Bootlin at the Buildroot hackathon

During a 3-day week-end, between March 31 and April 2, the Buildroot project organized a hackathon in Paris with six core/active developers of the project. The goal of this meeting was to make progress on outstanding patch series and reduce the backlog of contributions waiting in the project patchwork. Thomas Petazzoni, CTO and embedded Linux engineer at Bootlin participated to the event, joining Arnout Vandecappelle, Peter Korsgaard, Yann E. Morin, Romain Naour and Maxime Hadjinlian in the fantastic location provided by Scaleway.

Thomas summarized the progress day by day in three separate e-mails sent on the mailing list:

• Day 1 highlights
• Day 2 highlights
• Day 3 highlights

The most important achievements were:

• Merge of a patch series from Yann E. Morin that reworks how filesystem images are generated, to make this process compatible with top-level parallel build.
• Merge of a patch series from Maxime Hadjinlian (with significant contributions from Yann E. Morin) that implements caching of Git downloads, significantly reducing the time needed to clone different versions of the same project through Git, especially big projects like the Linux kernel. An extensive summary of the changes was posted by Thomas on the mailing list.
• Merge of a golang-package infrastructure, contributed by Angelo Compagnucci, to help building packages written in Go, and using the standardized Go build system.
• The check-package tool was extended to validate the coding style of files outside the package/ folder, thanks to a contribution from Ricardo Martincoski.
• Arnout worked on a significant number of pending Qt5 patches, and specifically merged the bump to Qt 5.10.
• The LLVM patch series from Valentin Korenblit was reviewed, and thanks to this work, the initial LLVM package was merged a few days after the hackathon.
• Last but not least, a large number of patches sitting in patchwork have been discussed, and either applied (after some rework) or reviewed (with comments made on the mailing list).

In total, 222 commits have been pushed to the master branch during this meeting, and the backlog of patches has reduced from ~350 patches to ~175 patches.

Once again, the Buildroot community would like to thank Scaleway for hosting this event! The next Buildroot meeting will most likely take place right before the Embedded Linux Conference in Edinburgh, on October 20-21.