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 at FOSDEM 2025 and co-located events

FOSDEM 2025The highly popular and super interesting FOSDEM conference will as usual take place the first week-end of February in Brussels. Many Bootlin engineers have been attending the event over the years, and we highly recommend anyone in the open-source ecosystem to attend at least once to get a sense of what FOSDEM looks like, and benefit from the hundreds of talks that are given.

This year, no less than 10 Bootlin engineers will be attending FOSDEM: Thomas Perrot, Louis Chauvet, Luca Ceresoli, Hervé Codina, Alexis Lothore, Théo Lebrun, Mathieu Dubois-Briand, Antonin Godard, Thomas Bonnefille and Thomas Petazzoni.

In addition, Mathieu Dubois-Briand and Antonin Godard will both be attending the OpenEmbedded Workshop 2025, which takes place on Monday right after FOSDEM, and Mathieu will be giving a talk Yocto Build Failure Swat Team – Workflow and Updates:

All Yocto branches under active maintenance, in addition to any patches proposed on the mailing lists, are built on the Yocto autobuilder. The Yocto SWAT team is responsible for monitoring build failures, doing a first investigation of their causes, logging the issues, and notifying the relevant
owners.

In this session, Mathieu will outline tasks and processes of the SWAT team, along with the tooling and recent improvements.

And finally, Thomas Petazzoni and Thomas Bonnefille will be attending the Buildroot Developer Days, organized right after FOSDEM.

Do not hesitate to get in touch with us during FOSDEM or the co-located events!

2024 at Bootlin: a year in review

2024 a year in reviewFirst of all, the entire Bootlin team wishes everyone a Happy New Year and best wishes for 2025!

The end of a year and the beginning of the next one is often the right time to look back at what has been achieved, and think about what’s coming next. And we’re going to do exactly this in this blog post, summing up 2024 at Bootlin, a year that has been very active.

Continue reading “2024 at Bootlin: a year in review”

Welcome to Thomas Bonnefille

Thomas BonnefilleWe’re happy to announce that Thomas Bonnefille has just joined the Bootlin engineering team!

Thomas Bonnefille recently graduated from ENSEEIHT, an engineering school based in Toulouse, France. During his studies, he actively participated to 7Robot, the ENSEEIHT robotics club, thanks to which he got involved in his first embedded Linux project: building a robot that ranked 9 out of a hundred participating teams at the French Robotic Cup.

Following this success, Thomas did his final internship at Bootlin, during which he worked on Buildroot, U-Boot and Linux kernel support and drivers for several RISC-V platforms. During his internship, he also got the chance to following many of the training courses offered by Bootlin.

Thomas is now joining our team as a full-time engineer, to work with our growing team based in Toulouse, to help our customers on numerous embedded Linux projects.

Thomas Bonnefille is also the fourth Thomas to work at Bootlin, after Thomas Petazzoni, Thomas Perrot and Thomas Richard! 🙂

Please see Thomas’s Bootlin page and LinkedIn profile.

Linux 6.12 released, Bootlin contributions inside

Linux 6.12 has been released during the past week-end, pretty much as expected after 7 release candidates. As usual, we recommend our readers to go through the amazing LWN.net articles covering the 6.12 merge window (part 1, part 2) to get a high-level overview of the major new features and improvements in this 6.12 release. One of the prominent improvement in this release, as far as the embeded industry is concerned, is obviously the merge of the final bits enabling PREEMPT_RT… which already caused our Real-Time Linux with PREEMPT_RT training course to be updated.

As usual, Bootlin again contributed to this release: with 118 commits merged, we are again in the top 20 contributing companies! Also, in addition to contributing our own code, several of our engineers are also maintainers, and as part of this work those engineers review and merge patches from other contributors. As part of this effort, for this 6.12 release:

  • Alexandre Belloni, as the RTC and I3C subsystems maintainer, merged 29 patches from other contributors
  • Miquèl Raynal, as the MTD subsystem co-maintainer, merged 24 patches from other contributors
  • Grégory Clement, as the Marvell platform maintainer, merged 4 patches from other contributors

Overall, 13 active Bootlin engineers made contributions to this release, which on a total staff of 24 people, means that more than half of our team has contributed to the Linux kernel for 6.12, a good indication of our strong focus on Linux kernel development and upstreaming!

Continue reading “Linux 6.12 released, Bootlin contributions inside”

Bootlin at Capitole du Libre, November 16/17 in Toulouse, France

Capitole du LibreCapitole du Libre is one of the major open-source conferences in France, possibly the most important community-driven open-source conference in France. Coincidentally, it was co-founded over 10 years ago by Bootlin CEO Thomas Petazzoni, but it’s now run by a large group of enthusiast volunteers.

As one of the Bootlin offices is precisely based in Toulouse, and Bootlin is strongly connected to open-source projects and communities, it is natural that Bootlin engineers have been attending Capitole du Libre for pretty much as long as it has existed, and the 2024 edition will be no exception to this rule:

Bootlin is hiring, for both full-time embedded Linux engineer positions, and for embedded Linux engineering internships, so do not hesitate to get in touch during the event to discuss career opportunities at Bootlin!

Additionally, our hardware and electronic design partner and friend Ratiotech will be present, and they are hiring electronic design engineers, get in touch as well!

We’re looking forward to meeting the open-source community at Capitole du Libre, discovering new projects, and learning new things. Join us and attend the event!

Feedback from Open Source Summit Europe 2024: our selection of talks #1

Open Source Summit Europe 2024The Open Source Summit Europe took place about a month ago in Vienna, and a large part of the Bootlin team attended the event, at which we also gave two talks.

At Bootlin, after such conferences, we also have a tradition of highlighting a number of talks we found interesting, and sharing this selection with our readers: we have asked each Bootlin engineer who attended Open Source Summit Europe 2024 to pick one talk they liked, and share a summary.

You’ll find in this first blog post a first selection of 3 talks: with their videos being available, this gives you the ideal playlist for the upcoming cold and rainy evenings!

Continue reading “Feedback from Open Source Summit Europe 2024: our selection of talks #1”

Welcome to Antonin Godard

After Mathieu Dubois-Briand and Olivier Benjamin, a third engineer joined this September our team at our Lyon office in France: we’re happy to welcome Antonin Godard.

After graduating from the french Telecom Paris engineering school in 2020, Antonin spent 4 years at Witekio, exclusively dedicated to embedded Linux system development. He has primarily been involved in Yocto-based projects, designing and architecturing BSPs for various customers and maintaining them. He also has experience with secure boot, CI/CD , CVE analysis, OTA updates and automated testing. Antonin also worked for a year in Witekio’s Seattle office, where he pursued his work on Yocto-based projects for American customers.

Over the years, Antonin got to work with Xilinx Zynq Ultrascale and NXP Layerscape SoCs as well as some experience with i.MX and x86 based-SoCs – for which he got bootloaders (U-boot / Grub), the Linux kernel and various open-source software up and running.

As part of his work at Bootlin, Antonin has already been involved in contributing to the Yocto Project documentation, and he will bring his expertise to help our customers on all embedded Linux topics. See Antonin’s profile on our website for more details.

Once again, welcome Antonin!

2025 internships at Bootlin

We have just published our 2025 internships booklet, documenting the internship topics we are offering to students in engineering who are completing their studies by a final internship.

Since this is mainly targeted at students based in France, who can join our offices in Lyon (France) or Toulouse (France), the internship descriptions are in French.

The topics we are proposing this year are:

  • exploration of Machine Learning solutions for embedded Linux
  • improvement of Snagboot, the universal embedded flashing tool
  • drivers and hardware support in Linux or U-Boot
  • enhancement of Device Tree support in the Linux kernel
  • porting Bootlin training to Qemu
  • evaluation and porting of Bootlin training to a new hardware platform
  • contributions to the Yocto ecosystem
  • contribution to the Buildroot project
  • monitoring the security of Linux BSPs
  • reference implementation of a secure embedded Linux OS
  • Ultra Wide Band (UWB) support in the Linux kernel
  • open topic on embedded Linux or Zephyr



Bootlin welcomes cybersecurity expert Olivier Benjamin

We’re happy to announce that Olivier Benjamin has recently joined the Bootlin engineering team!

For anyone in the tech industry, and especially the embedded industry, it is clear now that security is one of the most important topics of the recent and coming years both from a technical standpoint and from a regulatory standpoint (with regulations such as the CRA). Bootlin has already been helping its customers improve the security of their embedded Linux products by providing expertise on secure boot, encryption, TPM or maintenance of Linux BSPs.

With the arrival of Olivier in our team, we’re really happy to be significantly strengthening our security expertise. Indeed, Olivier has a very strong and solid security background: he started his career at security R&D firm Quarkslab doing embedded device security assessment, then he worked for several years for the french Ministry of Defense reverse engineering security implementation in embedded devices, searching for vulnerabilities and developing proofs of concept. He then joined AWS at Amazon, going through various security roles including incident response as well as looking into security vulnerabilities of concern for the hypervisor and kernel layers of EC2.

In addition to being a security expert, Olivier is also passionate about Linux and Open Source, matching well Bootlin’s DNA. Most notably, Olivier is a contributor to the UBPorts project, looking specifically at the Pine64 native port.

Check out Olivier’s profile on our website for more details. Once again, welcome Olivier!

Welcome to Mathieu Dubois-Briand

Mathieu Dubois-BriandWe’re happy to announce that Mathieu Dubois-Briand has just joined the Bootlin engineering team!

Mathieu graduated from the UTBM, Mathieu spend 12 years at Witekio, where he worked first on Android AOSP, and then on many Linux-based Board Support Package, based on Yocto or Buildroot, for various ARM and ARM64 platforms such as the NXP i.MX and TI OMAP families. During this process, he wrote Device Trees and developed Linux kernel drivers for common devices, such as touchscreen controllers, 3-axis accelerometers, and network PHYs.

In addition to development, Mathieu has managed the maintenance of several projects, including CVE analysis and updating software components throughout the product lifecycle. His work has also involved security-related topics, including secure boot, Trusted Execution Environment, and Trusted Applications using OP-TEE, as well as secure communication between devices, primarily employing TLS and DTLS protocols.

Furthermore, Mathieu has some experience with microcontroller development, using real-time operating systems like FreeRTOS and Zephyr on MCUs from the i.MXRT, ESP32, and STM32 families.

Mathieu has joined our engineering team based in Lyon, and will help us offer more embedded Linux expertise to our customers, including some additional expertise on BSP development, maintenance, CVE analysis, and security. As a Bootlin engineer, Mathieu already participated to the Open Source Summit Europe in Vienna, and is directly contributing to the build engineering effort of the upstream Yocto Project.

Please see Mathieu’s Bootlin page and LinkedIn profile.