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...

Buildroot meeting and FOSDEM report, Google Summer of Code topics

As we discussed in a recent blog post, two of our engineers participated to the FOSDEM conference early February in Brussels, Belgium. For those interested, many videos are available, such as several videos from the Lameere room, where the embedded related talks were given.

Thomas Petazzoni also participated to the two days Buildroot Developers Meeting after the FOSDEM conference. This meeting gathered 10 contributors to the Buildroot project physically present and two additional remote participants. The event was sponsored by Google and Mind, thanks a lot to them! During those two days, the participants were able to discuss a very large number of topics that are often difficult to discuss over mailing lists or IRC, and a significant work to clean up the oldest pending patches was done. In addition to this, these meetings are also very important to allow the contributors to know each other, as it makes future online discussions and collaborations much easier and fruitful. For more details, see the complete report of the event.

Buildroot Developers Meeting in Brussels
Buildroot Developers Meeting in Brussels

Also, if you’re interested in Buildroot, the project has applied to participate to the next edition of the Google Summer of Code. Two project ideas are already listed on the project wiki, feel free to contact Thomas Petazzoni if you are a student interested in these topics, or if you have other proposals to make for Buildroot.

Bootlin contributions to Linux 3.13

Version 3.13 of the Linux kernel was released by Linus Torvalds on January, 19th 2014. The kernelnewbies.org site has an excellent page that covers the most important improvements and feature additions that this new kernel release brings.

As usual Bootlin contributed to this kernel: with 121 patches merged in 3.13 on a total of 12127 patches contributed, Bootlin is ranked 17th in the list of companies contributing to the Linux kernel. We also appeared on Jonathan Corbet kernel contribution statistics at LWN.net, as a company having contributed 1% of the kernel changes, right between Renesas Electronics and Huawei Technologies.

Amongst the contributions we made for 3.13:

  • Standby support added to the Marvell Kirkwood processors, done by Ezequiel Garcia.
  • Various fixes and improvements to the PXA3xx NAND driver, as well as to the Marvell Armada 370/XP clocks, in preparation to the introduction of NAND support for Armada 370/XP, which will arrive in 3.14. Work done by Ezequiel Garcia.
  • Added support for the Performance Monitoring Unit in the AM33xx Device Tree files, which allows to use perf and oprofile on platforms such as the BeagleBone. Work done by Alexandre Belloni.
  • Support added for the I2C controllers on certain Allwinner SOCs, as well as several other cleanups and minor improvements for these SoCs. Work done by Maxime Ripard.
  • Continued the work to get rid of IRQF_DISABLED, as well as other janitorial tasks such as removing unused Kconfig symbols. Work done by Michael Opdenacker.
  • Added support for MSI (Message Signaled Interrupts) for the Armada 370 and XP SoCs. Work done by Thomas Petazzoni.
  • Added support for the Marvell Matrix board (an Armada XP based platform) and the OpenBlocks A7 (a Kirkwood based platform manufactured by PlatHome). Work done by Thomas Petazzoni.

In detail, the patches contributed by Bootlin are:

Bootlin at FOSDEM and at the Buildroot Developers Meeting

FOSDEMThis week-end is the first week-end of February, which on the schedule of all open-source developers is always booked for a major event of our community: the FOSDEM conference in Brussels. With several hundreds of talks over two days, this completely free event is one of the biggest event, if not the biggest of the open-source world.

For embedded Linux developers, FOSDEM has quite a few interesting tracks and talks this year: an embedded track, a graphics track (with many embedded related talks, such as talks on Video4Linux, the status of open-source drivers for 2D and 3D graphics on ARM platforms, etc.), and several talks in other tracks relevant to embedded developers. For example, there is one talk about the Allwinner SoCs and the community behind it in one of the main track. Our engineer Maxime Ripard is the Linux kernel maintainer for this family of SoC.

Two Bootlin engineers will attend FOSDEM: Maxime Ripard and Thomas Petazzoni. Do not hesitate to get in touch with them if you want to discuss embedded Linux or kernel topics!

Also, right after FOSDEM, the Buildroot community is organizing its Developers Meeting, on Monday, 3rd and Tuesday 4th February. This event is sponsored by Google (providing the meeting location) and Mind (providing the dinner), and will take place in the offices of Google in Brussels. Ten Buildroot developers will participate to the meeting in Brussels, as well as a number of others remotely. On Bootlin side, Thomas Petazzoni will be participating to the meeting. If you are interested in participating, either physically or remotely, do not hesitate to contact Thomas to register. For more details, see the wiki page of the event.

Bootlin at Linux Conf Australia, January 2014

Linux Conf Augstralia 2014Linux Conf Australia is by far the most well-known Linux related conference of the southern hemisphere, with a good number of Linux kernel related talks and discussions, as well as many other topics around the Linux ecosystem. The 2014 edition of the event will take place in Perth, Australia, and the schedule of talks and mini-confs looks very promising!

For the first time, Bootlin will be participating to this conference: our CTO and embedded Linux engineer Thomas Petazzoni will be giving a talk titled Buildroot: building embedded Linux systems made easy!, during which he will be presenting what Buildroot is, what it is useful for, and how it works.

Beyond this talk, Thomas will be attending the full week of conferences, so do not hesitate to get in touch with him, especially if you’re interested in embedded Linux topics, Buildroot, ARM kernel development, and in Bootlin!

Updated version of our kernel driver development course: Device Tree, BeagleBone Black, Wii Nunchuk, and more!

BeagleBone Black connected to the Wii Nunchuk over I2C
In the last few years, the practical labs of our Embedded Linux kernel and driver development training were based on the ARMv5 Calao USB-A9263 platform, and covering the ARM kernel support as it was a few years ago. While we do regularly update our training session materials, with all the changes that occurred in the ARM kernel world over the last two years, it was time to make more radical changes to this training course. This update is now available since last month, and we’ve already successfully given several sessions of this updated course.

The major improvements and updates are:

  • All the practical labs are now done on the highly popular ARMv7 based BeagleBone Black, which offers much more expansion capabilities than the Calao USB-A9263 platform we were using. This also means that participants to our public training sessions keep the BeagleBone Black with them after the session!
  • All the course materials and practical labs were updated to cover and use the Device Tree mechanism. We also for example cover how to configure pin muxing on the BeagleBone Black through the Device Tree.
  • The training course is now centered around the development of two device drivers:
    1. A driver for the Wii Nunchuk. This device is connected over I2C to the BeagleBone Black, and we detail, step by step, how to write a driver that communicates over I2C with the device and then exposes the device functionalities to userspace through the input kernel subsystem.
    2. A minimal driver for the OMAP UART, which we use to illustrate how to interface with memory-mapped devices: mapping I/O registers, accessing them, handling interrupts, putting processes to sleep and waking them up, etc. We expose some minimal functionality of the device to userspace through the misc kernel subsystem. This subsystem is useful to expose the functionalities of non-standard types of devices, such as custom devices implemented inside FPGAs.

And as usual, all the training materials are freely available, under a Creative Commons license, so you can study in detail the contents of the training session. It is also worth mentioning that this training session is taught by Bootlin engineers having practical and visible experience in kernel development, as can be seen in the contributions we made in the latest kernel releases: 3.9, 3.10, 3.11 and 3.12.

For details about cost and registration, see our Training cost and registration page.

Videos and slides of the Kernel Recipes 2013 conference

Kernel Recipes LogoAs we mentionned earlier on this blog, Bootlin participated to the second edition of the Kernel Recipes conference in Paris, a two-days conference dedicated to kernel topics.

The videos and slides of the talks in this conference have now been published, see https://kernel-recipes.org/en/2013/conferences/ for the complete list. There is a good number of interesting topics: discussion about kernel development environment by Willy Tarreau, status of Nftables and Netfilter in general by Eric Leblond, a talk explaning how to decipher kernel oopses, a talk about Crosstool-NG from Yann E. Morin, a discussion about Linux Security Modules, a talk about the status of Display support in the kernel by Laurent Pinchart, and several lightning talks.

The talks from Bootlin were:

Bootlin really enjoyed this conference, and is looking forward to participating again next year. Thanks a lot to the organizers!

Linux 3.12 released, Bootlin 14th contributor by number of commits

Emperor penguins pictureThe 3.12 kernel has just been released by Linus Torvalds, who summarized what he considers to be the major improvements offered by this release: improvements to the dynamic tick code, support infrastructure for DRM render nodes, TSO sizing and the FQ scheduler in the network layer, support for user namespaces in the XFS filesystem, multithreaded RAID5 in the MD subsystem, offline data deduplication in the Btrfs filesystem.

As usual, Bootlin contributed to the Linux kernel during this cycle, and according to the statistics at KPS, Bootlin is the 14th contributor in terms of number of commits, as a company. Bootlin contributed 185 patches to this kernel release, on a total of 10920 patches. Note that this classification includes the “Unknown” company which ranks first, gathering the contributions from all the contributors that are not known to be affiliated to any company.

The highlights of our contributions are:

  • Addition of support for the HX8369 LCD controller to the driver we had contributed earlier for the HX8357 LCD controller, in drivers/video/backlight/hx8357.c. These LCD controllers are used by the Crystalfontz i.MX28 boards, and this new development was done primarily by Alexandre Belloni.
  • Addition of a driver for the Nuvoton NAU7802 ADC chip on I2C, in drivers/iio/adc/nau7802.c. Some initial work was done by Maxime Ripard, but lots of debugging and additional work was done by Alexandre Belloni, who also pushed the driver to the mainline.
  • Added Device Tree information for the PMU unit on Atmel SAMA5D3 platforms, which allows to use perf on these platforms. Done by Alexandre Belloni.
  • Addition of a Device Tree binding to the mvebu-mbus driver, which controls the configuration of the MBus on Marvell EBU platforms (Armada 370/XP, Kirkwood, Dove, etc.). This binding took a lot of discussion time, and many iterations before reaching a state that was considered acceptable for mainline, but it has finally been merged in 3.12. The core of this work was done by Ezequiel Garcia, with several contributions from Thomas Petazzoni to convert existing platforms to the new APIs.
  • Many cleanups and improvements to the nand_pxa3xx driver, which for the moment is used for the NAND controller on PXA3xx, but that we are currently extending to also cover the NAND controller of Armada 370/XP platforms. In 3.12, only some cleanups have been integrated, and we are currently submitting the more important patches for mainline integration. This work was done by Ezequiel Garcia.
  • Cleanups, and conversion to CLOCKSOURCE_OF_DECLARE of the Armada 370/XP clocksource driver. Done by Ezequiel Garcia.
  • Extension of the Marvell I2C driver to use a new feature of the I2C controller found on Armada 370/XP, which allows to program an entire transaction at once, instead of having interrupts at each step of the transaction. This work was done by Gregory Clement.
  • The quest of removing unneeded ->init_irq() callbacks in machine descriptors continued, with Maxime Ripard removing 4 additional occurrences of this in mach-shmobile.
  • Cleanups and improvements to the sun4i clocksource driver, used on Allwinner SOCs. Done by Maxime Ripard.
  • Introduction of the initial support for the Allwinner A31 SOC and its WITS Columbus evaluation kit, as well as initial support for the Allwinner A20 SOC and the Olimex A20-Olinuxino-Micro and Cubieboard2 board, both based on the Allwinner A20 SOC. This includes clock support, pinctrl support, Ethernet support where applicable, and more. Work done by Maxime Ripard.
  • Michael Opdenacker continued his fight against IRQF_DISABLED and removed more occurrences of them. Michael also fixed a few issues in some Kconfig files.
  • Fixed big-endian issues in the Marvell mvneta Ethernet driver and the Marvell XOR driver, in preparation for the addition of big-endian support to the mach-mvebu platform. Done by Thomas Petazzoni.
  • Conversion of a few more Kirkwood platforms to the Device Tree, and removal of legacy support for other Kirkwood platforms that were already converted to the Device Tree. Done by Thomas Petazzoni.
  • Addition of the support for the Armada XP based AXP-WiFi AP board, from Marvell. Done by Thomas Petazzoni.
  • Improvements of the MSI infrastructure in the kernel: consolidation of code between architectures, addition of a registry of msi_chip. This preparatory work was needed to introduce MSI support for Armada 370/XP, which should hopefully make its way into 3.13. Work done by Thomas Petazzoni.

In details, our contributions were:

Videos from Embedded Linux Conference 2013

San FranciscoBetter late than never: we are finally publishing a set of videos of 24 talks from the last Embedded Linux Conference, which took place earlier this year in San Francisco, California. These videos are coming in addition to the videos that the Linux Foundation had posted from this conference on video.linux.com.

Our videos are the ones from other talks, covering topics such as I2C, the BeagleBone, the Common Display Framework, Kernel debugging, Memory management in the kernel, usage of SPDX in Yocto, the SCHED_DEADLINE scheduler, the management of ARM SoC support in the kernel, real-time, kernel testing, and more. We’re also including below the full set of videos from the Linux Foundation, so that this page nicely gives links to all the videos from Embedded Linux Conference 2013.

Our videos

David AndersVideo capture
Texas Instruments
Board Bringup: You, Me and I2C
Slides
Video (38 minutes):
full HD (269M), 800×450 (151M)

Jayneil DalalVideo capture
Texas Instruments
Beaglebone Hands-On Tutorial
Slides
Video (66 minutes):
full HD (444M), 800×450 (249M)

Jesse BarkerVideo capture
Linaro
Common Display Framework BoF
Video (113 minutes):
full HD (761M), 800×450 (389M)

Alison ChaikenVideo capture
Mentor Embedded Software Division
Embedded Linux Takes on the Hard Problems of Automotive
Slides
Video (54 minutes):
full HD (359M), 800×450 (152M)

Kevin ChalmersVideo capture
Texas Instruments
RFC: Obtaining Management Buy-in for Mainline Development
Slides
Video (36 minutes):
full HD (253M), 800×450 (140M)

Michael ChristoffersonVideo capture
Enea
Yocto Meta-Virtualization Layer Project
Slides
Video (47 minutes):
full HD (330M), 800×450 (187M)

Kevin DankwardtVideo capture
K Computing
Survey of Linux Kernel Debugging Techniques
Slides
Video (50 minutes):
full HD (350M), 800×450 (206M)

Ezequiel Alfredo GarciaVideo capture
VanguardiaSur
Kernel Dynamic Memory Allocation Tracking and Reduction
Slides
Video (56 minutes):
full HD (398M), 800×450 (235M)

Christopher FriedtVideo capture
Research In Motion
Gentoo-Bionic: We Can Rebuild Him. Better. Stronger. Faster.
Slides
Video (39 minutes):
full HD (272M), 800×450 (154M)

Gregoire GentilVideo capture
Always Innovating
Lessons Learned in Designing a Self-Video, Self-Hovering Nano Copter
Video (56 minutes):
full HD (391M), 800×450 (225M)

Mark Gisi, Mark HatleVideo capture
Wind River Systems
Leveraging SPDX with Yocto
Video (53 minutes):
full HD (376M), 800×450 (204M)

Yoshitake KobayashiVideo capture
TOSHIBA Corporation
Deadline Miss Detection with SCHED_DEADLINE
Slides
Video (38 minutes):
full HD (274M), 800×450 (158M)

Tetsuyuki KobayashiVideo capture
Kiyoto Microcomputer
Tips of Malloc and Free
Slides
Video (39 minutes):
full HD (277M), 800×450 (163M)

Tristan LelongVideo capture
Adeneo Embedded
Debugging on a Production System
Slides
Video (51 minutes):
full HD (354M), 800×450 (195M)

Noor UI MubeenVideo capture
Intel Technology India Pvt Ltd
Making Gadgets Really “cool”
Slides
Video (45 minutes):
full HD (298M), 800×450 (122M)

Hisao MunakataVideo capture
Renesas Electronics
How to Cook the LTSI Kernel with Yocto Recipe
Slides
Video (42 minutes):
full HD (295M), 800×450 (166M)

Olof JohanssonVideo capture
Google
Anatomy of the arm-soc git tree
Slides
Video (50 minutes):
full HD (348M), 800×450 (192M)

Mark OrvekVideo capture
Linaro
Application Diversity Demands Accelerated Linux Innovation
Slides
Video (38 minutes):
full HD (273M), 800×450 (158M)

Thomas PetazzoniVideo capture
Bootlin
Your New ARM SoC Linux Support Checklist!
Slides
Video (60 minutes):
full HD (418M), 800×450 (231M)

Matt PorterVideo capture
Texas Instruments, Inc.
Kernel Testing Tools and Techniques
Slides
Video (60 minutes):
full HD (405M), 800×450 (230M)

Brent RomanVideo capture
Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute
Making Linux do Hard Real-Time
Slides
Video (24 minutes):
full HD (173M), 800×450 (101M)

Mans RullgardVideo capture
ARM/Linaro
Designing for Optimisation
Slides
Video (50 minutes):
full HD (353M), 800×450 (202M)

Chris SimmondsVideo capture
2net Limited
The End of Embedded Linux (as we know it)
Video (46 minutes):
full HD (293M), 800×450 (137M)

Hunyue YauVideo capture
HY Research LLC
uCLinux for Custom Mobile Devices
Slides
Video (40 minutes):
full HD (283M), 800×450 (151M)

Linux Foundation videos

Joo-Young HwangVideo capture
Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd.
F2FS, Flash-Friendly File System
Slides
Video : on video.linux.com

Linus WalleijVideo capture
ST-Ericsson
Pin Control and GPIO Update
Slides
Video : on video.linux.com

Mark GrossVideo capture
Intel
The ‘Embedded Problem’ as Experienced by Intel’s Reference Phones

Video : on video.linux.com

Gap-Joo NaVideo capture
Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI)
Task Scheduling for Multicore Embedded Devices
Slides
Video : on video.linux.com

Joel FernandesVideo capture
Texas Instruments, Inc
FIT Image Format: Inspired by Kernel’s Device Tree
Slides
Video : on video.linux.com

Steven RostedtVideo capture
Red Hat
Understanding PREEMPT_RT (The Real-Time Patch)
Slides
Video : on video.linux.com

Ruud DerwigVideo capture
Synopsys
Using GStreamer for Seamless Off-loading Audio Processing to a DSP
Slides
Video : on video.linux.com

Rob LandleyVideo capture
Multicelluar
Toybox: Writing a new Linux Command Line from Scratch
Slides
Video : on video.linux.com

Denys DmytriyenkoVideo capture
Texas Instruments
Pre-built Binary Toolchains in Yocto Project
Slides
Video : on video.linux.com

Anna DushistovaVideo capture
Me, Myself and I
Target Communication Framework: One Link to Rule Them All
Slides
Video : on video.linux.com

Jim HuangVideo capture
0xlab
olibc: Another C Runtime Library for Embedded Linux
Slides
Video : on video.linux.com

Jake EdgeVideo capture
LWN.net
Namespaces for Security
Slides
Video : on video.linux.com

Beth FlanaganVideo capture
Intel
Listening to your Users: Refactoring the Yocto Project Autobuilder

Video : on video.linux.com

Katsuya MatsubaraVideo capture
– , IGEL Co., Ltd.
Optimizing GStreamer Video Plugins: A Case Study with Renesas SoC Platform
Slides
Video : on video.linux.com

Behan WebsterVideo capture
Converse in Code Inc
LLVMLinux: Compiling the Linux Kernel with LLVM
Slides
Video : on video.linux.com

Jim Zemlin, George GreyVideo capture
The Linux Foundation, Linaro
Working Together to Accelerate Linux Development

Video : on video.linux.com

Andrew ChathamVideo capture
Google
Google’s Self-Driving Cars: The Technology, Capabilities & Challenges
Video : on video.linux.com

Laurent PinchartVideo capture
Ideas on board SPRL
Anatomy of an Embedded KMS Driver
Slides
Video : on video.linux.com

Scott GarmanVideo capture
Intel Open Source Technology Center
Atom for Embedded Linux Hackers and the DIY Community
Video : on video.linux.com

Mike AndersonVideo capture
The PTR Group, Inc.
Controlling Multi-Core Race Conditions on Linux/Android
Video : on video.linux.com

Tracey Erway, Nithya RuffVideo capture
Intel Corporation, Synopsys
Can You Market an Open Source Project?
Video : on video.linux.com

Dave StewartVideo capture
Intel
Code Sweat: Embed with Nightmares
Video : on video.linux.com

Gregory ClementVideo capture
Bootlin
Common Clock Framework: How to Use It
Slides
Video : on video.linux.com

Sean HudsonVideo capture
Mentor Graphics
Building a Custom Linux Distribution with the Yocto Project
Slides
Video : on video.linux.com

Tzugikazu SHibataVideo capture
NEC
How to Decide the Linux Kernel Version for the Embedded Products to Keep Maintaining Long Term
Slides
Video : on video.linux.com

Mathieu PoirerVideo capture
Linaro
In Kernel Switcher: A Solution to Support ARM’s New big.LITTLE implementation
Slides
Video : on video.linux.com

Russell DillVideo capture
Texas Instruments
Extending the swsusp Hibernation Framework to ARM
Slides
Video : on video.linux.com

John MehaffeyVideo capture
Mentor Graphics
Security Best Practices for Embedded Systems
Slides
Video : on video.linux.com

Leandro PereiraVideo capture
ProFUSION Embedded System
EasyUI: No Nonsense Mobile Application Development with EFL

Video : on video.linux.com

Khem RajVideo capture
OpenEmbedded
Bringing kconfig to EGLIBC
Slides
Video : on video.linux.com

Aaditya KumarVideo capture
Sony India Software Centre Pvt Lltd
An Insight into the Advanced XIP Filesystem (AXFS)
Slides
Video : on video.linux.com

Pantelis AntoniouVideo capture
Antoniou Consulting
Adventures in (simulated) Assymmetric Scheduling
Slides
Video : on video.linux.com

Mike Anderson, The PTR group; Zach Pfeffer, Linaro; Tim Bird, Sony Network Entertainment; David Stewart, Intel; Karim Yaghmour, Opersys (Moderator)Video capture

Is Android the new Embedded Linux

Video : on video.linux.com

George Grey, CEO, Linaro, Jim Zemlin, Executive Director, The Linux FoundationVideo capture

Working Together to Accelerate Linux Development

Video : on video.linux.com

Frank RowandVideo capture
Sony Network Entertainment
Using and Understanding the Real-Time Cyclictest Benchmark
Slides
Video : on video.linux.com

Increasing activity in the Buildroot community

In the recent times, the Buildroot project has seen a particular high level of activity, with a significant number of new contributors and contributions. It is an interesting opportunity to have a look at some statistics of the project activity in the last years: they show that the Buildroot project is really active, and in rapid development.

First, a look at the number of commits per month is an obvious way of looking at the activity of an open-source project. For two years, the project has seen each month at least 150 commits, and since for the last year, most of the months have seen between 300 and 400 commits.

Buildroot activity in commits

Another interesting data point is that this increasing number of commits is not only due to an increasing effort from the existing core developers, but rather due to an increasing number of contributors. The following graph, which displays the number of unique contributors having had patches merged each month, clearly shows that the Buildroot community is growing. From an average of 10-15 contributors per month a few years back, the project is now having between 30 and 40 unique contributors each month.

Number of Buildroot contributors

The mailing list activity also nicely reflects this increasing activity: it is now receiving almost each month between 1500 and 2000 e-mails, which means between 50 and 65 e-mails per day, and it starts to be difficult to read everything!

Number of Buildroot mailing list posts

Finally, the number of packages has also increased progressively over the last two years. As can be seen on the graph below, the period 2008 → 2011 hasn’t seen a big increase in the number of packages, as it was a period mainly focused on refactoring and cleanup work. After this cleanup work, it seems that Buildroot has started gaining in popularity, and more work was done to add more packages for various useful open-source components in embedded systems. Since 2011, the number of packages has been growing regularly, starting from less than 700 in 2011 to reach almost 1200 packages today.

Number of Buildroot packages

All in all, those four graphs clearly show a nice increase of activity within the Buildroot project, which is really cool!

Some notes on how the data was computed:

  • The number of commits per month was obtained by doing a git log --pretty=online --since=yyyy-mm-dd --until=yyyy-mm-dd | wc -l for each month.
  • The number of contributors was obtained by doing a git shortlog -sn --since=yyyy-mm-dd --until=yyyy-mm-dd | wc -l for each month.
  • The e-mail statistics were obtained by looking at the number of messages displayed in the HTML archives, per month, as in http://lists.busybox.net/pipermail/buildroot/2013-August/thread.html.
  • The number of packages was computed using an approximate method, that consists in counting the number of .mk files in Buildroot (a few .mk files are not packages, but the vast majority of them are). The exact command used was git checkout -q $(git rev-list -n 1 --before=2013-08-01 master) && find . -name '*.mk' | wc -l.

Bootlin at the ARM Kernel Summit, the Embedded Linux Conference and the Buildroot Developers Meeting

Late october will be a busy moment for all the embedded Linux developers meeting in Edinburgh, UK. The Linux Foundation is organizing a number of conferences here, including the Embedded Linux Conference Europe (October 24-25) and LinuxCon Europe (October 21-23), and many co-located other events.

Bootlin will be present at several of these events:

  • First, three Bootlin engineers will be present at the ARM kernel summit on October 22nd and 23rd. The ARM kernel summit is an invitation-only conference, organized in relation with the Linux Kernel Summit. Gregory Clement, Maxime Ripard and Thomas Petazzoni, engineers at Bootlin have been invited due to their participation to the ARM support in the kernel, mainly on Allwinner SOCs for Maxime and on Marvell SOCs for Gregory and Thomas. Being present at this event is an excellent opportunity to be part of the discussion that shapes the future of ARM support in Linux, and strengthen our relations with other members of this growing community.
  • Then, the entire technical team of Bootlin will attend the Embedded Linux Conference, on October 24th and 25th. Several talks will also be given by Bootlin engineers:
    • On Thursday, 24th October at 11:40 AM, Thomas Petazzoni will give a talk titled Device Tree for dummies!, which will give an introduction to the Device Tree on ARM: what it is, how it is compiled, how it used by the kernel, how Device Tree bindings are defined, how drivers are affected by the Device Tree, etc.
    • At the same time in another room, Michael Opdenacker will lead a Bird of a Feather session dedicated to Small Businesses in the embedded Linux world. Exchanging experiences, networking with other companies working in the same field, etc.
    • Still on Thursday, at 3 PM, Gregory Clement will give a talk on the Linux kernel Common Clock Framework, which will be an updated version of the talk he gave at ELC earlier this year.
    • On Friday, 25th October at 9:30 AM, Thomas Petazzoni will be part of the keynote panel session dedicated to a discussion on Embedded Linux build systems together with Tim Bird (Sony Mobile), Ross Burton (Intel), and Karim Yaghmour (Opersys), the panel being moderated by Jeff Osier-Mixon (Intel).
  • On Saturday 26th and Sunday 27th October, the Buildroot community is organizing its traditional Developers Meeting, to which Thomas Petazzoni will participate. Some of the core Buildroot developers will join for two days of discussion and work to improve this embedded Linux build system.

As you can see, this will be a very interesting and busy week, and we’re all looking forward to meeting more embedded Linux developers and learning about the latest technologies in this field.