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...

Back from Kernel Recipes: slides and videos

As we announced previously, we participated to the Embedded Recipes and Kernel Recipes conferences in September in Paris. Three people from Bootlin attended the event: Bootlin CEO Michael Opdenacker, and Bootlin engineers Mylène Josserand and Maxime Ripard.

Introduction to Yocto Project / OpenEmbedded, by Mylène Josserand

Mylène Josserand gave an Introduction to the Yocto Project / OpenEmbedded-core. The slides are available in PDF or as LaTeX code.

An introduction to the Linux DRM subsystem, by Maxime Ripard

Maxime Ripard gave an Introduction to the Linux DRM subsystem. The slides are available in PDF or as LaTeX code.

Other videos and slides

The slides of all talks are available on the Embedded Recipes and Kernel Recipes conference websites. Youtube playlists are available for Embedded Recipes 2017 and Kernel Recipes 2017 as well.

Conclusion

With its special one track format, an attendance limited to 100 people, excellent choice of talks and nice social events, Kernel Recipes remains a very good conference that we really enjoyed. Embedded Recipes, which was in its first edition this year, followed the same principle, with the same success. We’re looking forward to attending next year editions, and hopefully contributing a few talks as well. See you all at Embedded and Kernel Recipes in 2018!

Back from ELCE 2017: slides and videos

Bootlin participated to the Embedded Linux Conference Europe last week in Prague. With 7 engineers attending, 4 talks, one BoF and a poster at the technical showcase, we had a strong presence to this major conference of the embedded Linux ecosystem. All of us had a great time at this event, attending interesting talks and meeting numerous open-source developers.

Bootlin team at the Embedded Linux Conference Europe 2017
Bootlin team at the Embedded Linux Conference Europe 2017. Top, from left to right: Maxime Ripard, Grégory Clement, Boris Brezillon, Quentin Schulz. Bottom, from left to right: Miquèl Raynal, Thomas Petazzoni, Michael Opdenacker.

In this first blog post about ELCE, we want to share the slides and videos of the talks we have given during the conference.

SD/eMMC: New Speed Modes and Their Support in Linux – Gregory Clement

Grégory ClementSince the introduction of the original “default”(DS) and “high speed”(HS) modes, the SD card standard has evolved by introducing new speed modes, such as SDR12, SDR25, SDR50, SDR104, etc. The same happened to the eMMC standard, with the introduction of new high speed modes named DDR52, HS200, HS400, etc. The Linux kernel has obviously evolved to support these new speed modes, both in the MMC core and through the addition of new drivers.

This talk will start by introducing the SD and eMMC standards and how they work at the hardware level, with a specific focus on the new speed modes. With this hardware background in place, we will then detail how these standards are supported by Linux, see what is still missing, and what we can expect to see in the future.

Slides [PDF], Slides [LaTeX source]

An Overview of the Linux Kernel Crypto Subsystem – Boris Brezillon

Boris BrezillonThe Linux kernel has long provided cryptographic support for in-kernel users (like the network or storage stacks) and has been pushed to open these cryptographic capabilities to user-space along the way.

But what is exactly inside this subsystem, and how can it be used by kernel users? What is the official userspace interface exposing these features and what are non-upstream alternatives? When should we use a HW engine compared to a purely software based implementation? What’s inside a crypto engine driver and what precautions should be taken when developing one?

These are some of the questions we’ll answer throughout this talk, after having given a short introduction to cryptographic algorithms.

Slides [PDF], Slides [LaTeX source]

Buildroot: What’s New? – Thomas Petazzoni

Thomas PetazzoniBuildroot is a popular and easy to use embedded Linux build system. Within minutes, it is capable of generating lightweight and customized Linux systems, including the cross-compilation toolchain, kernel and bootloader images, as well as a wide variety of userspace libraries and programs.

Since our last “What’s new” talk at ELC 2014, three and half years have passed, and Buildroot has continued to evolve significantly.

After a short introduction about Buildroot, this talk will go through the numerous new features and improvements that have appeared over the last years, and show how they can be useful for developers, users and contributors.

Slides [PDF], Slides [LaTeX source]

Porting U-Boot and Linux on New ARM Boards: A Step-by-Step Guide – Quentin Schulz

May it be because of a lack of documentation or because we don’t know where to look or where to start, it is not always easy to get started with U-Boot or Linux, and know how to port them to a new ARM platform.

Based on experience porting modern versions of U-Boot and Linux on a custom Freescale/NXP i.MX6 platform, this talk will offer a step-by-step guide through the porting process. From board files to Device Trees, through Kconfig, device model, defconfigs, and tips and tricks, join this talk to discover how to get U-Boot and Linux up and running on your brand new ARM platform!

Slides [PDF], Slides [LaTeX source]

BoF: Embedded Linux Size – Michael Opdenacker

This “Birds of a Feather” session will start by a quick update on available resources and recent efforts to reduce the size of the Linux kernel and the filesystem it uses.

An ARM based system running the mainline kernel with about 3 MB of RAM will also be demonstrated.

If you are interested in the size topic, please join this BoF and share your experience, the resources you have found and your ideas for further size reduction techniques!

Slides [PDF], Slides [LaTeX source]

Bootlin at NetDev 2.2

NetDev 2.2Back in April 2017, Bootlin engineer Antoine Ténart participated to NetDev 2.1, the most important conference discussing Linux networking support. After the conference, Antoine published a summary of it, reporting on the most interesting talks and topics that have been discussed.

Next week, NetDev 2.2 takes place in Seoul, South Korea, and this time around, two Bootlin engineers will be attending the event: Alexandre Belloni and Antoine Ténart. We are getting more and more projects with networking related topics, and therefore the wide range of talks proposed at NetDev 2.2 will definitely help grow our expertise in this field.

Do not hesitate to get in touch with Alexandre or Antoine if you are also attending this event!

Buildroot training course updated to Buildroot 2017.08

BuildrootBack in June 2015, we announced the availability of a training course on Buildroot, a popular and easy to use embedded Linux build system. A year later, we updated it to cover Buildroot 2016.05. We are happy to announce a new update: we now cover Buildroot 2017.08.

The most significant updates are:

  • Presentation of the Long Term Supported releases of Buildroot, a topic we also presented in a previous blog post
  • Appearance of the new top-level utils/ directory, containing various utilities directly useful for the Buildroot user, such as test-pkg, check-package, get-developers or scanpypi
  • Removal of $(HOST_DIR)/usr/, as everything has been moved up one level to $(HOST_DIR), to make the Buildroot SDK/toolchain more conventional
  • Document the new organization of the skeleton package, now split into several packages, to properly support various init systems. A new diagram has been added to clarify this topic.
  • List all package infrastructures that are available in Buildroot, since their number is growing!
  • Use SPDX license codes for licensing information in packages, which is now mandatory in Buildroot
  • Remove the indication that dependencies of host (i.e native) packages are derived from the dependencies of the corresponding package, since it’s no longer the case
  • Indicate that the check for hashes has been extended to also allow checking the hash of license files. This allows to detect changes in the license text.
  • Update the BR2_EXTERNAL presentation to cover the fact that multiples BR2_EXTERNAL trees are supported now.
  • Use the new relocatable SDK functionality that appeared in Buildroot 2017.08.

The practical labs have of course been updated to use Buildroot 2017.08, but also Linux 4.13 and U-Boot 2017.07, to remain current with upstream versions. In addition, they have been extended with two additional steps:

  • Booting the Buildroot generated system using TFTP and NFS, as an alternative to the SD card we normally use
  • Using genimage to generate a complete and ready to flash SD card image

We will be delivering this course to one of our customers in Germany next month, and are of course available to deliver it on-site anywhere in the world if you’re interested! And of course, we continue to publish, for free, all the materials used in this training session: slides and labs.

Buildroot Long Term Support releases: from 2017.02 to 2017.02.6 and counting

Buildroot LogoBuildroot is a widely used embedded Linux build systems. A large number of companies and projects use Buildroot to produce customized embedded Linux systems for a wide range of embedded devices. Most of those devices are now connected to the Internet, and therefore subject to attacks if the software they run is not regularly updated to address security vulnerabilities.

The Buildroot project publishes a new release every three months, with each release providing a mix of new features, new packages, package updates, build infrastructure improvements… and security fixes. However, until earlier this year, as soon as a new version was published, the maintenance of the previous version stopped. This means that in order to stay up to date in terms of security fixes, users essentially had two options:

  1. Update their Buildroot version regularly. The big drawback is that they get not only security updates, but also many other package updates, which may be problematic when a system is in production.
  2. Stick with their original Buildroot version, and carefully monitor CVEs and security vulnerabilities in the packages they use, and update the corresponding packages, which obvisouly is a time-consuming process.

Starting with 2017.02, the Buildroot community has decided to offer one long term supported release every year: 2017.02 will be supported one year in terms of security updates and bug fixes, until 2018.02 is released. The usual three-month release cycle still applies, with 2017.05 and 2017.08 already being released, but users interested in a stable Buildroot version that is kept updated for security issues can stay on 2017.02.

Since 2017.02 was released on February 28th, 2017, six minor versions were published on a fairly regularly basis, almost every month, except in August:

With about 60 to 130 commits between each minor version, it is relatively easy for users to check what has been changed, and evaluate the impact of upgrading to the latest minor version to benefit from the security updates. The commits integrated in those minor versions are carefully chosen with the idea that users should be able to easily update existing systems.

In total, those six minor versions include 526 commits, of which 183 commits were security updates, representing roughly one third of the total number of commits. The other commits have been:

  • 140 commits to fix build issues
  • 57 commits to bump versions of packages for bug fixes. These almost exclusively include updates to the Linux kernel, using its LTS versions. For other packages, we are more conservative and generally don’t upgrade them.
  • 17 commits to address issues in the licensing description of the packages
  • 186 commits to fix miscellaneous issues, ranging from runtime issues affecting packages to bugs in the build infrastructure

The Buildroot community has already received a number of bug reports, patches or suggestions specifically targetting the 2017.02 LTS version, which indicates that developers and companies have started to adopt this LTS version.

Therefore, if you are interested in using Buildroot for a product, you should probably consider using the LTS version! We very much welcome feedback on this version, and help in monitoring the security vulnerabilities affecting software packages in Buildroot.

Bootlin at the Embedded Linux Conference Europe

The next Embedded Linux Conference Europe will take place on October 23-25 in Prague, Czech Republic.

Embedded Linux Conference Europe 2017

As usual, a significant part of the Bootlin engineering team will participate to the conference and give talks on various topics:

In addition to the main ELCE conference, Thomas Petazzoni will participate to the Buildroot Developers Days, a 2-day hackaton organized on Saturday and Sunday prior to ELCE, and will participate to the Device Tree workshop organized on Thursday afternoon.

Once again, we’re really happy to participate to this conference, and looking forward to meeting again with a large number of Linux kernel and embedded Linux developers!

Linux 4.13 released, Bootlin contributions

Linux 4.13 was released last Sunday by Linus Torvalds, and the major new features of this release were described in details by LWN in a set of articles: part 1 and part 2.

This release gathers 13006 non-merge commits, amongst which 239 were made by Bootlin engineers. According to the LWN article on 4.13 statistics, this makes Bootlin the 13th contributing company by number of commits, the 10th by lines changed.

The most important contributions from Bootlin for this release have been:

  • In the RTC subsystem
    • Alexandre Belloni introduced a new method for registering RTC devices, with one step for the allocation, and one step for the registration itself, which allows to solve race conditions in a number of drivers.
    • Alexandre Belloni added support for exposing the non-volatile memory found in some RTC devices through the Linux kernel nvmem framework, making them usable from userspace. A few drivers were changed to use this new mechanism.
  • In the MTD/NAND subsystem
    • Boris Brezillon did a large number of fixes and minor improvements in the NAND subsystem, both in the core and in a few drivers.
    • Thomas Petazzoni contributed the support for on-die ECC, specifically with Micron NANDs. This allows to use the ECC calculation capabilities of the NAND chip itself, as opposed to using software ECC (calculated by the CPU) or ECC done by the NAND controller.
    • Thomas Petazzoni contributed a few improvements to the FSMC NAND driver, used on ST Spear platforms. The main improvement is to support the ->setup_data_interface() callback, which allows to configure optimal timings in the NAND controller.
  • Support for Allwinner ARM platforms
    • Alexandre Belloni improved the sun4i PWM driver to use the so-called atomic API and support hardware read out.
    • Antoine Ténart improved the sun4i-ss cryptographic engine driver to support the Allwinner A13 processor, in addition to the already supported A10.
    • Maxime Ripard contributed HDMI support for the Allwinner A10 processor (in the DRM subsystem) and a number of related changes to the Allwinner clock support.
    • Quentin Schulz improved the support for battery charging through the AXP20x PMIC, used on Allwinner platforms.
  • Support for Atmel ARM platforms
    • Alexandre Belloni added suspend/resume support for the Atmel SAMA5D2 clock driver. This is part of a larger effort to implement the backup mode for the SAMA5D2 processor.
    • Alexandre Belloni added suspend/resume support in the tcb_clksrc driver, used as for clocksource and clockevents on Atmel SAMA5D2.
    • Alexandre Belloni cleaned up a number of drivers, removing support for non-DT probing, which is possible now that the AVR32 architecture has been dropped. Indeed, the AVR32 processors used to share the same drivers as the Atmel ARM processors.
    • Alexandre Belloni added the core support for the backup mode on Atmel SAMA5D2, a suspend/resume state with significant power savings.
    • Boris Brezillon switched Atmel platforms to use the new binding for the EBI and NAND controllers.
    • Boris Brezillon added support for timing configuration in the Atmel NAND driver.
    • Quentin Schulz added suspend/resume support to the Bosch m_can driver, used on Atmel platforms.
  • Support for Marvell ARM platforms
    • Antoine Ténart contributed a completely new driver (3200+ lines of code) for the Inside Secure EIP197 cryptographic engine, used in the Marvell Armada 7K and 8K processors. He also subsequently contributed a number of fixes and improvements for this driver.
    • Antoine Ténart improved the existing mvmdio driver, used to communicate with Ethernet PHYs over MDIO on Marvell platforms to support the XSMI variant found on Marvell Armada 7K/8K, used to communicate with 10G capable PHYs.
    • Antoine Ténart contributed minimal support for 10G Ethernet in the mvpp2 driver, used on Marvell Armada 7K/8K. For now, the driver still relies on low-level initialization done by the bootloader, but additional changes in 4.14 and 4.15 will remove this limitation.
    • Grégory Clement added a new pinctrl driver to configure the pin-muxing on the Marvell Armada 37xx processors.
    • Grégory Clement did a large number of changes to the clock drivers used on the Marvell Armada 7K/8K processors to prepare the addition of pinctrl support.
    • Grégory Clement added support for Marvell Armada 7K/8K to the existing mvebu-gpio driver.
    • Thomas Petazzoni added support for the ICU, a specialized interrupt controller used on the Marvell Armada 7K/8K, for all devices located in the CP110 part of the processor.
    • Thomas Petazzoni removed a work-around to properly resume per-CPU interrupts on the older Marvell Armada 370/XP platforms.
  • Support for RaspberryPi platforms
    • Boris Brezillon added runtime PM support to the HDMI encoder driver used on RaspberryPi platforms, and contributed a few other fixes to the VC4 DRM driver.

It is worth mentioning that Miquèl Raynal, recently hired by Bootlin, sees his first kernel patch merged: nand: fix wrong default oob layout for small pages using soft ecc.

Bootlin engineers are not only contributors, but also maintainers of various subsystems in the Linux kernel, which means they are involved in the process of reviewing, discussing and merging patches contributed to those subsystems:

  • Maxime Ripard, as the Allwinner platform co-maintainer, merged 113 patches from other contributors
  • Boris Brezillon, as the MTD/NAND maintainer, merged 62 patches from other contributors
  • Alexandre Belloni, as the RTC maintainer and Atmel platform co-maintainer, merged 57 patches from other contributors
  • Grégory Clement, as the Marvell EBU co-maintainer, merged 47 patches from other contributors

Here is the commit by commit detail of our contributors to 4.13:

Bootlin at Embedded and Kernel Recipes 2017

Kernel RecipesEmbedded RecipesThe Kernel Recipes conference has become over the last few years a very interesting conference, with an original single track format and a limited number of attendees, which fosters communication and networking. Held in Paris, France, it is obviously a conference of choice for Bootlin engineers to attend and speak at. We participated to multiple editions, Bootlin engineer Maxime Ripard gave a talk at the 2014 edition, while Thomas Petazzoni gave a talk at the 2013 edition.

In 2017, the organizers decided to complement the 3-day Kernel Recipes conference with a 1-day Embedded Recipes event, and Bootlin will participate by having two engineers attend those events and give talks:

If you’re interested in attending one of those events, make sure to register on time, there are only 100 seats available!

Bootlin at the Linux Plumbers 2017 conference

The Linux Plumbers conference has established itself as a major conference in the Linux ecosystem, discussing numerous aspects of the low-level layers of the Linux software stack. Linux Plumbers is organized around a number of micro-conferences, plus a number of more regular talks.

Linux Plumbers 2017

Bootlin already participated to several previous editions of Linux Plumbers, and will again participate to this year’s edition that takes place in Los Angeles on September 13-15. Bootlin engineers Boris Brezillon, Alexandre Belloni, Grégory Clement and Thomas Petazzoni will attend the conference.

If you’re attending this conference, or are located in the Los Angeles area, and want to meet us, do not hesitate to drop us a line at info@bootlin.com. You can also follow Bootlin Twitter feed for updates during the conference.

Updated bleeding edge toolchains on toolchains.bootlin.com

Two months ago, we announced a new service from Bootlin: free and ready-to-use Linux cross-compilation toolchains, for a large number of architectures and C libraries, available at https://toolchains.bootlin.com/.

Bleeding edge toolchain updates

All our bleeding edge toolchains have been updated, with the latest version of the toolchain components:

  • gcc 7.2.0, which was released 2 days ago
  • glibc 2.26, which was released 2 weeks ago
  • binutils 2.29
  • gdb 8.0

Those bleeding edge toolchains are now based on Buildroot 2017.08-rc2, which brings a nice improvement: the host tools (gcc, binutils, etc.) are no longer linked statically against gmp, mpfr and other host libraries. They are dynamically linked against them with an appropriate rpath encoded into the gcc and binutils binaries to find those shared libraries regardless of the installation location of the toolchain.

However, due to gdb 8.0 requiring a C++11 compiler on the host machine (at least gcc 4.8), our bleeding edge toolchains are now built in a Debian Jessie system instead of Debian Squeeze, which means that at least glibc 2.14 is needed on the host system to use them.

The only toolchains for which the tests are not successful are the MIPS64R6 toolchains, due to the Linux kernel not building properly for this architecture with gcc 7.x. This issue has already been reported upstream.

Stable toolchain updates

We haven’t changed the component versions of our stable toolchains, but we made a number of fixes to them:

  • The armv7m and m68k-coldfire toolchains have been rebuilt with a fixed version of elf2flt that makes the toolchain linker directly usable. This fixes building the Linux kernel using those toolchains.
  • The mips32r5 toolchain has been rebuilt with NaN 2008 encoding (instead of NaN legacy), which makes the resulting userspace binaries actually executable by the Linux kernel, which expects NaN 2008 encoding on mips32r5 by default.
  • Most mips toolchains for musl have been rebuilt, with Buildroot fixes for the creation of the dynamic linker symbolic link. This has no effect on the toolchain itself, but also the tests under Qemu to work properly and validate the toolchains.

Other improvements

We made a number of small improvements to the toolchains.bootlin.com site:

  • Each architecture now has a page that lists all toolchain versions available. This allows to easily find a toolchain that matches your requirements (in terms of gcc version, kernel headers version, etc.). See All aarch64 toolchains for an example.
  • We added a FAQ as well as a news page.

As usual, we welcome feedback about our toolchains, either on our bug tracker or by mail at info@bootlin.com.