As announced some time ago on Debian Backport s mailing list I will be backporting Qt 6 to Debian 11 Bullseye . This comprises the (so far) 29 source packages that compose Qt 6 and libassimp. The Qt Company wanted to let us Debian users also enjoy Qt 6 on Bullseye, so they contacted me (and by extension my employer ICS) to bring this forward. As said in the mail I sent to the backports list I m making the commitment to maintain the packages myself, but I m really happy the Qt Company asked me for this. You can download Qt 6 for Debian Bullseye s backports by following the instructions. Also a big kudos to IOhannes m zm lnig, the assimp maintainer, who promptly helped me to get it backported. Enjoy!

Almost ten months ago, I mentioned on this blog I bought an ARM laptop, which is now my main machine while away from home a Lenovo Yoga C630 13Q50. Yes, yes, I am still not as much away from home as I used to before, as this pandemic is still somewhat of a thing, but I do move more. My main activity in the outside world with my laptop is teaching. I teach twice a week, and well, having a display for my slides and for showing examples in the terminal and such is a must. However, as I said back in August, one of the hardware support issues for this machine is: It has sadly not yet been solved While many things have improved since kernel 5.12 (the first I used), the Device Tree does not yet hint at where external video might sit. So, I went to the obvious: Many people carry different kinds of video adaptors I carry a slightly bulky one: A RPi3 For two months already (time flies!), I had an ugly contraption where the RPi3 connected via Ethernet and displayed a VNC client, and my laptop had a VNC server. Oh, but did I mention My laptop works so much better with Wayland than with Xorg that I switched, and am now a happy user of the Sway compositor (a drop-in replacement for the i3 window manager). It is built over WLRoots, which is a great and (relatively) simple project, but will thankfully not carry some of Gnome or KDE s ideas not even those I d rather have. So it took a bit of searching; I was very happy to find WayVNC, a VNC server for wlroot-sbased Wayland compositors. I launched a second Wayland, to be able to have my main session undisturbed and present only a window from it. Only that VNC is slow and laggy, and sometimes awkward. So I kept searching for something better. And something better is, happily, what I was finally able to do! In the laptop, I am using wf-recorder to grab an area of the screen and funnel it into a V4L2 loopback device (which allows it to be used as a camera, solving the main issue with grabbing parts of a Wayland screen): (yes, my V4L2Loopback device is set to /dev/video10). You will note I m grabbing a 960 540 rectangle, which is the top of my screen (1920x1080) minus the Waybar. I think I ll increase it to 960 720, as the projector to which I connect the Raspberry has a 4 3 output. After this is sent to /dev/video10, I tell ffmpeg to send it via RTP to the fixed address of the Raspberry: Yes, some uglier things happen here. You will note /tmp/video.sdp is created in the laptop itself; this file describes the stream s metadata so it can be used from the client side. I cheated and copied it over to the Raspberry, doing an ugly hardcode along the way: People familiar with RTP will scold me: How come I m streaming to the unicast client address? I should do it to an address in the 224.0.0.0 239.0.0.0 range. And it worked, sometimes. I switched over to 10.0.0.100 because it works, basically always Finally, upon bootup, I have configured NoDM to start a session with the user user, and dropped the following in my user s .xsession: Anyway, as a result, my students are able to much better follow the pace of my presentation, and I m able to do some tricks better (particularly when it requires quick reaction times, as often happens when dealing with concurrency and such issues). Oh, and of course in case it s of interest to anybody, knowing that SD cards are all but reliable in the long run, I wrote a vmdb2 recipe to build the images. You can grab it here; it requires some local files to be present to be built some are the ones I copied over above, and the other ones are surely of no interest to you (such as my public ssh key or such :-] ) What am I still missing? (read: Can you help me with some ideas? )

• I d prefer having Ethernet-over-USB. I have the USB-C Ethernet adapter, which powers the RPi and provides a physical link, but I m sure I could do away with the fugly cable wrapped around the machine
• Of course, if that happens, I would switch to a much sexier Zero RPi. I have to check whether the video codec is light enough for a plain ol Zero (armel) or I have to use the much more powerful Zero 2 I prefer sticking to the lowest possible hardware!
• Naturally The best would be to just be able to connect my USB-C-to- HDMI,VGA adapter, that has been sitting idly One day, I guess

Of course, this is a blog post published to brag about my stuff, but also to serve me as persistent memory in case I need to recreate this

Sometimes I have remote meetings with Google Meet. Unlike the other video-conferencing services that I use (Bluejeans, Zoom), my video was stretched out of proportion under Google Meet with Firefox. I haven't found out why this was happening, but I did figure out a work-around. Thanks to Daniel Silverstone, Rob Kendrick, Gregor Herrmann and Ben Allen for pointing me in the right direction! Hardware The lovely Sony RX-100 mk3 that I bought in 2015 has spent most of its life languishing unused. During the Pandemic, once I was working from home all the time, I decided to press-gang it into service as a better-quality webcam. Newer models of this camera the mark 4 onwards have support for a USB mode called "PC Remote", which effectively makes them into webcams. Unfortunately my mark 3 does not support this, but it does have HDMI out, so I picked up a cheap "HDMI to USB Video Capture Card" from eBay. Video modes This device offers a selection of different video modes over a webcam interface. I used qv4l2 to explore the different modes. It became clear that the camera was outputting a signal at 16:9, but the modes on offer from the dongle were for a range of different aspect ratios. The picture for these other ratios was not letter or pillar-boxed, but stretched to fit. I also noticed that the modes which had the correct aspect ratio were at very low framerates: 1920x1080@5fps, 1360x768@8fps, 1280x720@10fps. It felt to me that I would look unnatural at such a low framerate. The most promising mode was close to the right ratio, 720x480 and 30 fps. Software My initial solution is to use the v4l2loopback kernel module, which provides a virtual loop-back webcam interface. I can write video data to it from one process, and read it back from another. Loading it as follows:

modprobe v4l2loopback exclusive_caps=1

The option exclusive_caps configures the module into a mode where it initially presents a write-only interface, but once a process has opened a file handle, it then switches to read-only for subsequent processes. Assuming there are no other camera devices connected at the time of loading the module, it will create /dev/video0.¹ I experimented briefly with OBS Studio, the very versatile and feature-full streaming tool, which confirmed that I could use filters on the source video to fix the aspect ratio, and emit the result to the virtual device. I don't otherwise use OBS, though, so I achieve the same result using ffmpeg:

fmpeg -s 720x480 -i /dev/video1 -r 30 -f v4l2 -vcodec rawvideo \
    -pix_fmt yuyv422 -s 720x405 /dev/video0

The source options are to select the source video mode I want. The codec and pixel formats are to match what is being emitted (I determined that using ffprobe on the camera device). The resizing is triggered by supplying a different size to the -s parameter. I think that is equivalent to explicitly selecting a "scale" filter, and there might be other filters that could be used instead (to add pillar boxes for example). This worked just as well. In Google Meet, I select the Virtual Camera, and Google Meet is presented with only one video mode, in the correct aspect ratio, and no configurable options for it, so it can't misbehave. Future I'm planning to automate the loading (and unloading) of the module and starting the ffmpeg process in response to the real camera device being plugged or unplugged, using systemd events and services. (I don't leave the camera plugged in all the time due to some bad USB behaviour I've experienced if I do so.) If I get that working, I will write a follow-up.

This is a kernel module I cooked in a couple of days. The idea is to expose a v4l device that gets its data from user space.

I had 2 use cases in mind:
1) Educational purpose for myself (I'm really a kernel noob).
2) Streaming movies over skype, google talk, ... etc.

The idea could be good or completely rubbish but hey ? Learning can only be done with stupid ideas!

The code is highly unstable. It shouldn't oops the kernel but I'm not responsible. I've been developing and testing it inside qemu.

Clone it from the git repository via:

Here are a few missing bits off the top of my head:

* I'm not following the kernel coding style yet ;-)
* I'm sure my locking, unlocking and concurrency handling is flawed.
* The code is a bit fragile.
* It'd be nice to implement mmap support for the character device. This should eliminate data copies.
* Perhaps expose the character device all the time and generate "fake" frames when streaming starts ? Problem now is one has to be very fast in feeding data to the module otherwise select() on the v4l device will timeout.
* Many more...

If someone finds this idea useful, please drop me a line.
Comments, use cases, ideas and tips are really welcomed!

If I see a lot of interest, I might try to push it to the kernel tree one day ;-)

Update: Seems vloopback already exists and renders my code useless. I might still do something with it as my idea seems a bit simpler but whatever.

Update 2: There's also v4l2loopback and its fork. read more