Back from Display Next Hackfest 2025

This year, the Linux Display Next Hackfest was hosted by AMD in Toronto. The event brought together a diverse group of contributors from a wide range of projects and companies, all united by a shared interest in advancing Linux Graphics. Participants included kernel developers, compositor maintainers, hardware vendors, and others deeply involved in the graphics stack. For the second year in a row, I had the opportunity to attend in person—an important step for Bootlin, as staying closely engaged with the latest developments in the Linux Graphics Stack is key to delivering upstream-friendly, cutting-edge support for our customers.

As usual, a wide range of topics were discussed: commit failure feedback, backlight API, adaptive backlight management, testing, pageflip, scheduling, variable refresh rate (VRR), atomic commits, and others. What made this edition especially noteworthy was the presence of two color experts: a full day was dedicated to exploring HDR—what it is, how it works, and how we can support it properly in Linux.

Display Next Hackfest 2025

You can read the notes for this event on Harry’s blog, or from Xaver Hugl, more will probably be posted later by other participants.

Continue reading “Back from Display Next Hackfest 2025”

Linux 6.16 released, Bootlin contributions

Penguin coding, AI generatedLinux 6.16 was released last Sunday, and as usual LWN provides the best coverage of what’s new: part 1 and part 2, as well as the KernelNewbies.org page for this release.

This time around, the engineers at Bootlin contributed 89 patches to the 6.16 release, but also as maintainers, they reviewed/merged 117 patches from other contributors!

Continue reading “Linux 6.16 released, Bootlin contributions”

Snagboot 2.4 release overview

Snagboot 2.4Snagboot is an open-source and vendor-neutral tool to recover and reflash a wide variety of embedded platforms, leveraging the communication protocols offered by the boot ROMs of most modern system-on-chips. It replaces unpractical, vendor-specific and often closed-source tools provided by silicon vendors.

Spring 2025 has been especially rich in Snagboot contributions. Various bug fixes, feature requests and even support for additional SoC families have been submitted to the official  repository. Version 2.4 of Snagboot was released last Monday, which gives us a good opportunity to take a closer look at some of these improvements.

Continue reading “Snagboot 2.4 release overview”

Bootlin Gears Up for ELCE 2025 with 25 Engineers and 8 Talks

This year’s edition of the Embedded Linux Conference Europe will take place as part of the broader Open Source Summit Europe, on August 25–27 in Amsterdam, Netherlands.

Open Source Summit Europe 2025

As usual, Bootlin will have a strong presence at this major event in the Embedded Linux ecosystem. This year, however, our presence will be especially significant, with no fewer than 25 of our engineers attending and 8 talks given by our team. We’ll also be taking part in several co-located events.

Continue reading “Bootlin Gears Up for ELCE 2025 with 25 Engineers and 8 Talks”

Step-by-Step Guide to Adding SoC and Board Support to Zephyr with CH32V303

ZephyrThis post is the sixth in our series about Zephyr. You can find the previous episodes below:

  1. Getting started with Zephyr
  2. Understanding Zephyr’s Blinky example
  3. Zephyr: Implementing a Device Driver for a sensor
  4. Integrating ST7789H2 Display Support on STM32L562E-DK with Zephyr: A Step-by-Step Guide
  5. Zephyr: making a driver for the Nunchuk joystick

In this sixth post, we will explore how to add support for a new System-on-Chip (SoC) and a new board in the Zephyr operating system.

Continue reading “Step-by-Step Guide to Adding SoC and Board Support to Zephyr with CH32V303”

Bootlin engineer Louis Chauvet at the 2025 Display Next Hackfest

Like last year, Bootlin engineer Louis Chauvet is attending the 2025 Display Next Hackfest, taking place this week in Toronto, Canada, and hosted by AMD.

As described on the event website:

The Display Next Hackfest is an event where talented developers will gather to explore the latest technologies and trends in the Linux Display Stack. It has an unconference format where participants propose topics for presenting, roadmapping, discussing and examining together. It aims to unblock bottlenecks, design solutions, raise pitfalls and accommodate the needs of each layer of the display stack. Participants should feel free to propose any topic which interests them. Some topics from the previous edition include: HDR and color management, frame timing and variable refresh rate (VRR), atomic flips, backlight control, testing and CI, etc.

Attending this hackfest is especially important for Bootlin, as it allows us to stay actively involved in the upstream Linux graphics ecosystem. By participating in discussions and collaborative problem-solving sessions with key contributors and maintainers, we ensure that our expertise remains aligned with the latest developments and best practices. This also strengthens our ability to support our customers with state-of-the-art display integration and driver development, while contributing improvements and fixes back to the community.

Materials for our “Embedded Linux Networking” training released

Bootlin Embedded Linux networking trainingBack in April 2025, we announced the launch of a brand new training course titled Embedded Linux Networking. At the time, the course was still under active development, and training materials were not yet available.

Since then, Bootlin engineer and networking expert Maxime Chevallier has finalized the course and successfully delivered it to our launch customer in the US, receiving excellent participant feedback. With this first session completed, and in line with our long-standing commitment to open-source education, we are pleased to release the complete training materials under the Creative Commons BY-SA license:

Here are a few highlights from participant feedback on the first session:

The amount of information shared was incredible.

Maxime’s knowledge of the subject is outstanding. He presented the material fluently without simply reading from the slides. His English was excellent, and the content was clearly communicated.

Maxime demonstrated deep expertise and answered every question thoroughly. His passion for the topic was evident throughout.

Thank you for the training; it was very well done.

If you’re interested in joining this training, we offer several options:

We hope these freely available materials, along with the training itself, will be valuable resources for engineers tackling networking challenges in their Embedded Linux projects.

Linux 6.15 released, Bootlin contributions inside

Penguin coding, AI generatedLinux 6.15 has been released last Sunday, and we as usual encourage our readers to look at the LWN summaries of the merge window (part 1, part 2) for a good summary. CNX-Software also has a summary more oriented towards hardware support for ARM and RISC-V platforms.

On our side, we have been quite active in this release cycle, with no less than 145 commits from Bootlin engineers merged. Also, our engineers who maintain various subsystems in the Linux kernel reviewed and merged a total of 104 patches from other contributors.

Continue reading “Linux 6.15 released, Bootlin contributions inside”

Safe updates using RAUC on Raspberry Pi 5

RAUC on RaspberryPi 5As part of a recent project at Bootlin, we implemented A/B Over-The-Air (OTA) updates on a a system based on the RaspberryPi 5 using RAUC. We ended up not using U-Boot as a bootloader and instead rely solely on the RaspberryPi firmware as a bootloader. This post will dive into the details of making this happen, and some advanced features of RAUC.

Continue reading “Safe updates using RAUC on Raspberry Pi 5”

Bootlin talk at Embedded Recipes: “Yocto Project and OpenEmbedded: Recent Changes and Future Directions”

Embedded RecipesAs we previously announced, Bootlin is proud to be a Chef Sponsor of Embedded Recipes 2025. A large part of our team will be attending the event, which takes place on May 14–15 in Nice, France.

We’re also excited to share that Bootlin engineer Antonin Godard will be giving a talk titled Yocto Project and OpenEmbedded: Recent Changes and Future Directions. As the official maintainer of the Yocto Project documentation, Antonin brings a unique perspective on the latest developments and upcoming changes in Yocto/OpenEmbedded. Here is the full abstract of his talk:

The Yocto Project and OpenEmbedded form the foundation of many embedded Linux systems, providing a powerful and flexible build system for custom distributions. In this talk, Antonin Godard, embedded Linux engineer at Bootlin and Yocto Project documentation maintainer, will explore recent developments in the project, including key changes in the latest releases, improvements in tooling. Attendees will gain insights into the future roadmap of Yocto/OpenEmbedded and how these changes impact developers and system integrators. Whether you’re a long-time Yocto user or just getting started, this session will help you stay up to date with the latest advancements in the ecosystem.

There’s still time to secure your seat at Embedded Recipes—don’t miss this unique single-track conference that fosters deep technical exchange and networking. And of course, take advantage of the beautiful spring weather in Nice while you’re there!