Yesterday, Bootlin co-organized and participated to the first edition of Live Embedded Event, a new online conference dedicated to embedded systems topics. In addition to co-organizing the event, we also gave four different talks at this conference, and we are happy to share the slides and videos of our talks.

Introduction video

The following video was presented during the introduction keynote of the event, where each sponsor and co-organizer could say a few words.

An overview of the Linux kernel and user-space graphics stack

Talk given by Bootlin engineer Paul Kocialkowski, slides available in PDF.

ASoC: Supporting Audio on an Embedded Board

Talk given by Bootlin engineer Alexandre Belloni, slides available in PDF.

Embedded Linux “from scratch” in 45 minutes…on RISC-V

Talk given by Bootlin founder and CEO Michael Opdenacker, slides available in PDF.

Device Tree: hardware description for everybody!

Talk given by Bootlin CTO Thomas Petazzoni, slides available in PDF.

As we announced back in October, Bootlin has participated to the organization of a new online conference around embedded systems: Live Embedded Event, which will take place on December 3. The registration is totally free, and the event will propose 4 tracks throughout the day, covering a wide range of topics. We encourage you to register and participate to the event!

Bootlin is not only co-organizing the event, but also has 4 talks that have been accepted:

• An overview of the Linux and user-space graphics stack, by Paul Kocialkowski, Bootlin’s multimedia expert and author of our Linux Graphics training course. Talk abstract: Graphics with the Linux kernel is often perceived as a haystack, composed of many components that have complex interactions with eachother. While this is not always far from the truth, this talk will try to provide a clear overview of the different pieces in the stack and what their individual role is. Throughout the presentation, various APIs, protocols and software implementations will be demystified, covering both display and render aspects. This includes topics such as DRM, Wayland, Xorg, OpenGL, Mesa and more!
• Embedded Linux from scratch in 45 minutes… on RISC-V, by Michael Opdenacker, Bootlin’s founder and CEO. Talk abstract: Join and discover how to build your own embedded Linux system completely from scratch. You will build your own toolchain, bootloader and kernel, this time on the Risc-V open Instruction Set Architecture, that you will run through a system emulated by QEMU. You will also build a minimal root filesystem by yourself thanks to the BusyBox project. You will finish by controlling the system through a tiny webserver. The approach will be to provide only the files that are strictly necessary. That’s all the interest of embedded Linux: you can really control and understand everything that runs on your system, and see how simple the system can be. That’s much easier than trying to understand how a GNU/Linux system works from a distribution as complex as Debian!
• ASoC: audio on an embedded board, by Alexandre Belloni, Bootlin’s audio expert, Linux kernel and Yocto trainer, as well as kernel maintainer. Talk abstract: ASoC, which stands for ALSA System on Chip, is a Linux kernel subsystem created to provide better ALSA support for system-on-chip and portable audio codecs. It allows to reuse codec drivers across multiple architectures and provides an API to integrate them with the SoC audio interface. This talk will present the typical hardware architecture of audio devices on embedded platforms, how to integrate the audio codec and processor audio interface using device tree. Examples, common issues and debugging tips will also be discussed.
• Device Tree: hardware description for everybody!, by Thomas Petazzoni, Bootlin’s CTO and co-maintainer of Buildroot. Talk abstract: The Device Tree has been adopted for the ARM 32-bit Linux kernel support almost a decade ago, and since then, its usage has expanded to many other CPU architectures in Linux, as well as bootloaders such as U-Boot and Barebox. Even though Device Tree is no longer a new thing, developers coming into the embedded Linux world often struggle to understand what Device Trees are, what is their syntax, how they interact with the Linux kernel device drivers, what Device Tree bindings are, and more. This talk will provide an introduction to the Device Tree, to jump start new developers in using this description language that is now ubiquitous in the vast majority of embedded Linux projects.

Note that we are aware of limitations of the platform that was chosen for the online conference: the details of the talks, and details about sponsors are only visible for people who registered. This is unfortunate, but we discovered this when it was too late to change the platform, together with a few other limitations. Let’s say this is a first edition, and regardless of those limitations, the selection of talks and contents is very promising!