Author: Thomas Petazzoni

Thomas Petazzoni is Bootlin's co-owner and CEO. Thomas joined Bootlin in 2008 as a kernel and embedded Linux engineer, became CTO in 2013, and co-owner/CEO in 2021. More details...

Bootlin contributions to Linux 5.14 and 5.15

It’s been a while we haven’t posted about Bootlin contributions to the Linux kernel, and in fact missed both the Linux 5.14 and Linux 5.15 releases, which we will cover in this blog post.

Linux 5.14 was released on August 29, 2021. The usual KernelNewbies.org page and the LWN articles on the merge window (part 1 and part 2) provide the best summaries of the new features and hardware support offered by this release.

Linux 5.15 on the other hand was released on November 1, 2021. Here as well, we have a great KernelNewbies.org article and LWN articles on the merge window (part 1 and part 2).

In total for those two releases, Bootlin contributed 79 commits, in various areas:

  • Alexandre Belloni, as the RTC subsystem maintainer, contributed 9 patches improving various aspects of RTC drivers, the RTC subsystem or Device Tree bindings for RTC
  • Clément Léger contributed a small improvement to the at_xdmac driver used on Microchip ARM platforms
  • Hervé Codina enabled Ethernet support on the old ST Spear320 SoC, by leveraging the existing stmmac Ethernet controller driver
  • Maxime Chevallier fixed a small issue with the Ethernet PHY on the i.MX6 Solidrun system-on-module
  • Miquèl Raynal added support for NV-DDR timings in the MTD susbsystem. This allows to improve performance with NAND flash memories that support those timings. Their usage is specifically implemented in the Arasan NAND controller driver, which Miquèl contributed back in Linux 5.8. See our previous blog post on this topic for more details
  • Miquèl Raynal added support for yet another NAND controller driver, the ARM PL35x, which is used for example on Xilinx Zynq 7000. See our previous blog post on this topic.
  • Miquèl Raynal added support for NAND chips with large pages (larger than 4 KB) to the OMAP GPMC driver.
  • Miquèl Raynal made a few fixes to the IIO driver for the max1027 ADC.
  • Paul Kocialkowski contributed a few patches to enable usage of the Hantro video decoder driver on the Rockchip PX30 processor.
  • Thomas Perrot contributed one patch to enable usage of the Flex Timers on i.MX7, and one to fix an issue in the PL022 SPI controller driver.

And now, as usual the complete list of our contributions to Linux 5.14 and 5.15:

New training course: Real-Time Linux with PREEMPT_RT

In the field of embedded systems, a number of applications need real-time guarantees, and the Linux ecosystem has been offering for a long time a number of solutions to address those needs, either by improving the Linux kernel itself using the PREEMPT_RT approach, or by using a co-kernel approach such as the one offered by Xenomai. Bootlin training’s portfolio already has an initial coverage of these topics in our Embedded Linux system development course.

Today, we are happy to announce a brand new Real-Time Linux with PREEMPT_RT, which is specifically focused on the PREEMPT_RT solution. This solution made a vast amount of progress in recent times in terms of integration into the official Linux kernel, which makes it even more relevant for a number of projects which need real-time guarantees.

The main topics covered by the course are:

  • What is a real-time and deterministic operating system
  • How to configure, build and setup a PREEMPT_RT enabled Linux kernel
  • How to identify and benchmark the hardware platform in terms of real-time characteristics
  • How to configure and tune the Linux kernel and the system for deterministic behavior
  • How to develop and debug real-time user-space Linux applications as well as analyze latencies

The course is illustrated by practical labs or demonstrations made on the BeagleBone Black platform. It has been developed and is taught by Bootlin engineer Maxime Chevallier, who is an experienced embedded Linux and Linux kernel engineer and trainer.

As usual our training materials are fully open-source, including the ones for this brand new session. You can read the Slides and Practical lab instructions. Bootlin is one of the very few companies delivering training courses to make its training materials open-source: by choosing to work with Bootlin for your trainings, you support our work on developing and publishing freely available training materials.

If you’re interested in getting this new Real-Time Linux with PREEMPT_RT training course, you have three options:

  • Public on-line sessions, opened to individual registration. The course lasts 3 sessions of 4 hours. We have scheduled a first session on January 19-21, 2022, and registration is open, for 399 EUR at the Early bird rate, of 449 EUR at the Regular rate.
  • Dedicated on-line sessions, which we organize at the date/time of your choice. The course also lasts 3 sessions of 4 hours. Contact us to request a quote.
  • Dedicated on-site sessions, where our trainer travels to your location to deliver the training course. In this case, the course lasts two full days. Contact us to request a quote.

Bootlin at the SIDO event in Paris, November 10

The SIDO is a large event dedicated to IoT, AI, robotics in Paris, and it takes place next to the Open Source Experience event, which as the name suggest is dedicated to all things related to open-source. For Bootlin whose activity is precisely at the junction between embedded systems/IoT and open-source, being present at this combined event made complete sense.

Therefore, Bootlin CEO Thomas Petazzoni will be present at SIDO on November 10, 2021. If you’re interested in discussing with Bootlin about:

  • Engineering services, and how Bootlin can help you with Embedded Linux development, Linux kernel development and upstreaming, boot time optimization, real-time, Yocto, Buildroot, and anything related to Embedded Linux;
  • Training services, and how Bootlin can help your company, team and engineers grow their skills in the field of Embedded Linux;
  • Career opportunities, both full-time positions and internships

Then feel free to contact us to schedule a meeting!

Embedded Linux Boot time optimization: training and webinar

Bootlin has been helping its customers optimize the boot time of embedded Linux systems for many years, ensuring that these systems meet their startup time requirements. Thanks to this, Bootlin has accumulated a significant experience in this field.

Next week, Bootlin is organizing or participating to two events related to Embedded Linux boot time optimization:

In addition, if you need help and support to optimize the boot time of your Embedded Linux systems, do not hesitate to as we offer engineering services, thanks to which we can take your existing Embedded Linux system, and significantly reduce its startup time to meet your requirements.

Online Embedded Linux system development course in new time zones

Since April 2020, we are offering our training courses online, both in public sessions available to individual registration and in dedicated sessions for specific customers.

So far, our public sessions have always been organized from 2 PM to 6 PM Paris time, which was a good fit for our customers in Europe and in the US East Coast, but not so much for our customers in the US West Coast, in the Middle East and Asia.

Therefore, we are happy to announce that we have opened two sessions of our Embedded Linux system development course at different times, to suit the needs of customers in different parts of the world:

  • An Embedded Linux system development course will start on November 22, spread over 7 sessions of 4 hours organized from 09:00 to 13:00 Paris time (UTC+1), which is 13:30 to 17:30 in India, and 16:00 to 20:00 in China. This time is best for our customers in Europe, Middle East and Asia. Registration is possible directly online or by contacting us to get a quotation. The trainer for this course will be Grégory Clement.
  • An Embedded Linux system development course will start on November 29, spread over 7 sessions of 4 hours organized from 18:00 to 22:00 Paris time (UTC+1), which is 09:00 to 13:00 in the US West Coast, and 12:00 to 16:00 in the US East Coast. Registration is possible directly online or by contacting us to get a quotation. The trainer for this course will be Michael Opdenacker.

In both cases, the course is offered at 829 EUR per participant in the early bird rate (valid for registrations at least one month prior to the course starting date), or otherwise at 929 EUR.

Of course, like for all our training courses, the training materials are fully open, so that you can verify that the course suits your needs. See Embedded Linux system development training page for the complete agenda, slides and lab instructions.

If there is sufficient interest in these new time zones, we will consider offering our other courses at similar times in the future.

Bootlin contributions to Linux 5.13

After finally publishing about our Linux 5.12 contributions and even though Linux 5.14 was just released yesterday, it’s hopefully still time to talk about our contributions to Linux 5.13. Check out the LWN articles about the merge window to get the bigger picture about this release: part 1 and part 2.

In terms of Bootlin contributions, this was a much more quiet release than Linux 5.12, with just 28 contributions. The main highlights are:

  • The usual round of RTC subsystem updates from its maintainer Alexandre Belloni
  • A large amount of improvements in the MTD subsystem by its co-maintainer Miquèl Raynal, continuing his effort to improve the ECC handling in the MTD subsystem. See Miquèl’s talk at ELCE 2020 for more details on this effort: slides and video.
  • A small fix for an annoying regression in the musb USB gadget controller driver.

Even though we contributed just 28 commits to this release, as maintainers, some of us also reviewed and merged code from other contributors: Miquèl Raynal as the MTD co-maintainer merged 63 patches, Alexandre Belloni merged 22 patches, and Grégory Clement 6 patches.

Here are the details of our contributions to Linux 5.13:

Bootlin contributions to Linux 5.12

Yes, Linux 5.13 was released yesterday, but we never published the blog post detailing our contributions to Linux 5.12, so let’s do this now! First of all the usual links to the excellent LWN.net articles on the 5.12 merge window: part 1 and part 2.

LWN.net also published an article with Linux 5.12 development statistics, and two Bootlin engineers made their way to the statistics: Alexandre Belloni in the list of top contributors by number of changesets, with 69 commits, and Paul Kocialkowski in the list of top contributors by number of changed lines, with over 6000 lines changed.

Here are the highlights of our contributions:

  • Addition of a new driver for the Silvaco I3C master controller. This was contributed by Miquèl Raynal, who became the maintainer for this driver. Bootlin has pioneered support for I3C in Linux, by introducing the complete drivers/i3c subsystem a few years ago, together with the first controller driver, for a Cadence IP, see our blog post from 2018.
  • Addition of two new camera sensor drivers, one for the Omnivision OV5648 and another for the Omnivision OV8865. These were contributed by Paul Kocialkowski.
  • Implementation of mqprio support in the Marvell Ethernet controller driver mvneta, see this commit. As explained in the tc-mqprio man page, the MQPRIO qdisc is a simple queuing discipline that allows mapping traffic flows to hardware queue ranges using priorities and a configurable priority to traffic class mapping. This was contributed by Maxime Chevallier
  • Improvements in the IIO driver for the ms58xx family of sensors, contributed by Alexandre Belloni.
  • The final removal of the atmel_tclib code, which has been replaced by proper drivers for the TCB timers on Atmel/Microchip ARM platforms over the past few releases, also by Alexandre Belloni.
  • As usual, a large amount of fixes and improvements in the RTC subsystem, by its maintainer Alexandre Belloni.

Here is the detailed list of our contributions to this release:

Slides and videos of Bootlin talks at Live Embedded Event #2

The second edition of Live Embedded Event took place on June 3rd, exactly 6 months after the first edition. Even though there were a few issues with the online platform, it was once again great to learn new things about embedded, and share some of the work we’ve been doing at Bootlin on various topics. For the next edition, we plan to switch to a different online platform, hopefully providing a better experience.

But in the mean time, all videos of the event have been posted on the Youtube Channel of the event. The talks from Bootlin have been posted on Bootlin’s Youtube Channel.

Indeed, in addition to being part of the organization committee, Bootlin prepared and delivered 5 talks as part of Live Embedded Event, covering different topics we have worked on in the recent months for our customers.

Understanding U-Boot Falcon Mode and adding support for new boards, Michael Opdenacker

Slides [PDF]

Introduction to RAUC, Kamel Bouhara

Slides [PDF]

Security vulnerability tracking tools in Buildroot, Thomas Petazzoni

Slides [PDF]

Secure boot in embedded Linux systems, Thomas Perrot

Slides [PDF]

Device Tree overlays and U-boot extension board management, Köry Maincent

Slides [PDF]

Upcoming online training courses in 2021

Online training courseThroughout this first half of 2021, our online training courses available for individual registration have been very popular. We have added some new dates for this summer and early fall for all our courses:

You can register directly online through Eventbrite and pay by credit card, or request an invoice. Note that our sessions are regularly full: our embedded Linux training course next month is full one month before the session, so make sure to book your seat early enough. We offer a 100 EUR early bird discount for registrations taking place at least one month before the course.

These courses are delivered entirely online: you don’t need any hardware to participate, as the hands-on labs are replaced by live demonstrations made by the trainer. All you need is a web browser, a good Internet connection and an audio headset!

We can also organize private courses upon request, if you have a larger group of engineers to train on these topics. Contact us for details!

Bootlin welcomes Clément Léger in its team

Welcome on board!Since June 1st, we’re happy to have an additional engineer in our team, Clément Léger!

After graduating from ENSIMAG in 2012, Clément spent 9 years working for Kalray, a silicon vendor company based in France, designing and producing an innovative and advanced new multi-core CPU architecture. At Kalray, Clément was in charge of porting a bootloader and the Linux kernel to this new CPU architecture, working on all aspects needed to support the CPU in the arch/ of Linux (syscalls, interrupts, exceptions, MMU, etc.) as well as developing a number of core kernel drivers such as pinctrl, irqchip, remoteproc and spimem.

In our engineering team at Bootlin, Clément will help our customer with bootloader porting, Linux kernel porting, device driver development, integration of complete Linux BSPs and more. He brings an additional significant experience in low-level kernel development and debugging to our team of experts. Clément will be working remotely from Grenoble, in tight connection with our team in Lyon.

See Clément Léger’s page on our site, as well as the rest of our team.