside the container. There are some extensions available for things like Visual Studio Code starting to try to improve things (those extensions are not created by us, but looking at solving a similar problem), but we want to see how we can help providing a polished experience here. Over time we do believe the pet container model of development is so good that most IDEs will follow in GNOME Builders footsteps and make in-container development a core part of the feature set, but for now we need to figure out a good bridging strategy.

Wayland – headless and variable refresh rate.
Since switching to Wayland we have continued to work in improving how GNOME work under Wayland to remove any major feature regressions from X11 and to start taking advantage of the opportunities that Wayland gives us. One of the last issues that Jonas Ådahl has been hard at work recently is trying to ensure we have headless support for running GNOME on systems without a screen. We know that there are a lot of sysadmins for instance who want to be able to launch a desktop session on their servers to be used as a tool to test and debug issues. These desktops are then accessed through tools such as VNC or Nice DCV. As part of that work he also made sure we could deal with having multiple monitors connected which had different refresh rates. Before that fix you would get the lowest common denominator between your screens, but now if you for instance got a 60Hz monitor and a 75Hz monitor they will be able to function independent of each other and run at their maximum refresh rate. With the variable refresh rate work now landed upstream Jonas is racing to get the headless support finished and landed in time for Fedora Workstation 33.

Linux Vendor Firmware Service
Richard Hughes is continuing his work on moving the LVFS forward having spent time this cycle working with the Linux Foundation to ensure the service can scale even better. He is also continuously onboarding new vendors and helping existing vendors use LVFS for even more things. We are now getting reports that LVFS has become so popular that we are now getting reports of major hardware companies who up to know hasn’t been to interested in the LVFS are getting told by their customers to start using it or they will switch supplier. So expect the rapid growth of vendors joining the LVFS to keep increasing. It is also worth nothing that many of vendors who are already set up on LVFS are steadily working on increasing the amount of systems they support on it and pushing their suppliers to do the same. Also for enterprise use of LVFS firmware Marc Richter also wrote an article on access.redhat.com about how to use LVFS with Red Hat Satelitte. Satellite for those who don’t know it is Red Hats tool for managing and keeping servers up to date and secure. So for large companies having their machines, especially servers, accessing LVFS directly is not a wanted behaviour, so now they can use Satelitte to provide a local repository of the LVFS firmware.

PipeWire
One of the changes we been working on that I am personally extremely excited about is PipeWire. For those of you who don’t know it, PipeWire is one of our major swamp draining efforts which aims to bring together audio, pro-audio and video under linux and provide a modern infrastructure for us to move forward. It does so however while being ABI compatible with both Jack and PulseAudio, meaning that applications will not need to be ported to work with PipeWire. We have been using it for a while for video already to handle screen capture under Wayland and for allowing Flatpak containers access to webcams in a secure way, but Wim Taymans has been working tirelessly on moving that project forward over the last 6 Months, focused a lot of fixing corner cases in the Jack support and also ramping up the PulseAudio support. We had hoped to start wide testing in Fedora Workstation 32 of the audio parts of PipeWire, but we decided that since such a key advantage that PipeWire brings is not just to replace Jack or PulseAudio, but also to ensure the two usecases co-exist and interact properly, we didn’t want to start asking people to test until we got the PulseAudio support close to being production ready. Wim has been making progress by leaps and bounds recently and while I can’t 100% promise it yet we do expect to roll out the audio bits of PipeWire for more widescale testing in Fedora Workstation 33 with the goal of making it the default for Fedora Workstation 34 or more likely Fedora Workstation 35.
Wim is doing an internal demo this week, so I will try to put out a blog post talking about that later in the week.

Flatpak – incremental updates
One of the features we added to Flatpaks was the ability to distribute them as Open Container Initiative compliant containers. The reason for this was that as companies, Red Hat included, built infrastructure for hosting and distributing containers we could also use that for Flatpaks. This is obviously a great advantage for a variety of reasons, but it had one large downside compared to the traditional way of distributing Flatpaks (as Ostree images) which is that each update comes as a single large update as opposed to the atomic update model that OStree provides.
Which is why if you would compare the same application when shipping from Flathub, which uses Ostree, versus from the Fedora container registry, you would quickly notice that you get a lot smaller updates from Flathub. For kubernetes containers this hasn’t been considered a huge problem as their main usecase is copying the containers around in a high-speed network inside your cloud provider, but for desktop users this is annoying. So Alex Larsson and Owen Taylor has been working on coming up with a way to do to incremental updates for OCI/Docker/Kubernetes containers too, which not only means we can get very close to the Flathub update size in the Fedora Container Catalog, but it also means that since we implemented this in a way that works for all OCI/Kubernetes containers you will be able to get them too with incremental update functionality. Especially as such containers are making their way into edge computing where update sizes do matter, just like they do on the desktop.

Hangul input under Wayland
Red Hat, like Lenovo, targets most of the world with our products and projects. This means that we want them to work great even for people who doesn’t use English or another European language. To achieve this we have a team dedicated to ensuring that not just Linux, but all Red Hat products work well for international users as part of my group at Red Hat. That team, lead by Jens Petersen, is distributed around the globe with engineers in Japan, China, India, Singapore and Germany. This team contributes to a lot of different things like font maintenance, input method development, i18n infrastructure and more.
One thing this team recently discovered was that the support for Korean input under Wayland. So Peng Wu, Takao Fujiwara and Carlos Garnacho worked together to come up with a series of patches for ibus and GNOME Shell to ensure that Fedora Workstation on Wayland works perfectly for Korean input. I wanted to highlight this effort because while I don’t usually mention efforts which such a regional impact in my blog posts it is a critical part of keeping Linux viable and usable across the globe. And ensuring that you can use your computer in your own language is something we feel is important and want to enable and also an area where I believe Red Hat is investing more than any other vendor out there.

GLX on EGL
We meet with NVidia on a regular basis to discuss topics of shared interest and one thing we been looking at for a while now is the best way to support Nvidia binary driver under XWayland. As part of that Adam Jackson has been working on a research project to see how feasible it would be to create a way to run GLX applications on top of EGL. As one might imagine EGL doesn’t have a 1to1 match with GLX APIs, but based on what we seen so far is that it should be close enough to get things going (Adam already got glxgears running :). The goal here would be to have an initial version that works ok, and then in collaboration with NVidia we can evolve it to be a great solution for even the most demanding OpenGL/GLX applications. Currently the code causes an extra memcopy compared to running on GLX native, but this is something we think can be resolved in collaboration with NVidia. Of course this is still an early stage effort and Adam and NVidia are currently looking at it so there is of course a chance still we will hit a snag and have to go back to the drawing board. For those interested you can take a look at this Mesa merge request to see the current state.

GNOME is not the default for Fedora Workstation

Posted on May 7, 2020 by uraeus

We recently had a Fedora AMA where one of the questions asked is why GNOME is the default desktop for Fedora Workstation. In the AMA we answered why GNOME had been chosen for Fedora Workstation, but we didn’t challenge the underlying assumption built into the way the question was asked, and the answer to that assumption is that it isn’t the default. What I mean with this is that Fedora Workstation isn’t a box of parts, where you have default options that can be replaced, its a carefully procured and assembled operating system aimed at developers, sysadmins and makers in general. If you replace one or more parts of it, then it stops being Fedora Workstation and starts being ‘build your own operating system OS’. There is nothing wrong with wanting to or finding it interesting to build your own operating systems, I think a lot of us initially got into Linux due to enjoying doing that. And the Fedora project provides a lot of great infrastructure for people who want to themselves or through teaming up with others build their own operating systems, which is why Fedora has so many spins and variants available.
The Fedora Workstation project is something we made using those tools and it has been tested and developed as an integrated whole, not as a collection of interchangeable components. The Fedora Workstation project might of course over time replace certain parts with other parts over time, like how we are migrating from X.org to Wayland. But at some point we are going to drop standalone X.org support and only support X applications through XWayland. But that is not the same as if each of our users individually did the same. And while it might be technically possible for a skilled users to still get things moved back onto X for some time after we make the formal deprecation, the fact is that you would no longer be using ‘Fedora Workstation’. You be using a homebrew OS that contains parts taken from Fedora Workstation.

So why am I making this distinction? To be crystal clear, it is not to hate on you for wanting to assemble your own OS, in fact we love having anyone with that passion as part of the Fedora community. I would of course love for you to share our vision and join the Fedora Workstation effort, but the same is true for all the other spins and variant communities we have within the Fedora community too. No the reason is that we have a very specific goal of creating a stable and well working experience for our users with Fedora Workstation and one of the ways we achieve this is by having a tightly integrated operating system that we test and develop as a whole. Because that is the operating system we as the Fedora Workstation project want to make. We believe that doing anything else creates an impossible QA matrix, because if you tell people that ‘hey, any part of this OS is replaceable and should still work’ you have essentially created a testing matrix for yourself of infinite size. And while as software engineers I am sure many of us find experiments like ‘wonder if I can get Fedora Workstation running on a BSD kernel’ or ‘I wonder if I can make it work if I replace glibc with Bionic‘ fun and interesting, I am equally sure we all also realize what once we do that we are in self support territory and that Fedora Workstation or any other OS you use as your starting point can’t not be blamed if your system stops working very well. And replacing such a core thing as the desktop is no different to those other examples.

Having been in the game of trying to provide a high quality desktop experience both commercially in the form of RHEL Workstation and through our community efforts around Fedora Workstation I have seen and experienced first hand the problems that the mindset of interchangeable desktop creates. For instance before we switched to the Fedora Workstation branding and it was all just ‘Fedora’ I experienced reviewers complaining about missing features, features had actually spent serious effort implementing, because the reviewer decided to review a different spin of Fedora than the GNOME one. Other cases I remember are of customers trying to fix a problem by switching desktops, only to discover that while the initial issue they wanted fix got resolved by the switch they now got a new batch of issues that was equally problematic for them. And we where left trying to figure out if we should try to fix the original problem, the new ones or maybe the problems reported by users of a third desktop option. We also have had cases of users who just like the reviewer mentioned earlier, assumed something was broken or missing because they where using a different desktop than the one where the feature was added. And at the same time trying to add every feature everywhere would dilute our limited development resources so much that it made us move slow and not have the resources to focus on getting ready for major changes in the hardware landscape for instance.
So for RHEL we now only offer GNOME as the desktop and the same is true in Fedora Workstation, and that is not because we don’t understand that people enjoy experimenting with other desktops, but because it allows us to work with our customers and users and hardware partners on fixing the issues they have with our operating system, because it is a clearly defined entity, and adding the features they need going forward and properly support the hardware they are using, as opposed to spreading ourselves to thin that we just run around putting on band-aids for the problems reported.
And in the longer run I actually believe this approach benefits those of you who want to build your own OS to, or use an OS built by another team around a different set of technologies, because while the improvements might come in a bit later for you, the work we now have the ability to undertake due to having a clear focus, like our work on adding HiDPI support, getting Wayland ready for desktop use or enabling Thunderbolt support in Linux, makes it a lot easier for these other projects to eventually add support for these things too.

Update: Adam Jacksons oft quoted response to the old ‘linux is about choice meme’ is also a required reading for anyone wanting a high quality operating system

Fedora Workstation : Swamp draining for 6 years

Posted on April 28, 2020 by uraeus

As Fedora Workstation 32 was released today I ended up looking back at our efforts to drain the swamp over the last 6 years. In April of 2014 I wrote a blog post outlining our vision for the Fedora Workstation effort and what we wanted to achieve with it. I hadn’t looked at that blog post in years, but it was interesting going back to it and realize that while some of the details have changed it is still the vision we are pursuing today; to keep draining the swamp and make Fedora Workstation a top notch operating system for developers and makers in general. Which I guess is one of the hallmarks of a decent vision, that it allows for the details to change without invalidating it.

One of my pet peeves at the time with Linux as a desktop operating system was that so many of the so called efforts to make linux user friendly was essentially duck taping over the problems, creating fragile solutions that often made it harder for us to really move forward. In the yers since we addressed a lot of major swamp issues with our efforts around HiDPI & Bolt (getting ahead of hardware enablement for new monitors and Thunderbolt devices respectively), Flatpaks, GNOME Software and AppStream (making applications discoverable, deployable and maintainable), Wayland (making your desktop secure and future proof), LVFS and firmware handling (making them easily available for Linux users), Finger print reader standard (ensuring your hardware is fully supported) and coming up with ways to improve the lives of developers with improvements to the terminal or Fedora Toolbox, our developer pet container tool.

Working on these and other issues we early realized that a model where hardware gets enabled in a reactive manner, in response to new laptops being sold, was never going to yield a good result for our users. As long as we followed that model people where bound to always hit issues with laptops as they came out and then have to deal with those issues for the first 6-12 Months of its life. This is why I am so excited about our new partnership with Lenovo that we pre-announced on Friday as it is both the culmination of our efforts over the last 6 years, but also the starting point of a new era in terms of how we work with hardware makers. So instead of us spending a ton of time trying to reverse engineers basic drivers we can now rely on our hardware partner and their component vendors providing that and we can instead focus on what I call high level hardware enablement. Meaning that as we see new features coming into laptops and computers we can try to improve the infrastructure in the operating system to be able to take full advantage of said hardware, and we can do so in collaboration with the hardware makers knowing that once we provide the infrastructure they will ensure to provide drivers and similar fitting into that infrastructure. Our work on fingerprint readers and thunderbolt support for instance has been two great early examples of that.

Anyway, you are probably interested to know some of the new things coming in Fedora Workstaton 32, so here are some of my personal highlights:

New lock screen

This is more a cosmetic change, but one that every user will see upon logging into their Fedora system after a new install or upgrade. The new design features a faded version of your desktop background image and it should also feel more smooth as the password dialog now appears on the lock screen page as opposed to before where it sort of replaced it. The dialog now also tries to more discreetly than before inform you if your trying to type in the password while the lock screen is on. A big thanks to Allan Day and the GNOME design team for their work here trying to polish this part of the user interface.

GNOME extension app

GNOME Shell extensions are little tweaks and additional features for the desktop that our user have gotten accustomed to and enjoy greatly. Extensions are also the technology that powers the GNOME Classic session that provides those of our users who want it with a more traditional desktop experience. GNOME Shell extensions have gradually evolved in how we work with them since their inception as something you install through your web browser to now being handled through GNOME Software. With Fedora Workstation 32 we are making the new GNOME Shell extensions management app available as the next step in the evolution of GNOME Shell extensions, making it simple to turn any given extension on of our or quickly see which extensions you have installed.

GNOME Extensions handling app

Fedora Toolbox

Fedora Toolbox is our helper for making working with containers for development and testing as easy it possibly can be. Debarshi Ray and Ondřej Míchal have been hard at work porting the Fedora Toolbox to Go from shell for this release. For those wondering why we choose Go as the language; there was basically two reasons for that. One we felt that the toolbox had gone as far as it could as a shell script, and two that was the language used by all the components we rely on and interact with in the container space, like buildah and podman. We also wanted to make it easy for developers on those projects to contribute by using the same language as they use in their projects.

Fedora Toolbox running on Fedora Workstation 32

Performance improvements

Another area that we always try to give some love is general performance improvement. For example this time around Christian Hergert identified some really bad behavior of GNOME shell when running on a system with very high I/O. At the face of it GNOME Shell didn’t look like it should have been affected, but during some intensive debugging sessions Christian Hergert discovered that I/O was triggered by various API calls to do things like string translation. So he put together a set of patches to resolve the high I/O stalls and can now report that GNOME Shell keeps running smoothly as silk, even under high disk I/O situations.

PipeWire

Wim Taymans keeps making great strides forward with PipeWire, our tool for creating a unified media handler for audio, pro-audio and Video. In Fedora Workstation 32 we will be shipping the 0.3 version which has quite complete Jack support. In fact we are hoping to team up with the Fedora Jam team to finalize the Jack support during the Fedora 32 lifecycle by testing it extensively. We have a lot of Jacks apps already working with PipeWire, including a series of important Jack apps that we have put into Flatpaks in Fedora like Carla. While the support is there in PipeWire in Fedora 32 right now, there are some convenience work we are still needing to do, but we hope to get that pushed out by next week to make replacing Jack with PipeWire becomes very simple to both do and undo for testing purposes.

The PulseAudio support is the last piece that are still in progress. It works for simple music playback, but it is not a drop in replacement for PulseAudio yet, so while we hoped to encourage widespread testing in F32 we will aim at delaying that to F33 in order to polish the PulseAudio support more first. But once ready we will make this available for testing in a simple manner just like the Jack support.

There has also been further work on the video side of PipeWire, adding support for zero copy video capture, this has reduced the overhead of doing things like screen capturing significantly and should be a nice performance/resource usage improvement for everyone.

Firefox on Wayland

Martin Stransky and Jan Horak has been working hard to improve how Firefox runs and works when used as a Wayland native application fixing a truckload of bigger and smaller bugs this cycle. We feel that we crossed the corner now in terms of the Wayland version being just as stable and good as the X11 one. In fact we could move beyond just fixing bugs to actually adding features this time around for instance Martin Stransky worked on WebGL HW acceleration support enabling us to have that enabled by default now for the first time. We also made sure to taking advantage of the Pipewire zero copy support to improve your video conferencing applications running under Firefox which turned out to be even more important than we expected considering Covid-19 has everyone working from home.

Looking forward

We spent a lot of time and energy over the last 6 years to get to where we are now, putting in place a lot of the basic building blocks needed to make Linux a great desktop operating system. And it feels great that just as we kick of the new line of Lenovo laptops running Fedora we are also entering a new phase of development where we can move beyond getting our basic infrastructure in place, but we can really start taking advantage of it to rapidly improve the experience we are providing even more. A good example is the Firefox work mentioned above, where we finally could move on from ‘make it work with Wayland and PipeWire, to ‘lets take advantage of these new pieces to make Firefox on Linux better’. Another example here is that Adam Jackson is currently investigating how we can improve how Fedora Workstation performs for remote usage. This work includes looking at things like VNC and RDP and commercial offerings and figuring out how we can make our stack work better with such tools, on top of the improvements that PipeWire brings for such usecases.

There is some more heavy lifting needed before our next generation OS architecture, Silverblue, is ready to be our default offering, but it is improving leaps and bounds each release and already have a loyal following, personally I am very excited about the fact that we are quickly moving closer the point were we can make it our default and through that offer features like bulletproof OS updates, factory resets and solid version rollbacks.

On the Flatpak side Owen Taylor and Alex Larsson are putting in a lot of final touches on our Red Hat infrastructure. So for RHEL8.2 we will finally be able to build Flatpaks in RHEL infrastructure and provide a runtime and SDK for our RHEL customers to use. But equally exciting is that we will be able to offer these to the community at large, meaning that we can offer a high quality Flatpak Long Term Support runtime and SDK for ISVs that they can use to both target RHEL users, but also Fedora and other Linux distributions with, in a similar vein to how the Red Hat UBI works. We will also be looking at ways to make getting access to these on Fedora very simple for developers, so that developing towards this runtime becomes quick and easy on your Fedora system. Alex and Owen are also working on an incremental updates feature to be shared between Kubernetes containers and OCI Flatpaks, making both technologies better and updates a lot smaller.

We are also looking at a host of other smaller improvements, many of them in collaboration with our friends at Lenovo, like lap detection (so you can be sure the laptop doesn’t burn you), privacy features (like making it harder to read your screen from an angle) and far field microphones. There are also things like Lennarts HomeD idea which we will be looking at as a way to improve the end user experience.

So the future is looking bright and I hope to see many new faces in the Fedora community going forward, be that if you download Fedora Workstation 32 to install on your own system yourself or if you join us through buying a Fedora laptop from Lenovo this summer.

A bold new chapter for Fedora Workstation

Posted on April 24, 2020 by uraeus

So you have probably seen the announcement that Lenovo are launching a set of Fedora Workstation based laptops. I am so happy and proud of this effort as it comes as the culmination of our hard effort over the last 6 years to drain the swamp and make Linux a more viable desktop operating system.
I am also so happy and proud that Lenovo was willing to work with us on this effort as they provide us with an incredible opportunity to reach both new and old Linux users around the globe with these systems, being the worlds biggest laptop maker with the widest global reach. Because one important aspect of this is that Lenovo will provide these laptops through all their sales channels in all their markets. This means you can of course order them online through their website, but it also means companies can order them through Lenovos business to business channels and it means that in any country where Lenovo is present you can order them, so this is not a North America only or Europe only, this is truly a global offering.

There are a lot of people who has been involved here in helping to make this happen, but special thanks goes to Egbert Gracias from Lenovo who was critical in making this happen and also a special thanks to Alberto Ruiz who spearheaded this effort from our side.

Our engineering team here at Red Hat has also been hard at work ensuring we can support these models very well be that by bugfixes to kernel drivers or by polishing up things like the Linux fingerprint support. As we go forward we hope to build on this relationship to take linux laptops to the next level and I am also very happy to say that we got Jared Dominguez on on team now to help us develop better work practices and closer relationships with our hardware partners and original device manufacturers.

Also a special thanks to Jakub Steiner for putting together the little sizzle video above, it was supposed to be used at our booth at Red Hat Summit next week, but with that going virtual we repurposed it for this announcement.

GStreamer Conference 2019 (including GStreamer and PipeWire hackfests)

Posted on October 7, 2019 by uraeus

GStreamer Conference 2019 in Lyon France

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

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

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

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

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

Fedora Workstation 31 – Whats new

Posted on September 23, 2019 by uraeus

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

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

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

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

Click on hover in action

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Improved GNOME Classic mode

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

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

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

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

Much improved Sysprof tool

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

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

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

Performance is better than ever

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

On the Road to Fedora Workstation 31

Posted on June 24, 2019 by uraeus

So I hope everyone is enjoying Fedora Workstation 30, but we don’t rest on our laurels here so I thought I share some of things we are working on for Fedora Workstation 31. This is not an exhaustive list, but some of the more major items we are working on.

Wayland – Our primary focus is still on finishing the Wayland transition and we feel we are getting close now, and thank you to the community for their help in testing and verifying Wayland over the last few years. The single biggest goal currently is fully removing our X Windowing System dependency, meaning that GNOME Shell should be able to run without needing XWayland. For those wondering why that has taken so much time, well it is simple; for 20 years developers could safely assume we where running atop of X. So refactoring everything needed to remove any code that makes the assumption that it is running on top of X.org has been a major effort. The work is mostly done now for the shell itself, but there are a few items left in regards to the GNOME Setting daemon where we need to expel the X dependency. Olivier Fourdan is working on removing those settings daemon bits as part of his work to improve the Wayland accessibility support. We are optimistic that can declare this work done within a GNOME release or two. So GNOME 3.34 or maybe 3.36. Once that work is complete an X server (XWayland) would only be started if you actually run a X application and when you shut that application down the X server will be shut down too.

Wayland Graphics

Another change that Hans de Goede is working on at the moment is allowing X applications to be run as root under XWayland. In general running desktop apps as root isn’t considered adviceable from a security point of view, but since it always worked under X we feel it should continue to be there for XWayland too. This should fix a few applications out there which only works when run as root currently. One last item Hans de Goede is looking at is improving SDLs Wayland support in regards to how it deals with scaling of lower resolution games. Thanks to the great effort by Valve and others we got a huge catalog of games available under Linux now and we want to ensure that those keep running and runs well. So we will work with the SDL devs to come up with a solution here, we just don’t know the exact shape and and form the solution will take yet, so stay tuned.

Finally there is the NVidia binary driver support question. So you can run a native Wayland session on top of the binary driver and you had that ability for a very long time. Unfortunately there has been no support for the binary driver in XWayland and thus and X applications (which there are a lot of) would not be getting any HW accelerated 3D graphics support. Adam Jackson has worked on letting XWaylands load the binary NVidia x.org driver and we are now waiting on NVidia to review that work and hopefully be able to update their driver to support it.

Once we are done with this we expect X.org to go into hard maintenance mode fairly quickly. The reality is that X.org is basically maintained by us and thus once we stop paying attention to it there is unlikely to be any major new releases coming out and there might even be some bitrot setting in over time. We will keep an eye on it as we will want to ensure X.org stays supportable until the end of the RHEL8 lifecycle at a minimum, but let this be a friendly notice for everyone who rely the work we do maintaining the Linux graphics stack, get onto Wayland, that is where the future is.

PipeWire – Wim Taymans keeps improving the core features of Pipewire, as we work step by step to be ready to replace Jack and PulseAudio. He has recently been focusing on improving existing features like the desktop sharing portal together with Jonas Adahl and we are planning a hackfest for Wayland in the fall, current plan is to do it around the All Systems Go conference in Berlin, but due to some scheduling conflicts by some of our core stakeholders we might need to reschedule it to a little later in fall.
A new user for the desktop sharing portal is the new Miracast support that Benjamin Berg has been steadily working on. The Miracast support is shaping up and you can grab the Network Displays test client from his COPR repository while he is working to get the package into Fedora proper. We would appreciate further users testing and feedback as we know there are definitely devices out there where things do not work properly and identifying them is the first step to figuring out how to make our support in the desktop more robust. Eventually we want to make the GNOME integration even more seamless than the standalone app, but for early testing and polish it does the trick. If you are interested in contributing the code is hosted here on github.

Network Display application using Miracast

Btw, you still need to set the enable Pipewire flag in Chrome to get the Pipewire support (chrome://flags). So I included a screenshot here to show you where to go in the browser and what the key is called:

Chrome Pipewire Flag

Flatpak – Work on Flatpak in Fedora is continuing. Current focus is on improving the infrastructure for building Flatpaks from RPMS and automating what we can.This is pre-requisite work for eventually starting to ship some applications as Flatpaks by default and eventually shipping all applications as Flatpaks by default. We are also working on setting things up so that we can offer applications from flathub.io and quay.io out of the box and in accordance with Fedora rules for 3rd party software. We are also making progress on making a Red Hat UBI based runtime available. This means that as a 3rd party developer you can use that to build your applications on top of and be certain that it will be stay around and be supported by Red Hat for the lifetime of a given RHEL release, which means around 10 years. This frees you up as a developer to really update your application at your own pace as opposed to have to chase more short lived runtimes. It will also ensure that your application can be certified for RHEL which gives you access to all our workstation customers in addition to Fedora and all other distros.

Fedora Toolbox – Work is progressing on the Fedora Toolbox, our tool for making working with pet containers feel simple and straightforward. Debarshi Ray is currently looking on improvements to GNOME Terminal that will ensure that you get a more natural behaviour inside the terminal when interacting with pet containers, for instance ensuring that if you have a terminal open to a pet container and create a new tab that tab will also be inside the container inside of pointing at the host. We are also working on finding good ways to make the selection of containers more discoverable, so that you more easily can get access to a Red Hat UBI container or a Red Hat TensorFlow container for instance. There will probably be a bit of a slowdown in terms of new toolbox features soon though as we are going to rewrite it to make it more maintainable. The current implementation is a giant shell script, but the new version will most likely be written in Go (so that we can more easily integrate with the other container libraries and tools out there, mostly written in Go).

Fedora Toolbox in action

GNOME Classic – We have had Classic mode available in GNOME and Fedora for a long time, but we recently decided to give it a second look and try to improve the experience. So Allan Day reviewed the experience and we decided to make it a more pure GNOME 2 style experience by dropping the overview completely when you run classic mode.
We have also invested time and effort on improving the Classic mode workspace switcher to make life better for people who use a very workspace centric workflow. The goal of the improvements is to make the Classic mode workspace switcher more feature complete and also ensure that it can work with standard GNOME 3 in addition to Classic mode. We know this will greatly improve the experience for many of our users and at the same time hopefully let new people switch to Fedora and GNOME to get the advantage of all the other great improvements we are bringing to Linux and the Linux desktop.

Sysprof & performance – We have had a lot of focus in the community on improving GNOME Shell performance. Our particular focus has been on doing both some major re-architecting of some core subsystems that where needed to make some of the performance improvements you seen even possible. And lately Christian Hergert has been working on improving our tooling for profiling the desktop, so let our developers more easily see exactly where in the stack bottlenecks are and what is causing them. Be sure to read Christians blog for further details about sysprof and friends.

Fleet Commander – our tool for configuring large deployments of Fedora and RHEL desktops should have a release out very soon that can work with Active Directory as your LDAP server. We know a lot of RHEL and Fedora desktop users are part of bigger organizations where Linux users are a minority and thus Active Directory is being deployed in the organization. With this new release Fleet Commander can be run using Active Directory or FreeIPA as the directory server and thus a lot of organizations who previously could not easily deploy Fleet Commander can now take advantage of this powerful tool. Next step for Fleet Commander after that is finishing of some lose ends in terms of our Firefox support and also ensure that you can easily configure GNOME Shell extensions with Fleet Commander. We know a lot of our customers and users are deploying one or more GNOME Shell extensions for their desktop so we want to ensure Fleet Commander can help you do that efficiently across your whole fleet of systems.

Fingerprint support – We been working closely with our hardware partners to bring proper fingerprint reader support to Linux. Bastien Nocera worked on cleaning up the documentation of fprint and make sure there is good sample code and our hardware partners then worked with their suppliers to ensure they provided drivers conforming to the spec for hardware supplied to them. So there is a new drivers from Synaptics finger print readers coming out soon thanks to this effort. We are not stopping there though, Benjamin Berg is continuing the effort to improve the infrastructure for Linux fingerprint reader support, making sure we can support in-device storage of fingerprints for instance.

Fingerprint readers now better supported

Gamemode – Christian Kellner has been contributing a bit to gamemode recently, working to make it more secure and also ensure that it can work well with games packaged as Flatpaks. So if you play Linux games, especially those from Ferral Interactive, and want to squeeze some extra performance from your system make sure to install gamemode on your Fedora system.

Dell Totem support – Red Hat has a lot of customers in the fields of animation and CAD/CAM systems. Due to this Benjamin Tissoires and Peter Hutterer been working with Dell on enabling their Totem input device for a while now. That works is now coming to a close with the Totem support shipping in the latest libinput version with the kernel side of things being merged some time ago. You can get the full details from Peters blog about Dell Totem.

The Dell Totem input device

Media codec support – So the OpenH264 2.0 release is out from Cisco now and Kalev Lember has been working to get the Fedora packages updated. This is a crucial release as it includes the support for Main and High profile that I mentioned in an earlier blog post. That work happened due to a collaboration between Cisco, Endless, Red Hat and Centricular with Jan Schmidt at Centricular doing the work implementing support for these two codecs. This work makes OpenH264 a lot more useful as it now supports playing back most files found in the wild and we been working to ensure it can be used for general playback in Firefox. At the same time Wim Taymans is working to fix some audio quality issues in the AAC implementation we ship so we should soon have both a fully working H264 decoder/encoder in Fedora and a fully functional AAC decoder/encoder. We are still trying to figure out what to do with MPEG2 video as we are ready to ship support for that too, but are still trying to figure out the details of implementation. Beyond that we don’t have any further plans around codecs atm as we feel that with H264, MPEG2 video, AAC, mp3 and AC3 we have them most critical ones covered, alongside the growing family of great free codecs such as VP9, Opus and AV1. We might take a look at the status of things like Windows Media and DivX at some point, but it is not anywhere close to the top of our priority list currently.

Christian F.K. Schaller

Blog talking about Fedora, GNOME, GStreamer and related topics. Anything I write in this blog is me speaking as a member of the open source community, official Red Hat communication happens on Redhat.com. The comments are my own personal opinion.

Category Archives: Fedora