Author: Michael Opdenacker

Michael Opdenacker is the founder of Bootlin, and was its CEO until 2021. He is best known for all the free embedded Linux and kernel training materials that he created together with Thomas Petazzoni. He is always looking for ways to increase performance, reduce size and boot time, and to maximize Linux' world domination. More details...

Embedded Linux and Ecology

Embedded Linux contributions to the Linux Ecology HOWTO.

Bootlin has contributed major updates to the Linux Ecology HOWTO, a Linux Documentation Project document that gathers ideas and techniques for using Linux in an environmentally friendly way.

In particular, Bootlin took advantage of its experience with embedded Linux system development to add new techniques which can reduce power consumption or make it possible to extend the lifetime of old systems with limited resources.

Bootlin also contributed an overview presentation on this HOWTO. The latest HOWTO version with our updates (waiting for the next official release) can also be found on the same page.

CELF conference videos

Videos from the 2006 CE Linux Forum conference in Santa Clara, California

For people who couldn’t make it to the 2006 edition of the CE Linux Forum conference, Bootlin is happy to share the following videos, shot by Michael Opdenacker:

  • Keynote, by Tim Bird (Sony):
    video, slides (46 minutes, 139 MB)
  • Usability of User-Space device drivers, by a speaker from Renesas:
    video, slides (50 minutes, 256 MB)
  • What’s New with Busybox, by Rob Landley (TimeSys):
    video (55 minutes, 322 MB)
  • Topics in Embedded Power Management, by Todd Poynor (MontaVista):
    video, slides (44 minutes, 253 MB)
  • CE Linux Forum Open Test Lab, by Matt Locke (Nomad Global Solutions):
    video (35 minutes, 213 MB)
  • Power Management Panel, by Mark Gross (Intel):
    video (55 minutes, 360 MB)
  • Panel: Tips for Mainlining, From the Experts (starring Greg K.H., Greg Ungerer, Matt Mackall), by Tim Bird (Sony):
    video (34 minutes, 230 MB)
  • MIPS BOF, by Arvind Kumar (MIPS):
    video (53 minutes, 268 MB)
  • uClinux, by Greg Ungerer (SnapGear):
    video, slides (44 minutes, 235 MB)
  • Examining Linux Kernel Size, by Munehiro Ikeda (NEC):
    video, slides (42 minutes, 247 MB)
  • Integrating DirectFB into a UHAPI Platform, by Denis Kropp (directfb.org):
    video, slides (31 minutes, 93 MB)
  • Linux Trace Toolkit Next Generation, by Mathieu Desnoyers (École Polytechnique de Montréal):
    video, slides (34 minutes, 211 MB)
  • MythTV on Philips Nexperia PNX8550, by Klaas de Waal (Philips):
    video, slides (50 minutes, 293 MB)
  • Visualizing Resource Usage During Initialization of Embedded Systems (embootchart), by Matthew Klahn (Motorola):
    video, slides (51 minutes, 236 MB)
  • State of Linux Real-time BOF, by Manas Saksena (TimeSys):
    video (42 minutes, 297 MB)
  • Closing Activity: Embedded Linux Quiz, by Tim Bird (Sony):
    video (22 minutes, 235 MB)

Slides are being collected on http://tree.celinuxforum.org/CelfPubWiki/ELC2006Presentations.

You may also be interested in our report, published by LWN.net.

Fosdem 2006 videos

Videos from the Fosdem conference in Brussels

For people who couldn’t go to the 2006 edition of Fosdem, one of the 2 most popular worldwide meetings for Free Software developers, or who couldn’t attend all the presentations they were interested in, Bootlin is happy to share the below 12 videos from this event:

  • Software patents, by Richard Stallman (Free Software Foundation):
    video (83 minutes, 345 MB)
  • SETR LiveCD, live tool for embedded development, by Hector Oron:
    video (30 minutes – lacks the first 5 minutes, 93 MB)
  • Optimizing the Linux kernel and applications, by
    Michael Opdenacker (Bootlin): video (49 minutes, 129 MB)
  • Lock-Free Data Exchange for Real-time applications, by Peter Soetens (Flander’s Mechatronics Technology Center, Leuven):
    video (49 minutes, 170 MB)
  • Alsa SoC layer, by Liam Girdwood (Wolfson Microelectronics):
    video (37 minutes, 95 MB)
  • The Maemo development platform, by Tommi Komulainen (Nokia):
    video (45 minutes, 151 MB)
  • Building and supporting distributions with OpenEmbedded,
    by Koen Kooi (Familiar release manager):
    video (48 minutes, 179 MB)
  • Towards a common embedded power management solution, by
    David Weinehall and Sampsa Fabritius (Nokia): video (81 minutes, 292 MB)
  • Real-time patches for Linux, by Klaas van Gend (MontaVista):
    video (55 minutes, 126 MB)
  • SLIND, a small Debian for embedded systems, by Benjamin Collar (Siemens):
    video (55 minutes, 161 MB)
  • Openocd, the Open On-Chip Debugger, by Dominic Rath (University of Applied Sciences, Augsburg):
    video (40 minutes, 128 MB)
  • The challenge of the GNU/Linux desktop, by Jeff Waugh (Ubuntu / Gnome):
    video (53 minutes, 176 MB)

See the abstracts of the presentations in the embedded track. Many other Fosdem videos can be found here.

Though most videos are related to the embedded topic, anyone could be be interested in Richard Stallman’s arguments on Software Patents as well as in Jeff Vaugh’s very entertaining keynote.

These videos are available under the Creative Commons Attribution – Share Alike 2.5 license.

Many other videos from Fosdem can be found here.

Happy 2006 with a penguin!

Penguin New Year wishes and good reasons for using Free Software in 2006

Bootlin wishes a Happy New Year to embedded system developers and to all members of the Free Software and Open Source community.

Unlike other birds…
Penguins never freeze!
While most others stay locked in a cozy shelter…

In 2006,
with a penguin,
you can reach out,
withstand extreme conditions,
and pioneer an exciting world of opportunities!
Happy New Year!


2006 wish card, front

  • License: right to copy and modify if the copyright notice is kept. Graphic elements (trees, cottage…) can be copied and modified with no restriction (Public Domain).
  • Source (Scalable Vector Graphics, created with Inkscape) and generated files can be found here. Rooster, hen and penguin graphics come from the Open Clip Art project.
  • Contributed 3 reusable graphics (cottage, Christmas hat and pine tree) back to Open Clip Art.

New presentation

To make these wishes come true, Bootlin has also released a new presentation collecting the main strengths (and weaknesses too) of Free Software in embedded systems. It should help to make the decision to (or not to) rely on penguins in 2006 and in the years to come.

Free embedded Linux training: one year after

A summary of the improvements brought in 1 year to our free embedded linux training materials.

Since our first public release in October 2004, we made significant improvements to our free embedded Linux training materials:

  • The total number of slides increased from approximately 500 to more than 1000. Here are all available training materials and presentations.
  • New training materials: audio in embedded Linux systems, multimedia in embedded Linux systems.
  • New presentations: embedded Linux From Scratch… in 40 minutes, Linux on TI OMAP processors, free software development tools.
  • Added many sections, updates and improvements to our main document: embedded Linux kernel and driver development. If you haven’t checked it for 1 year, you will hardly recognize it!
  • Some of training labs now use the SkyEye emulator, which supports several arm boards. People can now practise with cross-compiling and booting the Linux kernel without having to purchase expensive development boards.
  • KernelKit, a live GNU/Linux distribution derived from Knoppix, was created for embedded systems and kernel developers. In particular, it includes uClibc cross-compiling toolchains for several platforms: arm, armeb, i386, m68k, mips, mipsel, ppc and sh4. KernelKit is used in our training labs.
  • The PDF versions of the documents now include internal and external hyperlinks, thanks to using OpenOffice.org 2.0. To navigate within the documents or to go to an external site, just click on the links in your favorite PDF reader.
  • Some utilities were created and shared with the community: clink (to compact cross-compiling toolchains), and cOOol (to report broken hyperlinks in OpenOffice.org documents).
  • The training materials were used for 12 training sessions delivered to embedded system companies and key silicon vendors.
  • The documents are now released under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution – ShareAlike 2.0 license, instead of the GNU Free Documentation License.
  • Some of the documents have been translated to French, German or Italian by several contributors.

Your corrections, suggestions, contributions and translations are welcome!

Introduction to the GNU/Linux and UNIX command line

Some of these documents are used in our training sessions. They are available under the Creative Commons BY-SA license (see details and other documents).

Here are the PDF versions:

Here are the source versions in OpenDocument Format:

Thanks to people who sent comments and corrections: Michael Kerrisk, Jim Donelson, Tyler Le, Laurent Thomas, Jeff Ghislain, Leif Thande, Frédéric Desmoulins, Przemysław Ciesielski

Free embedded Linux training materials

Bootlin embedded Linux training materials freely available

This was our first, initial annoucement in 2004. Since then, we have made huge improvements to our embedded Linux and Linux kernel and device driver development training courses. See all our training materials.

The 500 page materials of Bootlin’sembedded Linux training have just been published.

They are all released under the terms of the “GNU Free Documentation License (with no invariant sections).

Full training materials

Presentations