Thomas Petazzoni – Page 24

Bootlin at FOSDEM 2015

For many open-source developers based in Europe, the FOSDEM is probably the most useful, interesting and exciting conference. Once again this year, several Bootlin engineers will attend the conference:

Maxime Ripard, mainly involved in Allwinner related kernel development, as well as more recently OpenWRT support for Marvell platforms
Antoine Ténart, involved in Marvell Berlin related kernel development, and one of the developers of our Yocto Project and OpenEmbedded training course
Alexandre Belloni, involved in Atmel processors related kernel development, and also one of our Yocto expert.
Thomas Petazzoni, involved in Marvell EBU processors related kernel development, and doing a lot of Buildroot contributions.

If you are attending, and want to know more about Bootlin, or discuss career or project opportunities, do not hesitate to contact us prior to the conference. Many of us will probably attend a significant number of talks from the Embedded track, so it should be easy to find us.

Last but not least, Alexandre Belloni will be giving a talk about Starting with the Yocto Project, which will take place on Sunday, at 3 PM in room Lameere.

Finally, Thomas Petazzoni has organized and will participate to the Buildroot Developers Meeting organized right after FOSDEM, and sponsored by Google and Mind.

Meet us at Embedded World 2015!

Bootlin will be present at Embedded World 2015 in Nüremberg, Germany on February 24-26. We will be present on the Atmel Corporation booth (4A-220) to demonstrate our Atmel-related developments and offerings.

Four people from Bootlin will be present: Michael Opdenacker (CEO), Thomas Petazzoni (CTO), Anja Roubin (training operations) and Alexandre Belloni (embedded Linux engineer).

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.

If you are interested in our training services, we will have very special discount vouchers for people who visit us at Embedded World.

You will also be able to ask us for free advise during the trade show. We have vast experience on embedded Linux and its kernel, and we will be most happy to give you ideas and pointers to resources that should be useful for your projects.

Linux 3.18 released, Bootlin 13th contributing company

Linus Torvalds has recently released the 3.18 version of the Linux kernel. As usual, LWN.net made an excellent coverage of the merge window: part 1, part 2 and part 3.

As of 3.18-rc6, LWN.net gathered some statistics about the 3.18 kernel contributions, and Bootlin is ranked as the 13th contributing company for this release in number of patches (see the statistics), right after MEV Limited and before Qualcomm.

A quick summary of our contributions:

Improvements to the support of Atmel ARM processors: addition of a memory driver for the RAM controller (Alexandre Belloni), improvements to the irqchip driver to support the new SAMA5D4 processor (Alexandre Belloni), updates to the defconfigs (Alexandre Belloni), new clock driver for the SAMA5D4 processor (Alexandre Belloni), preparation work for multi-platform (Boris Brezillon), numerous fixes to clock drivers (Boris Brezillon), NAND driver improvements (Boris Brezillon), new reset and poweroff drivers and moved all the corresponding logic to a Device Tree based description (Maxime Ripard), refactoring of the clocksource driver and move to the proper drivers/clocksource directory (Maxime Ripard).
Improvements to the support of Marvell EBU ARM processors: XOR driver improvements (Ezequiel Garcia), pin-muxing description in Device Tree for more platforms (Ezequiel Garcia), support for the RTC on Armada 375 (Grégory Clement), support for the Spread Sprectrum Generator on Armada 370 (Grégory Clement), improvements to the support of the Armada 370 RD platform (Thomas Petazzoni), extensions to the cpufreq-dt driver to support platforms with independent clocks for each CPU, various fixes.
Improvements to the support of Marvell Berlin ARM processors: add support for the Ethernet controller by re-using the existing pxa168_eth driver (Antoine Ténart).
Improvements to the support of Allwinner ARM processors: addition of the support for a phase property to the Common Clock Framework, and usage in the context of the MMC clock on Allwinner processors (Maxime Ripard).
Various small UBI improvements (Ezequiel Garcia).
A number of trivial fixes: removal of IRQF_DISABLED, typo fixes, etc. (Michael Opdenacker).

The detailed list of the patches we have contributed:

Yocto Project and OpenEmbedded training materials published

As we announced in out latest newsletter, we recently launched a new Yocto Project and OpenEmbedded development training course.

The first public session will take place in Toulouse, France on November 18-20 and we still have a few seats available. We can also deliver on-site sessions at the location of your choice, see our Training cost and registration page for more details.

However, what brings us here today is that we are happy to announce the release of all the training materials of this new course: like all Bootlin training materials, they are available under the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license.

Fully committed to its knowledge sharing principles, Bootlin has chosen to publish those materials even before the first session has taken place.

The materials available are:

Detailed agenda (PDF)
Slides (PDF)
Instructions for the practical labs (PDF),
Data needed for the practical labs (tarball)
The complete source code for those training materials is available in our Git repository at https://github.com/bootlin/training-materials/.

We of course welcome reviews, feedback and comments about these materials, in order to improve them where needed. Send us your comments!

Call for participation for the FOSDEM Embedded developer room

The FOSDEM is by far the largest and most vibrant open-source event in Europe. With 5000+ participants, 400+ talks in just two days, a completely free entrance with no registration required, and many topics covered, it has become over the years a major meeting event of open-source developers.

The 2015 edition will take on January 31 and February 1st in Brussels. Like most years, a specific track dedicated to embedded systems is on the schedule, called the “Embedded Developer Room”. A call for participation has been published, and proposals are expected by December, 1st.

It is worth mentioning that the scope of the FOSDEM Embedded Developer Room goes much beyond Embedded Linux: it covers all types of embedded systems, including micro-controller based development, fun hacking or do-it-yourself projects, and much more. Looking at last year’s schedule of the Embedded Devroom is a good way of getting a feeling of the topics that are covered.

Also, FOSDEM has many other tracks that can be interesting to embedded Linux developers: last year there was a track about Tracing and debugging, a track about Memory and Storage, a track about Hardware, a developer room about Graphics, etc.

So, save the date, and join FOSDEM 2015 in Brussels!

Videos of XDC2014 and Kernel Recipes 2014

Recently, two interesting conferences took place in France: the X.org developer conference (in Bordeaux, October 8th-10th) and the Kernel Recipes conference (in Paris, September 25th-26th).

Both conferences have now published videos and slides of the different talks:

for the XDC 2014 conference, they are available in the program page
for the Kernel Recipes conference, they are available from the schedule page

It also means that the video of the talk given by Bootlin engineer Maxime Ripard about the support for Allwinner processors in the kernel is now available: video, slides.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJmZkzq651Q

Call for participation for the Embedded Linux Conference 2015

The Embedded Linux Conference Europe is just over that it’s already time to think about the Embedded Linux Conference 2015, which will take place on March 23-25 in San Jose, California.

The call for participation has been published recently, and interested speakers are invited to submit their proposals before January, 9th 2015. The notifications of whether your talk is accepted or not will be sent on January, 16th and the final schedule is planned to be published on January, 23th.

At Bootlin, we really would like to encourage developers who are working on interesting embedded Linux related projects to submit a talk about what they are doing: talking about a specific open-source project, feedback on some experience doing an embedded Linux based product, etc. The scope of topics covered by the Embedded Linux Conference is fairly broad, so do not hesitate to submit a proposal. Giving a talk at this conference is really a great way of getting feedback about what you’re doing, raising awareness about a particular project or issue, and generally meeting other developers interested in similar topics.

It is worth mentioning that for those people whose talk is accepted, the entrance ticket is free. For hobbyists working on their own on open-source projects, the Linux Foundation also has the possibility of funding travel to the conference.

Bootlin team back from ELCE and Linux Plumbers

As we announced in an earlier blog post, the entire Bootlin engineering team was at the Embedded Linux Conference Europe and Linux Plumbers Conference last week in Düsseldorf.

Bootlin engineering team at the Embedded Linux Conference Europe 2014. From left to right, Grégory Clement, Alexandre Belloni, Maxime Ripard, Antoine Ténart, Thomas Petazzoni, Boris Brezillon and Michael Opdenacker.

In addition to attending many talks, meeting developers of the embedded Linux community and therefore keeping us up-to-date with the most recent developments in this domain, we also gave a number of talks, for which the slides are now available:

The DRM/KMS Subsystem From a Newbie’s Point of View by Boris Brezillon. Slides available as PDF and source code.
Supporting a New ARM Platform: The Allwinner Example by Maxime Ripard. Slides available as PDF and source code.
Buildroot: A Deep Dive Into The Core by Thomas Petazzoni. Slides available as PDF and source code.
Two years of ARM SoC Support Mainlining: Lessons Learned by Thomas Petazzoni. Slides available as PDF and source code.

Maxime Ripard giving his Allwinner kernel talk

Thomas Petazzoni giving his Buildroot talk

At the social event, from left to right: Grégory Clement (Bootlin), Kevin Hilman (Linaro), Boris Brezillon (Bootlin), Maxime Ripard (Bootlin)

All the slides of the conference are also available on the event site of the Linux Foundation, and all talks have been video-recorded by the Linux Foundation so hopefully videos should become available in the near future.

Linux 3.17 released, Bootlin 14th contributing company

Linux 3.17 has been released a few days ago. One can read the coverage of the 3.17 merge window by LWN (part 1 and part 2) to get some details about the new features brought by this kernel release.

As usual, Bootlin has continued to contribute a significant number of patches to this kernel release, even though with 147 patches, our contribution has been less important than for the 3.16 release for which we contributed 388 patches. With 147 patches merged, Bootlin is the 14th contributing company by the number of patches, according to the statistics.

Our contributions remain mainly focused on support for various families of ARM processors:

For the Atmel processors
- Switched to use the generic PWM framework instead of custom PWM drivers. This allowed to remove three obsolete drivers (a backlight driver, a LED driver and a misc driver). This work was done by Alexandre Belloni.
- Continue the migration to the common clock framework, by adding clock information to a large number of Atmel boards. Done by Alexandre Belloni.
- Migration of the interrupt controller driver from arch/arm/mach-at91 to drivers/irqchip. Done by Boris Brezillon.
For the Marvell EBU processors (Armada 370, 375, 38x, XP)
- Addition of the mvpp2 network driver, which is used on the Armada 375 SoC. This work was done by Marcin Wojtas from Semihalf, with a lot of review, help and debugging done by Ezequiel Garcia.
- Addition of cpuidle support for Armada 370 and Armada 38x. This work was done by Grégory Clement and Thomas Petazzoni.
- Preparation work to enable cpufreq on Armada XP was merged. However the feature cannot be enabled yet due to missing features in the cpufreq-cpu0 driver. Done by Thomas Petazzoni.
For Marvell Berlin processors
- SMP support has been added. Done by Antoine Ténart.
- Description of the I2C controller has been added to the Device Tree. Done by Antoine Ténart.
- Support for AHCI has been added. Also done by Antoine Ténart.
For Allwinner processors
- New DMA controller driver for the DMA engine of the Allwinner A31 SoC. Done by Maxime Ripard.
- A number of fixes and improvements to the pin-muxing driver for Allwinner platforms. Done by Maxime Ripard.
- Support for the Merrii A31 Hummingbird board has been added. Done by Maxime Ripard.
Other changes
- Addition of a helper function to convert an ONFI timing mode into the according NAND timings. Done by Boris Brezillon.
- Addition of a driver for the Foxlink FL500WVR00-A0T panel. Done by Boris Brezillon.

The detailed list of our contributions:

Xenomai 2.6.4 released, with Atmel SAMA5D3 support

At the end of September, the Xenomai project has announced the release of version 2.6.4. For the record, Xenomai is a hard real-time extension to the Linux kernel.

Amongst a number of bug fixes and improvements, this new release brings an interesting new feature to which Bootlin contributed: the support for the Atmel SAMA5D3. This means that Xenomai can now be used on platforms such as the Xplained SAMA5D3 and any other SAMA5D3 based platform. This work was done by Xenomai ARM maintainer Gilles Chanteperdrix, thanks to the testing and insights of Bootlin engineer Maxime Ripard.

Mainly, the change needed was to support the AIC5 interrupt controller used in SAMA5D3, which is different from the interrupt controller used on earlier AT91 processors. This change should also provide compatibility with the recently released SAMA5D4, though we haven’t tested this at this time, and Xenomai only provides its patch up to kernel 3.14, while SAMA5D4 support was only recently added to the mainline kernel.

This 2.6.4 Xenomai release also brings support for the 3.14 kernel version, through the corresponding I-Pipe patch.

There are also some other interesting Xenomai news: in early October, they have released the first release candidate of Xenomai 3, the next generation Xenomai architecture. And they also have a brand new and more modern website at xenomai.org.