Bootlin at Embedded World 2020

STMicro at Embedded World 2020 Bootlin will be preent at Embedded World 2020, in Nuremberg on February 25-27. We will be present on STMicroelectronics booth in hall 4A, stand 138. We will have two demos of the STM32MP1 platform running Linux, and of course details about Bootlin services around embedded Linux and Linux kernel development and training.

Three people from Bootlin will be present: Michael Opdenacker (CEO), Thomas Petazzoni (CTO) and Alexandre Belloni (embedded Linux engineer and trainer).

Do not hesitate to get in touch with us prior to the event if you would like to schedule a meeting to discuss business, project or career opportunities.

Linux 5.5 released, Bootlin contributions inside

Linux 5.5 was recently released, as usual bringing a large number of new features and improvements, which are nicely detailed in the LWN articles on merge window part 1 and merge window part 2, but also on the Kernelnewbies wiki.

According to the statistics, a total of 14350 changes were made to this kernel release, to which Bootlin contributed 124 patches, making us the 19th contributing company by number of commits. Here are the highlights of our contributions:

By far and large our most important achievement in Linux 5.5 is the merge of the H265 decoding support in the Allwinner VPU driver, developed by Paul Kocialkowski. This was the last missing feature to complete the effort funded by the Kickstarter campaign we launched in February 2018. See our blog post wrapping up the Allwinner VPU work.
Alexandre Belloni as the RTC subsystem maintainer, as usual contributed a large number of RTC driver improvements and fixes.
Antoine Ténart contributed some improvements to the Cadence MACB driver, most notably used as the Ethernet controller driver on Microchip/Atmel platforms. The main improvement is the conversion to the phylink subsystem for the interaction with the Ethernet PHY.
Grégory Clement contributed numerous enhancements to the Microchip/Atmel SPI controller driver, mainly aimed at fixing and improving the support for Chip Select, both native Chip Selects and GPIO-based Chip Selects.
Kamel Bouhara contributed a few additional Device Tree files to describe home automation hardware platforms from Overkiz, based on the Microchip SAMA5D2 processor, as well as an improvement to a Microchip SoC driver that allows to expose the platform serial number to user-space.
Miquèl Raynal added support for a new Marvell system-on-chip called Marvell CN9130. Despite the name, this chip is from a hardware point of view in the same family as the Marvell Armada 7K and 8K, which were already supported upstream.
Miquèl Raynal contributed a number of fixes and improvements to the Macronix SPI controller driver.
Miquèl Raynal added support for the ADC converters over SPI MAX1227, MAX1229 and MAX1231 to the existing max1027 IIO driver in the kernel. These ADCs have a 12-bit resolution.
Miquèl Raynal improved the SPI controller driver for the Zynq system-on-chips to correctly support multiple Chip Selects.

In addition to these direct contributions, some of the Bootlin engineers are also Linux kernel maintainers and therefore review and merge patches from other contributors: Alexandre Belloni as the RTC subsystem maintainer and Microchip platform co-maintainer reviewed and merged 45 patches from other contributors, Miquèl Raynal as the MTD subsystem co-maintainer reviewed and merged 39 patches from other contributors and Grégory Clement as the Marvell platform co-maintainer reviewed and merged 29 patches from other contributors.

Here is the detail of our contributions:

Bootlin at FOSDEM and Buildroot Developers Meeting

This week-end takes place one of the biggest and most important free and open-source software conference in Europe: FOSDEM. It will once again feature a very large number of talks, organized in several main tracks and developer rooms.

Bootlin CTO Thomas Petazzoni will participate to the FOSDEM conference, of course attending many of the talks from the Embedded, Mobile and Automative Devroom, to which he participated to the talk review and selection. Do not hesitate to get in touch with Thomas if you want to discuss career or business opportunities with Bootlin.

In addition, Thomas will also participate to the 3-day Buildroot Developers meeting which takes place in Brussels right after the FOSDEM conference, kindly hosted by Google. During 3 days, some of the core Buildroot developers will work together to discuss the future of Buildroot, as well as review and discuss pending patches and proposals.

Building a Linux system for the STM32MP1: implementing factory flashing

After several months, it’s time to resume our series of blog posts about building a Linux system for the STM32MP1 platform. After showing how to build a minimal Linux system for the STM32MP157 platform, how to connect and use an I2C based pressure/temperature/humidity sensor and how to integrate Qt5 in our system, how to set up a development environment to write our own Qt5 application and how to develop a Qt5 application, we will now cover the topic of factory flashing.

List of articles in this series:

Building a Linux system for the STM32MP1: basic system
Building a Linux system for the STM32MP1: connecting an I2C sensor
Building a Linux system for the STM32MP1: enabling Qt5 for graphical applications
Building a Linux system for the STM32MP1: setting up a Qt5 application development environment
Building a Linux system for the STM32MP1: developing a Qt5 graphical application
Building a Linux system for the STM32MP1: implementing factory flashing
Building a Linux system for the STM32MP1: remote firmware updates

What is factory flashing ?

So far, we have used a microSD card as storage for the Linux system running on the STM32MP1 platform. Since this media is removable, we can easily switch the microSD card back and forth between the STM32MP1 platform and our development workstation, which is nice during development and debugging.

However, an actual product will most likely use some form of non-removable persistent storage, typically an eMMC or a NAND flash. While not available on the STM32MP1-DK1 board probably for cost reasons, these storage devices are very common in most embedded systems. For example, the STM32MP157A-EV1 board provides three non-removable persistent storage devices: a 4 GB eMMC, a 1 GB NAND flash, and a 64 MB QSPI NOR flash.

When such storage devices are shipped by their manufacturer, they are typically empty. Therefore, as part of the manufacturing process of your embedded systems, you will have to load the relevant storage device with your Linux system, applications and data, so that the embedded system is fully operational: this is the process referred to as factory flashing in this blog post.

If you are doing a very high volume product, you can ask your eMMC or NAND flash vendor to pre-load a system image on the storage before it is shipped to you and assembled on your board. However, many companies do products with volumes that are not large enough to make such a strategy possible: in this case, you really receive an empty storage device, and have to flash it.

A first possibility to flash the non-removable storage is to use a removable storage device, boot a Linux system on the device, and use it to flash the non-removable storage. This can definitely be a possible option in some situations, but it is not always possible (if there’s no removable storage device interface at all) or not always practical.

However, most system-on-chips, including the STM32MP1 include some ROM code that the processor executes at boot time, even before it loads the first stage bootloader. This ROM code is primarly responsible for loading the first stage bootloader into memory, but it also very often offers a communication channel with the outside world, which can be used to gain control of a platform that has nothing at all on its storage. This communication channel is typically over USB or UART, and most often uses a custom, vendor-specific protocol, which is understood by vendor-specific tools. This protocol generally allows to send some code to the target and get it executed, which is sufficient to be able to reflash the target device.

Here are a few examples with system-on-chips from various vendors:

The ROM code of the NXP i.MX processors implements a USB-based protocol, which can be interfaced either using the NXP-provided mfgtools, or using the community-developed imx_usb_loader. The latter was presented in one of our earlier blog posts about i.MX6 factory flashing.
The ROM code of Microchip SAMA5 processors implements a USB-based protocol, which can be interfaced using a tool called SAM-BA
The ROM code of Rockchip processors implements a USB-based protocol, which can be interfaced either using a Rockchip-specific tool called rkdeveloptool
The ROM code of the ST STM32MP15 processors also implement a USB-based protocol, which can be interfaced using the STM32 Cube Programmer

Obviously, in this blog post, we are going to use the latter, STM32 Cube Programmer, to flash our STM32MP1 platform. Since the DK2 board only has a removable device, we will use the tool to flash the SD card, but the process and logic would be the same for any other (non-removable) storage device.

Getting and installing STM32 Cube Programmer

While ST generally has very good upstream and open-source support for its products, the STM32 Cube Programmer unfortunately doesn’t follow this strategy: you need to be registered on the ST web site to download it, and its source code is not available. Due to this registration process, we for example cannot create a Buildroot package that would automatically download and install this tool for you.

So, follow the process to create an account on the ST web site, and then go to the STM32 Cube Programmer page. At the time of this writing, the latest version is 2.2.1, but according this Wiki page, this version doesn’t work for the STM32MP1 platform. Instead, select to download the 2.2.0 version, which is known to work. You will then download a file called en.stm32cubeprog.zip (it doesn’t have the version in its name, which isn’t great) weighting 187 MB, and which has the SHA256 hash 91107b4d605d126f5c32977247d7419d42abb2655848d2d1a16d52f5f7633d2d.

Extract this ZIP file somewhere in your system, and then run the SetupSTM32CubeProgrammer-2.2.0.linux executable:

$ ./SetupSTM32CubeProgrammer-2.2.0.linux

Got through the installation steps. On our system, we customized the installation path to be just $HOME/stm32cube, and the remainder of this blog post will assume this is where you installed the STM32 Cube Programmer.

In this blog post, we are only going to use the command line interface (CLI) of STM32 Cube Programmer, so just make sure you can run the corresponding tool:

$ ~/stm32cube/bin/STM32_Programmer_CLI
      -------------------------------------------------------------------
                        STM32CubeProgrammer v2.2.0
      -------------------------------------------------------------------


Usage :
STM32_Programmer_CLI.exe [command_1] [Arguments_1][[command_2] [Arguments_2]...]
[...]

Testing the communication with the board

On the back of the board, there is a two-way DIP switch labeled SW1, which is used to configure the boot mode. When both are “ON”, the board boots from the SD card. When both are “OFF”, the board enters the “USB boot for flashing mode”, which is what we are going to use. So switch both switches to OFF, and reset the board.

Plug an additional USB-C cable from the board CN7 connector (which is located between the HDMI port and the 4 USB host ports).

USB-C connection for factory flashing

Then, reset the board. If you run lsusb on your Linux workstation, you should see a new device:

Bus 003 Device 011: ID 0483:df11 STMicroelectronics STM Device in DFU Mode

Then, you can ask STM32_Programmer_CLI to list the devices it sees over USB. This needs root permissions (unless appropriate udev rules are created):

$ sudo ~/stm32cube/bin/STM32_Programmer_CLI -l usb
      -------------------------------------------------------------------
                        STM32CubeProgrammer v2.2.0
      -------------------------------------------------------------------

=====  DFU Interface   =====

Total number of available STM32 device in DFU mode: 1

  Device Index           : USB1
  USB Bus Number         : 003
  USB Address Number     : 003
  Product ID             : DFU in HS Mode @Device ID /0x500, @Revision ID /0x0000
  Serial number          : 004200343338510534383330
  Firmware version       : 0x0110
  Device ID              : 0x0500

Good, the STM32CubeProgrammer tool is seeing our board, and we see that the Device Index is USB1. Keep that in mind for the next steps.

Change the Linux system boot chain

STM32CubeProgrammer works by sending a U-Boot bootloader over USB, and then talking to this U-Boot to make it erase the MMC or NAND flash, and make it write some data to those storage devices. However, for some reason, STM32CubeProgrammer doesn’t work with the boot flow we have used so far, which uses the U-Boot SPL as the first-stage bootloader, and U-Boot itself as the second stage bootloader. It only works when the first stage bootloader is the Arm Trusted Firmware, also called TF-A. You can get more details about the different possible boot chains on STM32MP1 on this Wiki page.

Due to this constraint, we are going to switch our Buildroot configuration to use TF-A instead of U-Boot SPL as the first stage bootloader.

First of all, we need to backport two Buildroot commits, which did not exist in the Buildroot 2019.02 we are using, but have been integrated later. The first commit, 9dbc934217e170578d4cbfdf524bc1b3988d0b9e allows to build TF-A for ARM 32-bit platforms, while the second commit, e4d276c357fdf9f19f99f826cab63f373687f902 allows to provide a custom name for the TF-A image name.

In Buildroot, do:

$ git cherry-pick 9dbc934217e170578d4cbfdf524bc1b3988d0b9e
$ git cherry-pick e4d276c357fdf9f19f99f826cab63f373687f902

The second one will cause some minor conflict in boot/arm-trusted-firmware/Config.in. Resolve the conflict by removing the BR2_TARGET_ARM_TRUSTED_FIRMWARE_DEBUG option from this file, remove the conflict markers, then run:

git add boot/arm-trusted-firmware/Config.in
git commit

If you’re not sure about this, you can check our 2019.02/stm32mp157-dk-blog-6 branch on Github, which has these changes already integrated.

Once done, we can run make menuconfig and start modifying the Buildroot configuration. Here are the changes that we need:

In the Bootloaders menu, enable ARM Trusted Firmware (ATF), and then:
- Set ATF Version to Custom Git repository
- Set URL of custom repository to https://github.com/STMicroelectronics/arm-trusted-firmware.git
- Set Custom repository version to v2.0-stm32mp-r2
- Set ATF platform to stm32mp1
- Set Additional ATF build variables to DTB_FILE_NAME=stm32mp157c-dk2.dtb AARCH32_SP=sp_min. The DTB_FILE_NAME selects the correct Device Tree file for the DK2 board, while the AARCH32_SP indicates that we are using the “minimal” secure payload, and not a complete Trusted Execution Environment such as OP-TEE.
- Set Binary boot images to *.stm32. This makes sure the final image gets copied to output/images.
Still in the Bootloaders menu, inside the U-Boot option, make the following changes:
- Change Board defconfig to stm32mp15_trusted. This is the most important change, which makes U-Boot build only the second stage, and in a format that gets loaded by TF-A as the first stage.
- In U-Boot binary format, disable u-boot.img, and instead enable Custom (specify below) and indicate u-boot.stm32 as the value for U-Boot binary format: custom names.
- Disable the Install U-Boot SPL binary image option.

Overall, the diff of the changes in the configuration looks like this:

@@ -30,16 +30,22 @@ BR2_TARGET_ROOTFS_EXT2=y
 BR2_TARGET_ROOTFS_EXT2_4=y
 BR2_TARGET_ROOTFS_EXT2_SIZE="120M"
 # BR2_TARGET_ROOTFS_TAR is not set
+BR2_TARGET_ARM_TRUSTED_FIRMWARE=y
+BR2_TARGET_ARM_TRUSTED_FIRMWARE_CUSTOM_GIT=y
+BR2_TARGET_ARM_TRUSTED_FIRMWARE_CUSTOM_REPO_URL="https://github.com/STMicroelectronics/arm-trusted-firmware.git"
+BR2_TARGET_ARM_TRUSTED_FIRMWARE_CUSTOM_REPO_VERSION="69cc28c5a1b877cf67def7f94dece087f3917b1c"
+BR2_TARGET_ARM_TRUSTED_FIRMWARE_PLATFORM="stm32mp1"
+BR2_TARGET_ARM_TRUSTED_FIRMWARE_ADDITIONAL_VARIABLES="DTB_FILE_NAME=stm32mp157c-dk2.dtb AARCH32_SP=sp_min"
+BR2_TARGET_ARM_TRUSTED_FIRMWARE_IMAGES="*.stm32"
 BR2_TARGET_UBOOT=y
 BR2_TARGET_UBOOT_BUILD_SYSTEM_KCONFIG=y
 BR2_TARGET_UBOOT_CUSTOM_GIT=y
 BR2_TARGET_UBOOT_CUSTOM_REPO_URL="https://github.com/STMicroelectronics/u-boot.git"
 BR2_TARGET_UBOOT_CUSTOM_REPO_VERSION="v2018.11-stm32mp-r2.1"
-BR2_TARGET_UBOOT_BOARD_DEFCONFIG="stm32mp15_basic"
+BR2_TARGET_UBOOT_BOARD_DEFCONFIG="stm32mp15_trusted"
 BR2_TARGET_UBOOT_CONFIG_FRAGMENT_FILES="board/stmicroelectronics/stm32mp157-dk/uboot-fragment.config"
 # BR2_TARGET_UBOOT_FORMAT_BIN is not set
-BR2_TARGET_UBOOT_FORMAT_IMG=y
-BR2_TARGET_UBOOT_SPL=y
-BR2_TARGET_UBOOT_SPL_NAME="spl/u-boot-spl.stm32"
+BR2_TARGET_UBOOT_FORMAT_CUSTOM=y
+BR2_TARGET_UBOOT_FORMAT_CUSTOM_NAME="u-boot.stm32"
 BR2_TARGET_UBOOT_CUSTOM_MAKEOPTS="DEVICE_TREE=stm32mp157c-dk2"
 BR2_PACKAGE_HOST_GENIMAGE=y

Before we can restart the build, we need to adjust the genimage.cfg file that describes the layout of the SD card. Indeed, the file name of the first stage bootloader is now tf-a-stm32mp157c-dk2.stm32 instead of u-boot-spl.stm32 and the file name of the second stage bootloader is now u-boot.stm32 instead of u-boot.img. All in all, your genimage.cfg file in board/stmicroelectronics/stm32mp157-dk/genimage.cfg should now look like this:

image sdcard.img {
	hdimage {
		gpt = "true"
	}

	partition fsbl1 {
		image = "tf-a-stm32mp157c-dk2.stm32"
	}

	partition fsbl2 {
		image = "tf-a-stm32mp157c-dk2.stm32"
	}

	partition ssbl {
		image = "u-boot.stm32"
	}

	partition rootfs {
		image = "rootfs.ext4"
		partition-type = 0x83
		bootable = "yes"
		size = 256M
	}
}

With this in place, it’s time to restart the build. You can do a complete rebuild with make clean all, or you can just clean up U-Boot, and restart the build:

$ make uboot-dirclean
$ make

You should now have in output/images the new TF-A image tf-a-stm32mp157c-dk2.stm32 and the new U-Boot image u-boot.stm32. Of course the sdcard.img file has been updated.

Rather than updating our SD card on our workstation, we’ll directly use the STM32CubeProgrammer tool to do that, in the next section.

Flashing the board

The STM32CubeProgrammer tool takes as input a flash layout file, which has a .tsv extension. The format of this file is extensively documented on this Wiki page. It is essentially a text file that says what should be flashed in each partition.

In our case, we are going to simply flash the entire sdcard.img instead of flashing partition by partition. To achieve this, we are going to use the RawImage image type, also described on the Wiki page.

Let’s create a file board/stmicroelectronics/stm32mp157-dk/flash.tsv, with the following contents:

#Opt	Id	Name	Type	IP	Offset	Binary
-	0x01	fsbl1-boot	Binary	none	0x0	tf-a-stm32mp157c-dk2.stm32
-	0x03	ssbl-boot	Binary	none	0x0	u-boot.stm32
P	0x10	sdcard	RawImage	mmc0		0x0	sdcard.img

The first line is a comment, just to help remember what each field is about. The second and third lines tell STM32CubeProgrammer which bootloader images should be used as part of the flashing process. Finally, the last line says we want to flash sdcard.img as a raw image on the mmc0 device.

Then, go do output/images, and run STM32CubeProgrammer. We use the -c port=usb1 argument, because our board was detected as device USB1 when we enumerated all detected devices using the -l usb previously.

$ cd output/images/
$ sudo ~/stm32cube/bin/STM32_Programmer_CLI -c port=usb1 -w ../../board/stmicroelectronics/stm32mp157-dk/flash.tsv

The output will look like this:

      -------------------------------------------------------------------
                        STM32CubeProgrammer v2.2.0                  
      -------------------------------------------------------------------



USB speed   : High Speed (480MBit/s)
Manuf. ID   : STMicroelectronics
Product ID  : DFU in HS Mode @Device ID /0x500, @Revision ID /0x0000
SN          : 004200343338510534383330
FW version  : 0x0110
Device ID   : 0x0500
Device name : STM32MPxxx
Device type : MPU
Device CPU  : Cortex-A7


Start Embedded Flashing service



Memory Programming ...
Opening and parsing file: tf-a-stm32mp157c-dk2.stm32
  File          : tf-a-stm32mp157c-dk2.stm32
  Size          : 237161 Bytes
  Partition ID  : 0x01 

Download in Progress:
[==================================================] 100% 

File download complete
Time elapsed during download operation: 00:00:00.444

RUNNING Program ... 
  PartID:      :0x01 
Start operation done successfully at partition 0x01

Flashlayout Programming ...
[==================================================] 100% 
Running Flashlayout Partition ...
Flashlayout partition started successfully


Memory Programming ...
Opening and parsing file: u-boot.stm32
  File          : u-boot.stm32
  Size          : 748042 Bytes
  Partition ID  : 0x03 

Download in Progress:
[==================================================] 100% 

File download complete
Time elapsed during download operation: 00:00:00.791

RUNNING Program ... 
  PartID:      :0x03 

reconnecting the device ...

USB speed   : High Speed (480MBit/s)
Manuf. ID   : STMicroelectronics
Product ID  : USB download gadget@Device ID /0x500, @Revision ID /0x0000
SN          : 004200343338510534383330
FW version  : 0x0110
Device ID   : 0x0500
Start operation done successfully at partition 0x03


Memory Programming ...
Opening and parsing file: sdcard.img
  File          : sdcard.img
  Size          : 539002368 Bytes
  Partition ID  : 0x10 

Download in Progress:
[==================================================] 100% 

File download complete
Time elapsed during download operation: 00:04:31.583

RUNNING Program ... 
  PartID:      :0x10 
Start operation done successfully at partition 0x10
Flashing service completed successfully

Finally, we can toggle back the SW1 DIP switches to their ON position, to boot again from SD card, and hit the reset button. The board should boot, but this time with our new image, which uses TF-A instead of U-Boot SPL, so the first lines of the boot process should look like this:

NOTICE:  CPU: STM32MP157CAC Rev.B
NOTICE:  Model: STMicroelectronics STM32MP157C-DK2 Discovery Board
NOTICE:  Board: MB1272 Var2 Rev.C-01
NOTICE:  BL2: v2.0-r2.0(release):
NOTICE:  BL2: Built : 16:10:53, Jan  7 2020
NOTICE:  BL2: Booting BL32
NOTICE:  SP_MIN: v2.0-r2.0(release):
NOTICE:  SP_MIN: Built : 16:10:53, Jan  7 2020

U-Boot 2018.11-stm32mp-r2.1 (Jan 07 2020 - 16:13:55 +0100)

Conclusion

In this article, we have discussed the concept of factory flashing, understood better the different boot chains available for the STM32MP1, switched to a boot chain using TF-A, and presented how to use STM32CubeProgrammer to reflash the entire SD card.

As usual, we have a branch on Github with the Buildroot changes corresponding to this blog post, see the branch 2019.02/stm32mp157-dk-blog-6.

Stay tuned for the next article in this series of blog post, in which we will cover the topic of Over-The-Air firmware update.

2019 at Bootlin, a year in review

First of all, the entire team at Bootlin wishes you a Happy New Year, and best wishes for 2020 in your personal and professional life. The beginning of the new year is a good time to look back and see the achievements of the past year, which is why we review the 2019 year in terms of Bootlin news and activity.

Linux kernel contributions

In 2019, we made contributions to Linux 5.0, Linux 5.1, Linux 5.2, Linux 5.3 and Linux 5.4. We contributed a total of 1078 patches to these releases.

Some of the highlights were:

The brand new subsystem to support the MIPI I3C bus that we developed from scratch was merged in Linux 5.0. This paved the way to support both I3C controllers and I3C devices in Linux. See our blog post.
The Marvell Ethernet controller driver was extended to support packet classification offloading in hardware.
A brand new driver in the IIO subsystem for the TI ADS8344 ADC chip.
Support for HW-accelerated H264 video decoding was added to the Allwinner VPU driver, as part of our crowd-funded project, see our recent blog post.
Numerous improvements in the support of Allwinner, Microchip and Marvell platforms, see our blog posts for each kernel release for more details.

Other contributions

We contributed 52 patches to the U-Boot project in 2019: a new network driver the Microsemi Ocelot platform, improvements to the MTD subsystem, fixes to the NXP LPC3250 and Rockchip PX30 platform support.
We contributed 314 patches to the Buildroot project, our most significant contribution is support for top-level parallel build, which will land in the upcoming Buildroot 2020.02 release. In addition, Bootlin engineer Thomas Petazzoni remains an active Buildroot co-maintainer: in 2019 he reviewed and merged 2924 patches from other contributors, out of the total of 5503 patches merged throughout the year.
We improved our Web-based Elixir code browser. Elixir now indexes the sources of 16 projects, allows to browse various types of include files, has support for project specific HTML post-processing filters, has a new REST API (thanks to Carmeli Tamir), and has many fixed bugs. All this activity corresponds to a round number of commits: 128.

Engineering projects

Of course, most of the contributions described above are driven by the engineering projects we have with our customers worldwide. Here are some of the significant engineering projects we worked on in 2019:

Implemented support for MACsec hardware offloading, and support for this functionality for the Microchip VSC8584 Ethernet PHY. We presented this work in detail in a blog post, and submitted 4 iterations in 2019 and hope to see this merged in early 2020.
Improved the Intel GMA500 display driver to support page flipping, so that one of our customers can use the Weston Wayland compositor on hardware platforms that use this display controller.
Started a project to support the Microchip VSC8572 Ethernet PHY in Linux, used as a pass-through to SFP cages. As part of this project, we already contributed patches to convert the cpsw network driver to phylink, and we will contribute VSC8572 patches once the project has made enough progress.
Migrated a complete Buildroot-based BSP for a Danish customer in the healthcare industry: migration to a newer Linux kernel version and a newer Buildroot version for a Microchip AT91SAM9G45 platform and a TI AM335x platform.
Migrated a complete Yocto-based BSP for a Belgian customer to a newer mainline version of the Linux kernel for an i.MX6 platform, implemented secure boot and optimized the boot time.
For a major US customer, implemented a complete Linux BSP for a custom Xilinx Zynq 7000 platform: upstream U-Boot, upstream Linux and Yocto-based build system. As part of this project, we did a number of kernel contributions and we still have a major kernel contribution pending: a complete DRM driver for the logiCVC display controller.
For a German customer in the healthcare industry, continued to support additional hardware features of an i.MX6 platform, and built a complete new BSP for an SAMA5D3-based hardware platform.
For a Canadian customer, completely upgraded the Linux BSP for a NXP LPC3250 platform: update to U-Boot upstream, to Linux upstream, and migration to Buildroot as a build system.
For an Italian customer, started a brand new BSP for a Rockchip PX30 based platform, which will require a number of improvements and additions to the Linux kernel support for this platform, which we will work on in 2020.
For a Belgian customer, migrated a Linux BSP for an OMAP44xx platform with complex audio interfaces to a recent upstream Linux kernel version.
For a French customer, implemented and delivered a complete Yocto-based Linux BSP for an i.MX6 platform.
For the French company Overkiz, updated, cleaned-up and upstreamed to the Linux kernel the Device Tree files for their Microchip SAMA5 home automation platforms.
Implemented support for software-based ECC and external hardware ECC engines in the SPI flash subsystem of the Linux kernel, for one of our customers that manufactures flash chips. This patch series is still under review, but we expect to get it merged in early 2020.
Implemented support for dm-verity and SELinux in OpenWRT, for one of our customers. See our blog post.
Continued to work on implementing top-level parallel build in Buildroot, which finally got merged at the end of 2019 in upstream Buildroot.
Continued to work on improving the support for Microchip ARM processors and Marvell Armada ARM processors in the Linux kernel, in many areas.
For a customer building a complex audio product based on an Allwinner system-on-chip, we implemented support for TDM in the Allwinner audio interface driver and used it in conjunction with PDM microphones.
Published a long series of blog posts on how to create a Linux system with Buildroot for the STM32MP1 platform: part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4 and part 5. This series will continue in 2020.
Completed the work on the Allwinner VPU that was funded by the Kickstarter campaign of early 2018: the Allwinner VPU driver was merged, with MPEG2, H264 and H265 decoding support, see our blog post.
Continued to work on the support for the RaspberryPi platforms, making a number of enhancements to the display support and its testing, as we reported in a blog post.

Training

Our training business has seen quite a bit of activity in 2019:

We created and published a new training course: Displaying and rendering graphics with Linux. This 2-day course, created by Bootlin engineer Paul Kocialkowski provides a detailed walk-through of Linux graphics: graphics hardware and theory, low-level support in the Linux kernel, support in user-space in Wayland or X.org, OpenGL acceleration, etc. This course is available on-site and we already delivered it to customers in Spain, Portugal and France.
Our Embedded Linux and Yocto/OpenEmbedded training courses have been ported to use the STM32MP1 platform for practical labs, and we became a member of the STMicroelectronics Partner Program. The support for STM32MP1 in our training courses is proposed as an alternative to the Microchip SAMA5D3 platform (for the Embedded Linux training) and the BeagleBone Black (for the Yocto training) that we continue to support as well.
Thanks to funding from Zuehlke Engineering in Serbia, we expanded our Linux boot time optimization training course to 3 days, adding much more lecture and lab content, and collecting useful benchmarks that we later shared in the Embedded Linux Conference Europe.
Overall our publicly available training materials have received 376 commits during the course of 2019, all visible in their GitHub repository.
We delivered many of our on-site training courses in France, India, Spain, Serbia, Poland, Finland, Portugal, Nederlands and Austria, and continued to offer our training courses in public sessions in Avignon, France.

Conferences

As usual in 2019, we attended and participated to a number of conferences:

Our networking experts Antoine Ténart and Maxime Chevallier attended the Netdev 0x13 conference in Prague.
Bootlin engineer Alexandre Belloni attended the SiFive Tech Symposium about the RISC-V architecture, in Grenoble.
A significant part of our engineering team attended the Linux Plumbers conference in Lisbon.
Bootlin engineer Grégory Clement attended the Kernel Recipes conference in Paris.
Our display/video expert Paul Kocialkowski attended the X.org Developers Conference, in Montreal.
And of course, we attended the Embedded Linux Conference Europe 2019. We gave 5 talks and 2 tutorials at this event (see our blog post) and shared our selection of talks.
We participated to the Capitole du Libre conference in Toulouse, where Michael Opdenacker gave a talk on Embedded Linux from scratch in 40 minutes (on RISC-V).
Participated to the Buildroot Developers Meeting throughout the year: after FOSDEM 2019 and before ELCE 2019. See our report from the FOSDEM meeting.

Recruiting

An additional engineer joined our team in Lyon: Kamel Bouhara. Kamel is now working with our senior engineers Grégory Clement and Alexandre Belloni in this office.
During the summer 2019, Victor Huesca joined Bootlin as an intern in Toulouse, and worked on improving the tooling used for the maintenance of the Buildroot project. All the work done by Victor is now used by the Buildroot community, see our blog post for more details.
An additional engineer will join our Toulouse office at the end of January 2020, and 3 interns will also join Bootlin during the first half of 2020, working on improving the Elixir Cross Referencer, and contributing to Linux and U-Boot.
We still have positions opened for Embedded Linux and kernel engineers, see job offer.

Linux 5.4 released, Bootlin contributions inside

Linux This time around, we’re quite late to the party, but Linux 5.4 was indeed released a number of weeks ago, and once again, Bootlin contributed a number of patches to this Linux kernel release. As usual, the most useful source of information to learn about the major features brought by Linux 5.4 are the LWN articles (part 1, part 2) and the KernelNewbies Wiki.

With a total of 143 patches contributed to this release, Bootlin is the 17th contributing company by number of commits acccording to the Linux Kernel Patch Statistic.

Here are the highlights of our contributions:

Antoine Ténart contributed support for IEEE 1588 Precision Time Protocol (PTP) to the Microsemi Ocelot Ethernet switch driver, which Bootlin developed and upstreamed in 2018 (see our blog post)
In the MTD subsystem, a number of contributions to the spi-nor support, written originally by Boris Brezillon, made their way upstream.
In the support of Microchip (formerly Atmel) platforms, Kamel Bouhara, who joined Bootlin in September 2019, sees his first kernel contribution merged as a Bootlin engineer: dropping useless support for platform_data from the Atmel PWM driver.
In the support of Allwinner platforms
- Maxime Ripard contributed a brand new driver for the Allwinner A10 camera interface driver, a driver that we started at Bootlin for the CHIP platform back in the days, and that we finished more recently.
- Maxime Ripard contributed a significant number of improvements to the sun4i-i2s audio interface driver, especially TDM support, which was developed as part of a customer project at Bootlin.
- Maxime Ripard also contributed numerous enhancements to Allwinner platform Device Tree files, especially in the area of using YAML schemas.
In the support for Marvell platforms
- Grégory Clement added cpufreq support to the Marvell Armada 7K/8K platform by extending some of its clock drivers.
- Miquèl Raynal contributed improvements to the Marvell CP110 COMPHY driver, which is used to control SERDES lanes on the Marvell Armada 7K/8K platforms, and added the description of the SERDES lanes used by various IP blocks in those processors.
Alexandre Belloni, as the RTC subsystem maintainer, did a number of fixes and improvements in several RTC drivers (mainly pcf2123 and pcf8563)
For the LPC3250 platform, for which Bootlin delivered a modern BSP to a customer last year, Alexandre Belloni fixed an issue in the lpc_eth network driver, which was preventing the system from booting if the network had been initialized by the bootloader.

In addition to being contributors, some Bootlin engineers are also maintainers of various parts of the Linux kernel, and as such review and merge code from other contributors:

As the RTC subsystem maintainer and Microchip platform co-maintainer, Alexandre Belloni merged 47 patches from other contributors
As the MTD subsystem co-maintainer, Miquèl Raynal merged 33 patches from other contributors
As the Marvell platform co-maintainer, Grégory Clement merged 11 patches from other contributors

Here are the details of all our contributions to Linux 5.4:

Security contributions to OpenWrt: dm-verity and SELinux

While Bootlin is largely known for its expertise with the Buildroot and Yocto/OpenEmbedded build systems, we do also work with other build systems for customer projects. Specifically, in 2019, we have worked for one of our customers on extending OpenWrt to add support for two security features: dm-verity and SELinux, which we have contributed to upstream OpenWrt. In this blog post, we provide some details about those features, and how they are integrated in OpenWrt.

dm-verity support

dm-verity is a device mapper target that allows to create a block device on top of an existing block device, with a transparent integrity checking in-between. Provided a tree of per-block hashes that is generated offline, dm-verity will verify at run-time that all the data read from the underlying block device matches the hashes that are provided. This allows to guarantee that the data has not been modified, as a root hash must be passed from a trusted source when setting up the dm-verity block device at boot time. If any bit in the storage has been modified, the verification of the hashes all the way up to the root hash will fail, and the I/O operation on the block of data being read from storage will be rejected. Therefore, dm-verity is typically used as part of a secure boot strategy, which allows the root hash to be passed by the bootloader to the kernel, where the bootloader and kernel themselves are verified by other means. Also, due to the nature of the integrity verification, dm-verity provides a read-only block device, and will therefore only work with read-only filesystems.

dm-verity was also presented in our Secure Boot from A to Z talk the Embedded Linux Conference 2018, from slide 28.

We implemented an integration of this mechanism in OpenWrt, and contributed a first version back in March, and we just sent a second version in November.

In essence, our integration consists in:

Packaging the different tools that are needed to generate at build time the tree of hashes corresponding to a given filesystem image. The important package here is cryptsetup (patch 05/12), but it requires packaging a few dependencies: libjson-c (patch 04/12), popt (patch 03/12), lvm2 (patch 02/12) and libaio (patch 01/12)
Extending the mechanism of OpenWrt to generate FIT images for the kernel so that it can include a U-Boot script (patch 06/12 and patch 08/12). Indeed, we have chosen to embed the root hash information inside the FIT image, as FIT image can be signed and verified by the bootloader before booting, ensuring that the root hash is part of the trusted information.
Extending the squashfs filesystem image generation logic so that a dm-verity-capable image can optionally be generated (patch 09/12). If this is the case, then the squashfs image itself is concatenated with the tree of hashes, and a U-Boot script containing the details of the dm-verity image is generated. This includes the important root hash information.
Backporting to the 4.14 and 4.19 Linux kernels currently supported by OpenWrt the DM_INIT mechanism that is in upstream Linux since 5.1, and which allows to setup a device mapper target at boot time using the dm-mod.create= kernel argument (patch 10/12). This allows to have the root filesystem on a device mapper block device, without the need for an initramfs to setup the device mapper target.
Showing with the example of the Marvell Armada XP GP platform how to enable this mechanism on a specific hardware platform already supported by OpenWrt (patch 11/12 and patch 12/12).

For more details, you can read the cover letter of the patch series.

SELinux support

SELinux logo SELinux is a Linux security module that implements Mandatory Access Control and that is generally pretty infamously known in the Linux user community for being difficult to use and configure. However, it is widely used in security-sensitive systems, including embedded systems and as such, makes sense to see supported in OpenWrt. For example, SELinux is already supported in the Yocto/OpenEmbedded ecosystem through the meta-selinux layer, and in the Buildroot project since 2014, contributed by Collins Aerospace.

In short, the basic principle of SELinux is that important objects in the system (files, processes, etc.) are associated to a security context. Then, a policy defines which operations are allowed, depending on the security context of who is doing the operation and on what the operation takes place. This policy is compiled into a binary policy, which is loaded into the kernel early at boot time, and then enforced by the kernel during the system life. Of course, around this, SELinux provides a wide range of tools and libraries to manipulate the policy, build the policy, debug policy violations, and more.

The SELinux support in OpenWrt comes in two parts: a number of additional packages for various libraries and applications, and some integration work in OpenWrt. We will cover both in the next sections. It is worth mentioning that our work does not provide a SELinux policy specifically modified or adjusted for OpenWrt: we simply use the SELinux reference policy, which users will have to tune to their needs.

SELinux-related packages

Getting SELinux to work required a number of new packages to be added in OpenWrt. Those packages were contributed to the community-maintained package feed at https://github.com/openwrt/packages/. They were initially submitted through the mailing list, and then submitted as a pull request.

In short, it contains:

libsepol, the binary policy manipulation library.
libselinux, the runtime SELinux library that provides interfaces to ELinux-aware applications.
audit, which contains the user space utilities for storing and searching the audit records generated by the audit subsystem of the Linux kernel.
libcap-ng, which allows to use the POSIX capabilities, and is needed by policycoreutils.
policycoreutils, which is the set of core SELinux utilities such as sestatus, secon, setfiles, load_policy and more.
libsemanage, which is the policy management library.
checkpolicy, which is the SELinux policy compiler.
refpolicy, which is the SELinux reference policy.
selinux-python, a number of SELinux tools written in Python, especially audit2allow for policy debugging.

SELinux integration

Our second patch series, for OpenWrt itself, allows to build a SELinux-enabled system thanks to the following changes:

Allow to build Busybox with SELinux support, so that all the Busybox applets that support SELinux specific options such as -Z can be built with libselinux (patch 1/7)
Add support in OpenWrt’s init application, called procd, for loading the SELinux policy at boot time (patch 2/7). This patch has been submitted separately for integration into the procd project.
Add support for building a new host tool called fakeroot (patch 3/7).
Add support for building squashfs images with extended attributes generated by SELinux setfiles tool (patch 4/7). This is why fakeroot is needed: writing those extended attributes that store SELinux security contexts require root access, so we run the entire process within a fakeroot environment. This also requires building the squashfs tools with extended attributes support (patch 7/7).
Add new options to enable in the Linux kernel support for SELinux and SquashFS with extended attributes (patch 5/7 and patch 6/7).

Conclusion

Integrating those two security features in OpenWrt required numerous changes in the build system, and the corresponding patches are still under review by the OpenWrt community. We hope to see these features merged in 2020.

Back from ELCE 2019: our talks videos, slides, and more!

With 8 engineers participating to the Embedded Linux Conference Europe, almost the entire Bootlin engineering team took part to the conference. As usual, we not only attended the event, but also contributed by giving a total of 5 talks and 2 tutorials, for which we’re happy to share below the videos and slides. Also, as part of this conference, Bootlin CTO Thomas Petazzoni received an award for his contribution to the conference.

Buildroot, what’s new ?

Talk given by Thomas Petazzoni, slides in PDF and slides source code.

Timing boot time reduction techniques

Talk given by Michael Opdenacker, slides in PDF, slides source code.

Integrating hardware-accelerated video decoding with the display stack

Talk given by Paul Kocialkowski, slides in PDF, slides source code.

RTC subsystem, recent changes and where it is heading

Talk given by Alexandre Belloni, slides in PDF, slides source code.

Flash subsystems status update

Talk given by Miquèl Raynal (from Bootlin) and Richard Weinberger (from sigma star gmbh), slides in PDF, slides source code.

Offloading network traffic classification to hardware

Talk given by Maxime Chevallier, slides in PDF, slides source code.

Introduction to Linux Kernel driver programming

Tutorial given by Michael Opdenacker, slides in PDF, slides source document. The video is not yet available, but should be published in the future.

Introduction to the Buildroot embedded Linux build system

Tutorial given by Thomas Petazzoni, slides in PDF, slides source code. The video is not yet available, but should be published in the future.

Award to Thomas Petazzoni

During the traditional closing game of the conference, we were really happy to have Bootlin’s CTO Thomas Petazzoni called on stage, to receive from the hands of Tim Bird, an award for his continuous 11 year participation to the conference, with 24 presentations given, one keynote and for the past two years, participation to the conference program committee. We are honored and proud by this recognition of Thomas contribution to the conference.

Yocto Project training course available on STM32MP1 platform

Back in May 2019, we announced the availability of our Embedded Linux system development course on the STMicroelectronics STM32MP1 platform, in addition to the already supported Microchip SAMA5D3 Xplained board.

In the context of our partnership with STMicroelectronics, we are now happy to announce the availability of our Yocto Project and OpenEmbedded development training also on the STM32MP1 platform for the practical labs. We now support either the BeagleBoneBlack Wireless or the STMicroelectronics STM32MP1 platforms for this training course.

The complete training materials are available: detailed agenda, slides and practical labs. The complete source code of the training materials is also available in our Github repository.

Bootlin Yocto course on STM32MP1 — Slides of Bootlin’s Yocto course for the STM32MP1

This will hopefully help customers around the world to get started with using Yocto on the STM32MP1 system-on-chip. The Yocto experts at Bootlin are available to deliver this 3-day course anywhere in the world, at your location. The first edition of this new variant of the course is going to be given this week to one of our customers in Spain. Contact us if you’re interested by having this course organized at your location!

Publication of Linux graphics training materials

Back in June 2019, we announced the availability of a new training course, Displaying and rendering graphics with Linux. At the time of this announcement, the training materials were not available though.

Since then, Bootlin engineer Paul Kocialkowski has been very busy preparing those training materials, and has successfully delivered the first edition of this course to one of our customers in Spain early September. After taking the time to polish those training materials following this first course, we are now very happy to publish and share this 200+ slides deck, covering a wide range of graphics related topics:

Image and color representation
Basic drawing
Basic and advanced operations
Hardware aspects overview
Hardware for display
Hardware for rendering
Memory aspects
Performance aspects
Software aspects overview
Kernel components in Linux
Userspace components with Linux

See also the detailed agenda of this training course. The LaTeX source code for all our training materials, including this graphics training, is available in a Git repository. It is worth mentioning that this training only consists of slides and demos, and does not include practical labs done by the participants, in order to keep the training logistics manageable and the duration reasonably short (2 days).

Here are a few slides showing various aspects of this training course:

By publishing this training materials right after our first course, and under the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA license, Bootlin sticks to its commitment of publishing all its training materials under a free documentation license, to better spread the knowledge in the entire embedded Linux community.

We are available to deliver this Displaying and rendering graphics with Linux course anywhere in the world, at your location. Contact us for more details.