Linux 6.13 released, Bootlin contributions inside

Penguin coding, AI generatedLinux 6.13 has been released last Sunday and a few lucky kernel developers won some guitar pedals assembled by Linus Torvalds himself! As usual, we recommend looking at the excellent coverage from LWN.net of the 6.13 merge window to get a high-level overview of the main changes and new features: part 1 and part 2. KernelNewbies also has a nice thoroughly documented page about the Linux 6.13 updates.

On our side, we contributed a total of 96 patches to this release, making Bootlin the 22nd contributing company by number of commits. In addition to those direct contributions, Bootlin engineers also reviewed/merged 77 patches from other contributors, as part of their role of being kernel maintainers. Most notably, Alexandre Belloni reviewed/merged 53 patches from other contributors as the RTC and I3C subsystems maintainer, while Miquèl Raynal merged 17 patches from other contributors as an MTD subsystem co-maintainer.

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Updated Buildroot support for STM32MP1 and STM32MP2 platforms, ST BSP v6.0

Bootlin is an authorized partner of STThe buildroot-external-st project is an extension of the Buildroot build system with ready-to-use configurations for the STMicroelectronics STM32MP1 and STM32MP2 platforms.

More specifically, this project is a BR2_EXTERNAL repository for Buildroot, with a number of defconfigs that allow to quickly build embedded Linux systems for the STM32MPU Discovery Kit platforms and Evaluation board. It’s a great way to get started with Buildroot on those platforms.

Today, we are happy to announce an updated version of this project, published under the branch st/2024.02.9 at https://github.com/bootlin/buildroot-external-st.

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Bootlin Training: In-person public sessions are back!

Icon from www.flaticon.comBootlin training courses have long been recognized for their quality and effectiveness. Before the COVID era, we offered in-person sessions either on-site at customer locations for larger groups or as public sessions at our facilities, bringing together engineers from multiple companies. However, with the onset of the pandemic, we transitioned exclusively to online training. Since then, we have resumed in-person sessions at customer locations, but public sessions have yet to make a comeback—until now.

We’re excited to announce the return of our in-person public training sessions! The first session will focus on Linux kernel driver development and is scheduled for June 16-20, 2025, in Lyon, France. This course will be conducted by none other than Bootlin engineer and Linux kernel maintainer Grégory Clement.

For participants who prefer an in-person learning experience, this session provides a valuable opportunity for direct interaction with our trainer and fellow attendees. It’s an excellent alternative to online sessions, fostering deeper engagement and collaboration.

Seats are available at the standard rate of 2100 EUR per participant, with a discounted rate of 2000 EUR per participant under certain conditions.

Beyond this Linux kernel driver development in-person public session, we have plans to also open in-person public sessions for our Embedded Linux system development, Yocto Project/OpenEmbedded system development and Debugging, tracing, profiling and performance analysis with Linux training courses. Do not hesitate to contact us if you’re interested. Your feedback will help us gauge interest and schedule these sessions accordingly.

Bootlin at FOSDEM 2025 and co-located events

FOSDEM 2025The highly popular and super interesting FOSDEM conference will as usual take place the first week-end of February in Brussels. Many Bootlin engineers have been attending the event over the years, and we highly recommend anyone in the open-source ecosystem to attend at least once to get a sense of what FOSDEM looks like, and benefit from the hundreds of talks that are given.

This year, no less than 10 Bootlin engineers will be attending FOSDEM: Thomas Perrot, Louis Chauvet, Luca Ceresoli, Hervé Codina, Alexis Lothore, Théo Lebrun, Mathieu Dubois-Briand, Antonin Godard, Thomas Bonnefille and Thomas Petazzoni.

In addition, Mathieu Dubois-Briand and Antonin Godard will both be attending the OpenEmbedded Workshop 2025, which takes place on Monday right after FOSDEM, and Mathieu will be giving a talk Yocto Build Failure Swat Team – Workflow and Updates:

All Yocto branches under active maintenance, in addition to any patches proposed on the mailing lists, are built on the Yocto autobuilder. The Yocto SWAT team is responsible for monitoring build failures, doing a first investigation of their causes, logging the issues, and notifying the relevant
owners.

In this session, Mathieu will outline tasks and processes of the SWAT team, along with the tooling and recent improvements.

And finally, Thomas Petazzoni and Thomas Bonnefille will be attending the Buildroot Developer Days, organized right after FOSDEM.

Do not hesitate to get in touch with us during FOSDEM or the co-located events!

2024 at Bootlin: a year in review

2024 a year in reviewFirst of all, the entire Bootlin team wishes everyone a Happy New Year and best wishes for 2025!

The end of a year and the beginning of the next one is often the right time to look back at what has been achieved, and think about what’s coming next. And we’re going to do exactly this in this blog post, summing up 2024 at Bootlin, a year that has been very active.

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Cyber Resilience Act (CRA) – overview

The Cyber Resilience Act (CRA) was adopted by the European Council on October 10, 2024. It was then published in the Official journal of the EU on November 20, 2024 and enters into force today, December 10, 2024. Most of the law will start applying in 3 years, on December 11, 2027.

However, the obligation for manufacturers to report any actively exploited vulnerability or any security incident impacting the security of their product to ENISA will apply from September 11, 2026.
The other parts of the law that will start applying from June 11, 2026 apply to the member states and specify the details of setting up the administrative entities that will assess conformity with the CRA.

At Bootlin, we have been paying close attention to this topic for several reasons. First, the CRA will affect a large number of our clients, as almost every embedded device sold in the EU will need to comply with it. Second, the CRA also affects us directly, for instance as the maintainer of Snagboot.

This post is therefore the first in a series that will present our understanding of the CRA, and clearly lay out what one needs to have in mind in order to be confident of one’s compliance on time.

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OpenWrt support for STM32MP updated and STM32MP2 added

Bootlin is happy to announce a new release of our OpenWrt feed openwrt-feed-st, which  provides integration of ST’s STM32MP platforms with the OpenWrt build system. This new release openstlinux-6.1-openwrt-master-mpu-v24.06.26 updates the BSP software components and adds support for the new STM32MP2 platform.

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Upgrading Snagboot to a fully-fledged factory flashing tool

Snagboot is a fully open-source and vendor-agnostic recovery and flashing tool released by Bootlin in 2023. It is composed of snagrecover and snagflash, which respectively run U-Boot on a target platform using USB recovery mode and flash non-volatile storage devices using USB gadgets exposed by U-Boot.

While the combination of snagrecover and snagflash allows to reflash a board during development, it doesn’t fully address the needs of factory flashing: fast processing of multiple boards in parallel, monitoring of individual board statuses during the flashing process, and compatibility with Windows, which is the most often used operating system on factory floors.

Back in March 2024, Texas Instruments contacted Bootlin with a project request: to grow Snagboot into an efficient factory flashing tool. The goal was for factory operators to have a way of efficiently flashing groups of devices using a single user-friendly interface.

While this project could have been executed internally by engineers at Texas Instruments, the team at TI realized the importance of keeping this work agnostic to TI and driving this truly as an Open Source project. We thank TI for partnering with us and sponsoring us to deliver this tool that will cater to the flash writing needs of a variety of small and medium sized manufacturing houses & industry in general.

Consequently, Bootlin is proud to release the 2.0 version of Snagboot, which includes a factory flashing tool that runs on both Windows and Linux!

This tool supports a wide range of platforms from different vendors. All boards using supported SoCs are themselves supported without any extra effort, provided proper U-Boot support exists and USB recovery ports are routed in hardware.

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Welcome to Thomas Bonnefille

Thomas BonnefilleWe’re happy to announce that Thomas Bonnefille has just joined the Bootlin engineering team!

Thomas Bonnefille recently graduated from ENSEEIHT, an engineering school based in Toulouse, France. During his studies, he actively participated to 7Robot, the ENSEEIHT robotics club, thanks to which he got involved in his first embedded Linux project: building a robot that ranked 9 out of a hundred participating teams at the French Robotic Cup.

Following this success, Thomas did his final internship at Bootlin, during which he worked on Buildroot, U-Boot and Linux kernel support and drivers for several RISC-V platforms. During his internship, he also got the chance to following many of the training courses offered by Bootlin.

Thomas is now joining our team as a full-time engineer, to work with our growing team based in Toulouse, to help our customers on numerous embedded Linux projects.

Thomas Bonnefille is also the fourth Thomas to work at Bootlin, after Thomas Petazzoni, Thomas Perrot and Thomas Richard! 🙂

Please see Thomas’s Bootlin page and LinkedIn profile.

Linux 6.12 released, Bootlin contributions inside

Linux 6.12 has been released during the past week-end, pretty much as expected after 7 release candidates. As usual, we recommend our readers to go through the amazing LWN.net articles covering the 6.12 merge window (part 1, part 2) to get a high-level overview of the major new features and improvements in this 6.12 release. One of the prominent improvement in this release, as far as the embeded industry is concerned, is obviously the merge of the final bits enabling PREEMPT_RT… which already caused our Real-Time Linux with PREEMPT_RT training course to be updated.

As usual, Bootlin again contributed to this release: with 118 commits merged, we are again in the top 20 contributing companies! Also, in addition to contributing our own code, several of our engineers are also maintainers, and as part of this work those engineers review and merge patches from other contributors. As part of this effort, for this 6.12 release:

  • Alexandre Belloni, as the RTC and I3C subsystems maintainer, merged 29 patches from other contributors
  • Miquèl Raynal, as the MTD subsystem co-maintainer, merged 24 patches from other contributors
  • Grégory Clement, as the Marvell platform maintainer, merged 4 patches from other contributors

Overall, 13 active Bootlin engineers made contributions to this release, which on a total staff of 24 people, means that more than half of our team has contributed to the Linux kernel for 6.12, a good indication of our strong focus on Linux kernel development and upstreaming!

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