Training – Understanding the Linux Graphics Stack

Learn how the graphics stack is organized with Linux and how to use it, covering both the kernel and user-space aspects.

Course details

  • Duration: 2 days / 16 hours (on-site) – 4 half days / 16 hours (on-line)
  • Agenda: on-site, on-line
  • Training materials: slides.
  • Written language: English
  • Available oral languages: English and French.

Public on-line sessions

Type Dates Time Duration Language Expected
trainer		 Cost and registration
Linux Graphics (agenda)
FULL		 October 10, 11, 13, 14, 2022 14:00 – 18:00 (Paris time, UTC+2) 16 h English Paul Kocialkowski Discount: 519 EUR*
Regular: 619 EUR*
Register
Linux Graphics (agenda) March 6, 7, 9 10, 2023 14:00 – 18:00 (Paris time, UTC+1) 16 h English Paul Kocialkowski Discount: 519 EUR*
Regular: 619 EUR*
Registration opens soon.

*The price is excluding VAT. Eventbrite charges VAT, except for businesses in the European Union outside of France if they provide valid company information and VAT number to Evenbrite at registration time.

The discount rate is applicable at the following conditions:

  • Booking at least 1 month prior to the training session start
  • Booking and payment made online using Eventbrite (payment by credit card or Paypal, payments by wire transfer based on an invoice are not eligible to the discount rate)
  • Limit of 6 seats per training session at the discount rate

If you are unable to register through Eventbrite, do not hesitate to contact us, we will be able to provide a training contract and offer alternative payment methods.

Registration on Eventbrite remains available until the session starts, subject to seat availability.

See details about our on-line sessions.

Dedicated online sessions

We can organize private online sessions for your team or company. This way, you can choose the dates and times that best suit the needs and availabilities of your teams.

Dedicated on-site sessions

We can send one of our trainers at your own location, anywhere in the world (we have taught classes on all continents). See how to register.

Target audience

Display testing by displaying multiple DRM planes

This course targets engineers who need a detailed level of understanding of graphics concepts, graphics hardware and how the graphics stack is organized with Linux. It covers areas related to display and render, both at the kernel and user-space levels.

At the end of this course, you will be familiar with all the elements required to manage graphics efficiently on an embedded Linux-based system.

Objectives

  • Be able to understand the basics of graphics display: image and color representation, pixel drawing, pixel operations.
  • Be able to understand graphics hardware: display pipeline components, display and rendering hardware.
  • Have a solid understanding of the Linux kernel graphics stack components and role: TTY, framebuffer and DRM subsystems.
  • Have a solid understanding of the Linux user-space graphics stack components and role: DRM from user-space, X.org, Wayland, OpenGL.

See the detailed agenda.

Bootlin’s expertise in graphics

Bootlin engineers have worked on multiple projects implementing display, video playback and video capture support on numerous embedded platforms running Linux:

  • Development of the Linux kernel DRM driver for the display controlled found in Allwinner ARM processors: drivers/gpu/drm/sun4i.
  • Development of the Linux kernel DRM driver for the display controller found in Atmel SAMA5 processors: drivers/gpu/drm/atmel-hlcdc.
  • Improvements to the Linux kernel DRM driver for the RaspberryPi: kernel commits.
  • Improvements of the Intel GPU Tools project to be able to use the Google Chamelium board for display testing, and to allow testing various pixel formats and display configurations. See our blog posts Testing pixel formats on the RaspberryPi and More Improvements to Raspberry Pi Display Testing, and also our commits to the Intel GPU Tools project.
  • Development of a driver for the Allwinner hardware video decoding engine in the Video4Linux subsystem: drivers/staging/media/sunxi/cedrus. This was the first Linux kernel driver merged for stateless codec, which required a new user-space interface.
  • Numerous improvements to the OV5640 camera sensor driver: ov5640 commits
  • Linux support for display panels in a large number of Linux Board Support packages for our customers, for a wide range of platforms: HDMI displays, parallel RGB displays, MIPI-DSI displays, etc.

It is this Linux display expertise gathered both in the community and through customer projects that Bootlin is offering in this training course.

Training materials

All the training materials that we use during this course are freely available. Before the session, you can then check that they correspond to your needs.

Demos

Each lecture in our course is followed by a practical demonstration, performed on an embedded ARM board, representing about 25% of the whole course time.

Prerequisites

Hardware requirements

  • For on-line courses:
    • Computer with the operating system of your choice, with the Google Chrome or Chromium browser for videoconferencing.
    • Webcam and microphone, from an audio headset
    • High speed access to the Internet
  • For on-site courses:
    • Training room
    • Video projector
    • An HDMI monitor

Customer feedback


‘Understanding the Linux Graphics Stack’ training is a very useful training that provides the essential knowledge to the teams that are planning to start developing Linux applications and/or drivers based on video protocols.”

Joao Pinto, Synopsys

By the way, you can also see evaluations from previous sessions. In the same way we are transparent with our training materials, we share all the evaluations that we collect, not only the best ones.

Participants with disabilities

Participants with disabilities who have special needs are invited to contact us to discuss adaptations to the training course.

Contact

For any question, registration or comment, you can contact us:

Further details about our courses