audio-iio-aux: when IIO meets audio

Some time ago, one of our customers came to us with a hardware design featuring the Renesas X9250 digital potentiometer in an audio path, as shown in the following diagram. Naturally, our goal was to find the proper way to support this hardware design in the upstream Linux kernel.

Audio path with potentiometer

Since the X9250 is part of an audio path, the first thing that came to mind was the ALSA subsystem of the Linux kernel. However, the Renesas X9250 is a generic digital potentiometer, and audio is only one of its many possible use cases.

The Linux kernel also has a separate subsystem called IIO (Industrial I/O), which provides support for a wide range of devices, including accelerometers, various types of sensors, ADCs, DACs, and potentiometers. Potentiometers are already supported by IIO, as can be seen in the drivers/iio/potentiometer directory.

IIO is not specific to audio, so implementing the Renesas X9250 driver as an IIO driver made more sense than implementing an ALSA-specific driver. This way, the same driver can be reused for non-audio use cases as well.

However, we still needed a way for the potentiometer to be handled as a regular component of an audio path through the ALSA subsystem.

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Bootlin toolchains 2026.08 released

Bootlin toolchains 2026.08We are happy to announce the release of a new version of our freely available, pre-compiled cross-compilation toolchains, hosted at toolchains.bootlin.com.

This update covers a range of 43 CPU architecture variants, including: aarch64, aarch64be, arcle-750d, arcle-hs38, armv5-eabi, armv6-eabihf, armv7-eabihf, armebv7-eabihf, armv7m, m68k-68xxx, m68k-coldfire, microblazebe, microblazeel, mips32, mips32el, mips32r5el, mips32r6el, mips64-n32, mips64el-n32, mips64r6el-n32, openrisc, powerpc-440fp, powerpc-e300c3, powerpc-e500mc, powerpc64-e5500, powerpc64-e6500, powerpc64-power8, powerpc64le-power8, riscv32-ilp32d, riscv64-lp64d, s390x-z13, sh-sh4, sh-sh4aeb, sparc64, sparcv8, x86-64, x86-64-v2, x86-64-v3, x86-64-v4, x86-64-core-i7, x86-core2, x86-i686, xtensa-lx60.

As with previous releases, we provide two editions of each toolchain: a stable version based on the N-1 releases of GCC, binutils, GDB, and slightly older kernel headers, and a bleeding edge version featuring the latest available components. For the 2026.08 release, the versions are:

  • The bleeding-edge toolchains are based on gcc 16.2, binutils 2.46.1, gdb 17.1, kernel headers 6.12, glibc 2.44, musl 1.2.6 or uclibc-ng 1.0.59.
  • The stable toolchains are based on gcc 15.3, binutils 2.45.1, gdb 16.3, kernel headers 5.10, glibc 2.44, musl 1.2.6 or uclibc-ng 1.0.59.

All toolchains are built for x86-64 Linux hosts and are compatible even with relatively old Linux distributions. We welcome bug reports and feedback through our project issue tracker.

Bootlin’s Yocto training course updated to Wrynose

Yocto ProjectThe latest Long Term Support release of the Yocto Project, Yocto Project 6.0 (Wrynose), was released a few months ago, so it was time to update our Yocto Project training materials. This update is now complete.

As with every new Yocto Project release, Wrynose brings a number of changes and new features. Some of them affect the way developers work with Yocto, so we have updated our slides and labs accordingly. In particular:

  • The bitbake-setup tool was introduced as the Yocto Project-supported way to fetch layers and set up a build configuration. This has been a long-requested feature, and it is now covered in our training.
  • As part of this change, the Poky Git repository has been deprecated and is no longer maintained. Users now fetch the base components through a bitbake-setup configuration file or by using an external tool.
  • Support for configuration fragments was added, making it possible to group related and consistent configuration settings together. This is intended to simplify configuration management, whether or not bitbake-setup is being used. The new bitbake-config-build command can be used to enable these fragments from the command line.
  • There are also internal changes that affect how recipes should be written. These changes are reflected in our training materials. For example, the introduction of UNPACKDIR changes how the S and WORKDIR variables can be used.

Updated labs

We continue to support four different boards in our practical labs:

  • STM32MP157A-DK1
  • i.MX93 FRDM
  • BeaglePlay
  • BeagleBone Black

For each of these platforms, we use either vendor-provided or community-supported layers, each approach has its own advantages and limitations.

The labs have therefore been updated alongside the training slides to ensure that they remain aligned with the latest Yocto Project release.

Join our Yocto Project training

As with all Bootlin training courses, the Yocto Project training materials are freely available on our website.

If you would like to attend the training with an instructor, we offer public online sessions scheduled by Bootlin. We can also organize private online or private on-site sessions on demand.

Our next public sessions with available seats are:

Whether you are new to the Yocto Project or want to update your existing knowledge, our training provides both the concepts and hands-on experience needed to build and maintain embedded Linux systems with Yocto.

sbom-cve-check 1.3.2 and 1.3.3: improved SBOM handling and more robust CVE analysis

sbom-cve-checkSince our previous update on sbom-cve-check, the project has continued to evolve with two new releases: version 1.3.2, released in June, and version 1.3.3, released in August.

These releases bring a number of improvements to the handling of SBOM data, CVE version ranges and vulnerability assessments, as well as fixes for some corner cases encountered when analyzing real-world software projects.

For those discovering the project, sbom-cve-check is a lightweight open-source tool developed by Bootlin for performing vulnerability analysis on Software Bill of Materials (SBOMs). It is based on SPDX SBOMs and can be used both as a standalone tool and through its integration in the Yocto Project. Since the Yocto Project’s Wrynose release, sbom-cve-check has been used as the Yocto Project’s official tool for CVE monitoring.

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yocto-kiss: updated to the Wrynose Yocto LTS release

meta-kissWe are pleased to announce that yocto-kiss, our minimal but realistic Yocto/OpenEmbedded reference setup, has been updated to the latest Wrynose Yocto LTS release (version 6.0). Following the addition of ZynqMP support and the move to a cleaner multi-layer architecture earlier this year, this update keeps the project aligned with the current Yocto LTS and brings several improvements we’d like to highlight.

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Snagboot v3.0 is released!

SnagbootSnagboot has just received its second major version number increase since its initial release in 2023! The jump to 2.0 had been made to mark the introduction of Snagfactory, back in 2024. Almost two years have passed since then, and contributions to the project have been going strong! The milestone which underlies our decision to jump to 3.0 is a major overhaul of Snagfactory, turning it into a QT6-based app.

Let’s look back at some notable changes since the last release.

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Linux 7.2 released, Bootlin contributions inside

TuxLinux 7.2 has been released last Sunday afternoon. You can take a look at the whole content of this new version thanks to LWN merge window posts (see part 1 and part 2). As stated by Linus Torvalds himself, the final week of this release has not been a peaceful endeavour (with some late reverts being needed), but this phenomenon seems to be slowly becoming “the new normal thing”. You can find more details and facts about this release in the 7.2 coverage from LWN.

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Understanding the Linux Graphics Stack is now available as a self-paced video course

Understanding the Linux graphics stack trainingBootlin’s Understanding the Linux Graphics Stack training course is now available as a self-paced, pre-recorded video course on Udemy.

This course has previously been offered as an instructor-led training course. We are now changing its format: it is no longer available as an instructor-led course and is instead offered as a pre-recorded course that you can follow at your own pace.

For now, Understanding the Linux Graphics Stack is the only Bootlin training course available in a self-paced format. All of our other training courses continue to be offered as instructor-led training sessions.

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Bootlin at Open Source Summit Europe 2026 and Linux Plumbers 2026

PragueFrom October 5 to October 9 this year, Prague will be the place to be for the open-source community, and especially for embedded open-source developers. The Open Source Summit Europe will take place there from October 7 to 9, while Linux Plumbers Conference will run from October 5 to 7. Numerous co-located events are also being organized around these two major conferences.

Bootlin will once again have a strong presence in Prague, both in terms of attendance and technical presentations.

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Netconf 2026 and Netdev 0x1a

From the 13th to 16th of July in Rome, Italy, 130 Linux Kernel developers specialized in networking gathered at the Netdev 0x1a Conference, accompanied by 50 people attending remotely.

As someone who works a lot on Network drivers for Embedded Linux devices, I attended the event as well as the Netconf conference, a smaller conference that took place on the first day of the event and gathered Network Maintainers and Contributors to discuss ongoing topics in the Linux Kernel Networking ecosystem.

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