Collabora give an overview of their work with Valve at the Linux App Summit 2020

Interested in all the work the open source consulting firm Collabora are doing with Valve to help improve Linux gaming? We've got you covered.

We've already been over a few bits of what they're doing together, like their Linux Kernel work that will hopefully be live with Linux 5.11 and also their work on the Steam Linux Runtime Container system. Collabora have been doing a lot of other work in the open source space too that we've been following, like the Monado runtime for VR and AR (XR) and their work on the Panfrost driver for Mali.

During the Linux App Summit 2020, Collabora developer Vivek Das Mohapatra did a presentation giving a whistle-stop tour of their work to give an overview of all the bits and pieces. It's about 28 minutes, so it won't take you long to go through if you want a nice way to catch up.

You can see the full video below:

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What really captured my interest was the mention about the work with "Atomic Updates & A/B Booting", which Vivek Das Mohapatra mentioned can help with a "game console like piece of kit". While no direct reason was mentioned for working on it, Vivek Das Mohapatra said it has been a "big chunk" of the work they've been doing and that the hope is we will see it "real soon". 

It's interesting as such a system should allow both seamless and fool-proof system updates that something like SteamOS would benefit from. This is a similar sounding system to what the SteamOS-like distribution GamerOS currently uses too and we know that Valve at least had plans in the past to go back to SteamOS at some point.