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 2010.11 release and roadmap

Buildroot logoThe 2010.11 release of Buildroot has been published on November, 30th. Buildroot is a tool that eases the process of building an embedded Linux system: cross-compiling toolchain, root filesystem with dozens or hundreds of libraries and applications, bootloader and kernel.

Release 2010.11

Releases are made every three months, and the latest 2010.11 release has a number of improvements :

  • Experimental crosstool-NG back-end for handling the toolchain. Before, Buildroot could either compile a toolchain for you, or use an already existing external toolchain. However, the internal Buildroot process for building a toolchain is limited to uClibc and its maintenance is a duplication of the work done by the Crosstool-NG community. While this back-end is only experimental at the moment, the intention is to make it the default back-end in some future release, if everything works fine. Thanks to Yann E. Morin for implementing this back-end, and making related changes to Crosstool-NG.
  • The Kconfig infrastructure has been updated to the one of 2.6.36 and has been cleaned up (we now have a nice quilt patch series). This brings savedefconfig (for minimal Buildroot configurations) and nconfig support. We now also create a convenience Makefile wrapper in the output directory for out-of-tree builds, like the kernel has. So once you have done a first make O=/some/path menuconfig, you can go into /some/path and directly use make something without having to specify the output directory.
  • Old-style package hooks (*_HOOK_POST_*) have been removed. This was just a clean up process, because we have a more modern way of allowing packages to hook specific commands at various steps of the build process.
  • Download handling has been reworked and support for git/svn downloads was added, so that packages only available through version control systems can be added easily in Buildroot. The make source (to download all needed tarballs and files so that the build can be done completely offline) and make external-deps (to show all files that would need to be downloaded) commands have been improved to fix several issues
  • On the architecture side, support for ARM Cortex A9 and Sparc LEON variants was added. Support for Alpha, Cris, IA64 and Sparc64 (deprecated in 2010.08) was removed.
  • We also added a few more packages: argp-standalone, gdk-pixbuf, gpsd, gst-ffmpeg, libmpeg2, kbd, librsvg, nuttcp, rng-tools, rrdtool and xz. And removed some deprecated packages: dillo, libglib12, libgtk12, microwin and pcmcia.
  • Many, many packages have been updated. In particular, the Gtk+ library has been updated from 2.12 to 2.20, keeping the DirectFB support functional thanks to the work of Lionel Landwerlin (the DirectFB support in Gtk+ was broken since 2.12). So, finally, this brings us a recent and fresh Gtk+ library in Buildroot.
  • Many packages were converted to the autotargets or gentargets infrastructures (that we use to describe how a particular package should be downloaded, extracted, configured, built and installed), in particular thanks to the work of Martin Banky.

I have again contributed quite a bit to this release, but not as much as I wanted to. Here are the numbers:

git shortlog -s -n 2010.08..
   168  Peter Korsgaard
   115  Thomas Petazzoni
    55  Gustavo Zacarias
    37  Martin Banky
    26  Yann E. MORIN
    15  Lionel Landwerlin
    13  Mike Frysinger
    10  Paulius Zaleckas
     8  Maxime Petazzoni
     4  Konrad Eisele
     3  Chih-Min Chao
     2  Yegor Yefremov
     1  Andy Gibbs
     1  Felipe Contreras
     1  Frederik Pasch
     1  Heiko Zuerker
     1  Javier Viguera
     1  Luca Ceresoli
     1  Marcelo Roberto Jimenez
     1  Marcus Osdoba
     1  Matt Johnson
     1  Paul Burton
     1  Paul Jones
     1  Stanislav Bogatyrev
     1  Thomas Rudin
     1  Will Newton

The things I worked on are: cleanup of the kconfig patches and switch to the 2.6.36 one, removal of old-style hooks and many other small package cleanups, Gtk+ upgrade and documentation improvements. I’m also very happy to see that the number of contributors is increasing, as is the number of questions asked on the list, on IRC and on the bug tracker.

Buildroot developer day

A Buildroot Developer Day, meeting of some of the Buildroot developers, took place on October, 29th in Cambridge, UK, just after the Embedded Linux Conference Europe. Peter Korsgaard (Buildroot maintainer), Lionel Landwerlin (contributor), Yann E. Morin (contributor, Crosstool-NG developer), Nicolas Ferre (Atmel), Patrice Vilchez (Atmel) and Thomas Petazzoni (Bootlin) attended the meeting.

There has been discussions about cleaning up board support, libtool issues, Crosstool-NG integration, toolchain cleanup, top-level parallel make and package management. A report has been posted to the Buildroot mailing list.

The next Buildroot Developer Day will take place on Monday, 7th February, just after FOSDEM, in Brussels.

Roadmap for 2011.02

Here are some of the things that are in the pipeline, for 2011.02 if everything goes well.

  • Conversion of more (all remaining?) packages to the gentargets and autotargets infrastructures.
  • Cleanup of board support in Buildroot. We will now use minimal defconfigs for both Buildroot itself and for kernel configuration. The messy target/device/ directory will be cleaned-up. And we will add support for some emulated boards based on Qemu (x86, ARM, MIPS, PowerPC, SH4). This work is already done, so it’s very likely to be in 2011.02
  • Better support of devtmpfs, mdev and udev. An option will allow the user to select between static device creation and those three techniques for having a dynamic /dev. This is also ready.
  • Improvements in the external toolchain configuration and setup. Buildroot will be able to automatically download some well-known external toolchains, making them easier to use.
  • The Buildroot internal toolchain build process will be reworked, with conversion of most of the code to the package infrastructures, and the toolchain binaries and sysroot move to $(HOST_DIR). This will make it much, much easier to use the toolchain produced by Buildroot outside of Buildroot, and will allow us to generate a SDK to be shared with application developers, without requiring them to run Buildroot. See the report from the Buildroot Developers Day for details. This work has already been started by Gustavo Zacarias, and at least part of it will be in 2011.02.
  • Package management will be improved. Buildroot will know which package installed what in the different directories, and will therefore be able to cleanly remove a package from the system if it has been disabled in the configuration, without requiring a completely clean rebuild. Later on, this work could be used to generate .ipk packages, but for the moment, the focus is on being able to remove libraries and applications from the system when they are unselected from the configuration. This work has already been started by Lionel Landwerlin, and we will do our best to merge it into 2011.02.
  • Support for non-MMU architectures, and particularly Blackfin. Mike Frysinger has already posted patches to add Blackfin and support non-MMU for several packages. This is really a good news, as Buildroot is a good fit for non-MMU systems.
  • Public access to regression tests results

Toolchain cleanup work and board cleanup work are really interesting pieces, because they are the two remaining parts of Buildroot that haven’t been cleaned up and/or rewritten since the Buildroot project came back to life late 2008/early 2009. There are of course still some areas that need improvements of course, but for me, those two pieces are really closing the large cleanup work that has been started almost two years ago.

Of course, don’t hesitate to contact the Buildroot mailing-list, the IRC channel or the bug tracker if you have any questions or issues in using Buildroot.

Busybox 1.18.0, a few new applets

BusyBox logoBusybox, the embedded Linux swiss-army knife, has seen a new release recently: 1.18.0. As usual, it brings dozens of bug fixes, but it also includes a few new applets that are worth noting:

  • pmap, which shows the memory mappings for a particular process. It is just a formatted version of what you can find in /proc/PID/maps, but still nice to have. Knowing the mappings in a particular process is often useful for debugging purposes.
  • add-shell and remove-shell, that respectively add and remove a shell from /etc/shells. This file lists the shells that are acceptable for the chsh command, for example.
  • nandwrite and nanddump, that respectively write to NAND with bad block management, and dumps NAND flash contents. Those two commands expand the set of MTD-related commands in Busybox and are replacements for the version available in mtd-utils. There were already other MTD related utilities in Busybox: flashcp (write to a NOR flash), flash_eraseall (erase a NOR or NAND flash), flash_lock and flash_unlock to protect/unprotect sectors on flash storage. The main advantage is that these utilities relieve you from having to cross-compile mtd-utils, which is never as simple as cross-compiling BusyBox.
  • base64, a base64 encoder and decoder.
  • mpstat, iostat and powertop, three new statistics programs. mpstat (as in multiprocessor stat) reports interrupts and CPU usage on multiprocessor systems, on a per-CPU basis. iostat reports CPU and block device statistics. powertop is a lightweight variant of the popular tool used to diagnose sources of wake-ups, but is only limited to Intel-based machines at the moment.
  • nbd-client, a client for the Network Block Device protocol, so that an embedded system can mount volumes shared by NBD
  • blockdev, allows to perform some ioctl() on block devices such as get sector size, get/set block size, flush buffers, etc.

Have fun with Busybox!

Linux Kernel Development, third edition

Linux Kernel Development, by Robert Love, 3rd edition

Linux Kernel Development is a book authored by Robert Love, a famous kernel developer. Contrary to the very famous Linux Device Drivers book, Linux Kernel Development is not oriented towards driver development, but instead covers how the core Linux kernel works.

Having this knowledge is not absolutely necessary to write Linux device drivers, but having a good overall understanding of the kernel always help to understand what’s going on in your system, even at the application level. In July this year, the third edition of Linux Kernel Development has been published, which upgrades the book contents to kernel version 2.6.34, a good opportunity to have a new look at the book that Bootlin received a few weeks ago.

After a quick introduction to the kernel sources (configuring, building, organization of the source tree), the book immediately dives into kernel internals:

  • Process management: how the kernel represents processes and their state, how processes are created inside the kernel, how threads are handled, are processes are terminated.
  • Process scheduling: a full chapter dedicated to the Linux kernel process scheduler. The new CFS scheduler is of course covered in great detail, with large portion of commented source code, for those who want to understand the fine details of the scheduler. Topics such as process sleep/wake-up, preemption, real-time scheduling policies are also covered.
  • System calls are then covered: how they are implemented, how parameters are passed from userspace to the kernel, etc. The call path from your user-space application down to the kernel is well explained in this chapter.
  • Kernel data structures: a generic chapter which details the kernel API for linked lists, queues, maps, and binary trees. Those APIs are omni-present inside the kernel, and it’s therefore a good idea to know how they work, both for understand existing code and for writing new code.
  • Interrupts: how interrupts are handled and how one can write an interrupt handler. Unfortunately, the newly introduced threaded interrupt handlers are not covered, but it’s true that their usage is not yet very widespread inside the mainline kernel.
  • Bottom halves and deferring work, a topic closely related to interrupt handling. It covers bottom halves, softirqs, tasklets and workqueues.
  • Kernel synchronization: two chapters are dedicated to this topic. First a chapter detailing why synchronization is needed, what are the sources of concurrency and what should be protected against concurrent access. And then a chapter detailing the mechanisms provided by the kernel to implement proper synchronization: atomic operations, spin locks, reader-writer spin locks, semaphores, reader-writer semaphores, mutexes, completion variables, sequential locks, preemption disabling, ordering and barriers
  • Timers and time management details how the kernel manages time: ticks, jiffies counter, timers, delaying execution of code are covered in this chapter. There are unfortunately no details about the clocksource and clockevents infrastructure, and no details about how timers and high-resolution timers are implemented. Contrary to other chapters that go fairly deep into the implementation details, this one mostly only covers the API to time management rather than the internals.
  • Memory management is the topic of the following chapter: physical memory management with the page allocator and the physical zones, then the kmalloc, vmalloc and SLAB allocators are covered. High-memory mappings, a topic specific to 32 bits architectures having more than a gigabyte of RAM is also covered in detail. The per-cpu interface is also covered, and will help those who want to understand parts of the kernel that have been optimized for scalability on multiple CPUs.
  • The Virtual Filesystem, with its different objects: superblock, inode, dentry and file is covered in good detail.
  • The block layer is then covered, with a description of the role of the bio structure, the request queues, and the I/O schedulers.
  • Then, the book goes back to more details about the internals of memory management: the mm_struct memory descriptor, the virtual memory areas (so called VMAs) and how they relate with the mmap/munmap system calls. The next chapter continues with a detailed description of the page cache implementation.
  • A fairly strange chapter called “Devices and modules” gives some information about kernel modules (how to build them, how to use module parameters, how dependencies are handled), then covers the internal of the device model (kobjects, ktypes, ksets, krefs) and finally sysfs. Just like the chapter covering the device model in the third edition of Linux Device Drivers, I think it totally misses the point. All the kobject, ktypes, ksets and krefs stuff is very low-level plumbing used by the Linux device model, but it is not exactly what the driver developer needs to interact with in the first place. In my opinion, a good description of the device model should rather explain what struct bus_type, struct driver and struct device are, how they are specialized for the different bus types in pci_driver, pci_device, usb_driver, usb_device, platform_driver, platform_device, and how the registration/probing of drivers and devices is done. I’ve recently given a talk about this topic, the video is in French, but the slides are in English.
  • Debugging is then covered: printk of course, but also oopses, debugging-related kernel options, the magic SysRq key, kernel debuggers, etc.
  • A rather generic chapter about Portability is then proposed, and finally a chapter about Patches, Hacking and the community that details the kernel community, the kernel coding style, how to generate and submit patches, etc.

All in all, Linux Kernel Development remains very good reading. I particularly appreciate the writing style of Robert Love, who manages to make a deeply-technical book interesting and easy to read. Of course, there are some topics in the kernel in which I had to dive myself and for which I’d expect to see more details in this book, but giving every possible detail about a huge beast such as the Linux kernel in just 400 pages is not possible!

Videos from FOSDEM 2010

Peter Korsgaard presenting Buildroot in the Cross build systems workshop at FOSDEM 2010

Like every year, the Free and Open Source Developer European Meeting took place early February in Brussels, and Thomas Petazzoni, from Bootlin, attended and recorded a few talks from the embedded session. However, contrary to previous years, I haven’t been able to record all talks from the embedded session, since I attended talks from other sessions which were already being recorded by others.

Gian-Carlo Pascutto presenting Embedded software development best practices at FOSDEM 2010

We also attended talks from the X.org and Coreboot developer roooms : videos for the X.org developer room can be found at http://video.fosdem.org/2010/devrooms/xorg/ and videos for the Coreboot developer room can be found at http://video.fosdem.org/2010/devrooms/coreboot/.

Buildroot 2010.08 released!

Buildroot logoOn the last day of August, just in time, the 2010.08 version of Buildroot has been released. For the record, Buildroot is an easy-to-use embedded Linux build system: it can build your toolchain, your root filesystem with all its components (Busybox, libraries, applications, etc.), your kernel and your bootloaders, or any combination of these components.

Amongst the interesting changes in this version :

  • Complete rewrite of the bootloader build code. It contained a lot of legacy, unused and unclear stuff, it is now much easier to use and extend. We’ve removed support for Yaboot and added support for the new Barebox bootloader, and all the code to support AT91Bootstrap, AT91DataFlashBoot, U-Boot, Grub and Grub 2 has been rewritten.
  • Complete rewrite of the Linux kernel build code. It was also complicated to use, with an horribly complicated kernel version selection mechanism, the new code is much easier to configure and use.
  • The configuration file .config is now located in the out-of-tree directory when the O= option is used. So typically, for an out-of-tree build (which are very convenient when using the same Buildroot source tree for different projects/tests), you could do : mkdir ~/myoutput ; make O=~/myoutput menuconfig ; make O=~/myoutput
  • Support for building NPTL toolchains with uClibc, using the latest uClibc snapshots.
  • Support for the gconfig Gtk-based configurator, in addition to the already available menuconfig and xconfig
  • A particular effort has been put on fixing many of the bugs in our Bugzilla, improving robustness thanks to automated random builds, and converting even more packages to the generic and autotools infrastructure
  • Various things have also been deprecated: support for the CRIS, IA64, Sparc64 and Alpha architectures, support for Gtk over DirectFB (which is at the moment not supported upstream), Java support (no maintainer has volunteered to maintain this in Buildroot)
  • Many components have been bumped to newer versions
  • The shared configuration cache, which allowed to speed up the configuration of different packages, has been disabled by default, since it was causing a lot of problems with certain package configurations

I’ve again contributed to a significant portion of this release, being the author of the bootloader build code cleanup, the Linux kernel build code rewrite, leading an effort to reduce the number of outstanding bugs in our Bugzilla and many other little things. The contributors for this release are shown below :

   175  Peter Korsgaard
   168  Thomas Petazzoni
    38  Gustavo Zacarias
    18  cmchao
     8  Luca Ceresoli
     7  Paul Jones
     6  Lionel Landwerlin
     6  Malte Starostik
     5  Yann E. MORIN
     3  Julien Boibessot
     3  Khem Raj
     2  Dmytro Milinevskyy
     2  Francois Perrad
     2  Nick Leverton
     2  Peter Huewe
     2  Stanislav Bogatyrev
     1  Baruch Siach
     1  Bjørn Forsman
     1  Daniel Hobi
     1  Darcy Watkins
     1  Darius Augulis
     1  H Hartley Sweeten
     1  Karl Krach
     1  Kelvin Cheung
     1  Ossy
     1  Sagaert Johan
     1  Simon Pasch
     1  Slava Zanko
     1  Thiago A. Correa
     1  Will Wagner
     1  Yegor Yefremov

For the next release, there are already a few things in the pipeline :

  • Cleanup of all the board support code in Buildroot, in order to cleanly add support for more boards like BeagleBoard, Qemu boards, Calao boards, etc. We’ll use the new minimal defconfig mechanism used by the kernel. I’ve already started working on this
  • Cleanup of the package download process, to support Git and SVN download. The code has already been written by Maxime Petazzoni, reviewed on the list, so I expect it to be included fairly soon
  • Rewrite of libtool handling code, to remove some of our ugly libtool hacks. The code is currently being worked on by Lionel Landwerlin
  • Support for compiling toolchain using Crosstool-NG as a backend. The code is currently being finalized by Yann E. Morin, the author of Crosstool-NG
  • Further work on package uninstallation, clean partial rebuild. Some work has been started by Lionel Landwerlin, but it needs some discussion
  • Continue the conversion of packages to the generic and autotools infrastructures
  • I have also a ton of other things on my TODO-list : rework gdb/gdbserver support with external toolchains, rework the configuration of IPv6/RPC/locale/etc. with external toolchains, set up a Wiki-based Buildroot website with tutorials and better documentation, clean up the toolchain build process, reduce the number of “enhancement” bugs waiting in our Bugzilla, etc.

As Peter Korsgaard, Buildroot maintainer, said in the 2010.08 announcement: The next release is going to be 2010.11. Expect the first release candidate in late October and the final release at the end of November..

It is worth noting that we will be having a Buildroot Developer Day, on Friday 29th October, right after Embedded Linux Conference Europe. At least Peter Korsgaard, Lionel Landwerlin, Yann E. Morin and myself should be there.

Linux device drivers architecture talk at Libre Software Meeting

recursive device modelThomas Petazzoni gave a talk on the Linux kernel architecture for device drivers at the Libre Software Meeting in Bordeaux, France. While the talk was given in French, the materials are in English and can therefore benefit a larger audience. The talk seems to have been well-received, especially from people already having a basic Linux kernel development experience. The topics covered are part of our Linux Kernel development training, and are also usually very appreciated from the trainees already having Linux kernel experience.

The idea of the talk is to give an overview of how device drivers fit into the kernel, both to expose their functionality to upper layers (such as a network device driver exposes itself to the kernel network infrastructure) and to detect/access the hardware using the device/driver model, which is quite hard to understand from the source code only.

The talk went through the following sections :

  • First a basic introduction to device drivers: how devices are seen from userspace applications, and how a simple, raw, character driver can be implemented. It allowed to expose the principle of operations and their similarity with methods in object-oriented programming, and the principle of registration to an upper-layer infrastructure
  • Then, an introduction to what I call « kernel frameworks », i.e kernel subsystems that specialize a general device type (i.e character device) into a particular device type (i.e serial port device, framebuffer device, etc.). The talk illustrates this with the framebuffer core and the serial port core.
  • Finally, an explanation about the device model: bus drivers, adapter drivers and device drivers. I started with the example of the USB bus: being a dynamically-enumerated bus, it provides a good illustration of the device model principles. At the end, I explained how the device model works for the devices embedded into a SoC using the platform drivers/devices mechanism

The slides for this talk are no longer available, but their updates are now integrated in our Linux kernel and driver development training materials which are freely available.

Buildroot 2010.05 released: again many Bootlin contributions

Buildroot logoJust one day before the end of May, Buildroot 2010.05 has been released by Peter Korsgaard, as predicted by the fixed release schedule used by the project. It can be downloaded at http://buildroot.org/downloads/buildroot-2010.05.tar.bz2. For the record, Buildroot is a simple and efficient tool to build embedded Linux systems: cross-compiling toolchain, root filesystem, kernel image and bootloader.

Major changes

The major user-visible changes are:

  • Re-organization of the menuconfig layout for packages. All packages are now organized in categories, making them easier to find
  • Our X.org package set has been upgraded to X.org 7.5.
  • Several new packages have been added: cdrkit, cramfs, genext2fs, genromfs, libatomic_ops, librsync, libusb-compat, lmbench, netperf, squashfs, squashfs3, squid. Many of them have been added as the result of a filesystem code generation cleanup
  • On the internal toolchain side (i.e toolchains generated by Buildroot), we have added support for uClibc 0.9.31, GCC 4.4.4, GDB 7.x and binutils 2.20.1.
  • On the external toolchain side (i.e. re-using existing toolchains), we have improved support for multilib toolchains (such as CodeSourcery toolchains)

In addition to these changes, 41 bugs of our bug tracker have been fixed, and dozens of packages have been upgraded or fixed.

Bootlin contributions

Bootlin has again made significant contributions to this release:

git shortlog -s -n 2010.02..
   224  Paulius Zaleckas
   182  Thomas Petazzoni, from Bootlin
   148  Peter Korsgaard
    28  Gustavo Zacarias
    26  Will Wagner
    14  Lionel Landwerlin
     6  Yann E. MORIN
[...]

The things we have contributed include:

  • A big cleanup in the Buildroot code that generates the root filesystem images. It has been moved from various directories in target/ to a single, central location: fs/. The code that handled the compilation of host utilities to generate the filesystem images (genext2fs, cdrkit, mtd-utils, cramfs, squashfs, etc.) has been moved to normal packages, and an infrastructure has been added to factorize the common code of the various filesystem generation makefiles.
  • Better support for multilib external toolchains
  • A new script that generates nice dependency graph (see below)
  • A clarification of the gettext integration, to make it work properly with glibc toolchains.
  • Fixes to bug #75, bug #1789.
  • Dozens of build fixes found by testing random configurations.
  • Various code cleanups, that lead to the removal of several configuration options, which makes the usage of Buildroot a little bit easier.

Dependency graph generation

Thanks to the new package infrastructure that we have included in Buildroot a few releases ago, it is now easier to retrieve the list of dependencies of each package in a generic way. Using this, I recently implemented a dependency graph generation tool. It allows to generate nice graphs of the dependencies for a given package, like libgtk2 in the following example (click for the full sized version):

Note that packages in red are packages that do not use the generic or autotools infrastructure, so we couldn’t determine what their dependencies are.

We can also generate the dependency graph for a complete Buildroot configuration, with all packages:

Using this tool is fairly easy. You must first install the graphviz package on your distribution. For a single package dependency graph:

./scripts/graph-depends libgtk2 > libgtk2.dot
dot -Tpdf libgtk2.dot -o libgtk2.pdf

For a full dependency graph:

./scripts/graph-depends > full.dot
dot -Tpdf full.dot -o full.pdf

Note that the dependency graph always depends on the selected set of packages. It is not the absolute dependency graph, which would contain all existing dependencies. It only show the dependencies as they are in your current configuration.

Plans for the next release

The next release is scheduled for August (2010.08). I have in mind various things:

  • Cleanup of the bootloader compilation code and integration of support for Barebox. This is already implemented in one of my branch, so I should be able to push this fairly soon to Buildroot
  • Cleanup of the Linux kernel compilation code, with a much-wanted simplification of this. Again, this is already implemented on my side, but requires a little bit more work before being able to push this
  • Continue the effort to convert packages to the generic or autotools infrastructure. I have already sent a status update on this topic to the project mailing-list. We have 56 packages to convert to the generic infrastructure and 77 to convert to the autotools infrastructure.
  • Integration with Crosstool-NG, which is a job that Yann Morin, developer of Crosstool-NG has already started.
  • More improvements of the external toolchain integration
  • If some time is left, a cleanup and reorganization of the board support mechanism, so that we can add more boards in a sane way

Location of Embedded Linux Conference Europe 2010 announced

Cambridge, UKWhile the American Embedded Linux Conference always takes place in the San Francisco area in California, the European Embedded Linux Conference Europe travels each year in a different country across Europe: it took place in Austria in 2007, in the Netherlands in 2008 and in France in 2009. The location for the 2010 edition of ELCE has been announced recently: it will take place on October 27th and 28th in Cambridge, United Kingdom. As usual there will be many talks, Bird-of-a-Feather sessions, technical demonstrations and more. If you’re an embedded Linux developer in Europe, you should definitely ask your employer to send you to this conference!

Presentations on the following topics are encouraged: audio, video, and graphics systems for embedded products, security, system size, boot-up time, meeting real-time constraints, power management, streaming media, flash memory devices and filesystems, technologies related to cell phones, digital set top boxes, handheld devices, or other CE products, development tools for embedded users, use of Linux in actual products, practical experience and war stories, standards for CE products. The proposal must be received by June, 30th. My colleague Michael Opdenacker, founder of Bootlin, is a member of the program committee.

On the day before, note that there will also be an interesting event: GStreamer Conference 2010. As GStreamer is a key component of today’s multimedia systems based on embedded Linux. Staying in Cambridge for three days instead of two could then make a lot of sense.

Crosstool-NG 1.7.0, Bootlin contributed basic Blackfin support

Yann E. Morin, maintainer of Crosstool-NG, has just announced version 1.7.0 of his toolchain building tool we like so much at Bootlin. For the record, Crosstool-NG allows to build cross-compiling toolchains for a wide-range of architectures, using either glibc, uClibc, eglibc or newlib, and everything is configured through a menuconfig interface, familiar to all embedded Linux developers.

Blackfin architectureBootlin has contributed to this release, by adding some support for the Blackfin architecture, on which we have been working recently. Crosstool-NG is now capable of generating a FDPIC cross-compiling toolchain for Blackfin. FDPIC allows to use shared libraries even on no-MMU architectures like the Blackfin. This support of Blackfin in Crosstool-NG is only the beginning, a lot of work remains to be done to make sure that the toolchain works really well, and to support FLAT binaries and bare-metal as well.

Here are the patches that Bootlin has contributed for this release :

The other major changes for this release are :

  • two new architectures have been added: Blackfin and mips64
  • building canadian-crosses has been enhanced
  • experimental support for gcc-4.5 has been added
  • eglibc can be optimized for size (instead of speed)
  • companion libraries can be built statically, removing the need for a wrapper
  • many components versions have been added, and associated patchsets updated
  • some less important new features, or enhancements for stability and usability
  • a lot of bug-fixes, of which some to help on Darwin & *BSD

The 1.7.0 release can be downloaded at http://ymorin.is-a-geek.org/download/crosstool-ng/crosstool-ng-1.7.0.tar.bz2 and the homepage of the Crosstool-NG project is http://ymorin.is-a-geek.org/projects/crosstool. Enjoy !

ELC 2010 program announced

Japantown, San FranciscoThe program of talks and BOFs of the 2010 edition of the Embedded Linux Conference has been published a few days ago, an opportunity to look at the most important and interesting conference for embedded Linux developers. For the record, ELC 2010 will take place from April, 12th to April, 14th in San Francisco, CA, USA, in the same place as the 2009 edition.

A nice set of talks

  • A set of real-time related talks: Real-Time Linux Failure, by Frank Rowand (works for Sony, well known for his preempt-rt related talks at various ELC conferences), Effective Use of RT-Preempt, by Kevin Dankwardt, Using Interrupt Threads to Prioritize Interrupts, by Mike Anderson (also well known for his very interactive talks, he will also be giving his traditional Using JTAG to debug Linux device drivers tutorial), Measuring Responsiveness of Linux Kernel on Embedded System, by YungJoon Jung and DongHyouk Lim.
  • A talk by Grant Likely about Flattened Device Tree ARM support update, an effort to convert the ARM architecture to the same organization used in PowerPC, with a device tree file describing the hardware details instead of platform_device definitions in plain C. An important change for anyone doing ARM kernel development.
  • Several power-management related talks: Runtime Power Management: Overview and Platform Implementation, by Kevin Hillman (who works for Deep Root Systems and has done a huge amount of work in the OMAP power management area). Runtime Power Management is probably the most important change done recently to the power management infrastructure of the Linux kernel, so this talk is certainly worth a look, all the more as Kevin is a very good speaker. On power manegement, there will also be other talks : DVFS for the Embedded Linux, by Yong Bon Koo and Youngbin Seo, Wake-ups effect on idle power for Intel’s Moorestown MID and smartphone platform, by German Monroy (Intel), Workload based aggressive Power Management on the Intel Moorestown MID and future Intel MID/Smartphone Platforms, by Sujith Thomas (from Intel).
  • Japan Town, San FranciscoThe usual tracing-related talks, with Using the LTTng tracer for system-wide performance analysis and debugging by Mathieu Desnoyers and Ftrace – embedded edition, by Steven Rostedt. A talk on debugging Linux toolchain overview with advanced debugging and tracing features, by Dominique Toupin.
  • Talks about platforms: a keynote by Greg Kroah Hartmann on Android: a case study of an embedded Linux project (during which Greg will probably explain why the Android kernel modifications are not mainlined), Experiences in Android Porting, Lessons learned, tips and tricks, by Mark Gross and Understanding and Developing Applications for the Maemo Platform, by Leandro Melo de Sales, even though the recent merge of Maemo and Moblin to create MeeGo is likely to change some technical aspects of application development for this platform.
  • The question of multi-core now also seems to be present in embedded conferences: Strategies for Migrating Uniprocessor Code to Multi-Core, by Mike Anderson, Embedded Multi-core with Adeos, Dan Malek, Lock-free algorithm for Multi-core architecture, Hiromasa Kanda. Multi-core Scheduling optimizations for soft real-time multi-threaded applications – A cooperation aware approach, Lucas Martins De Marchi.
  • Some security talks, with Mike Anderson (again !) talking about Creating a Secure Router Using SELinux and Jake Edge about Understanding threat models for embedded devices
  • Some more-or-less multimedia-oriented talks: Supporting SoC video subsystems in video4linux, by Hans Verkuil, An Introduction to the Qt Development Framework, by Jeremy Katz, GeeXboX Enna: embedded Media Center, by Benjamin Zores, Case Study – Embedded Linux in a digital television STB, by Melanie Rhianna Lewis
  • In the other talks, I’ve noted the Small Business Owners BOF by Grant Likely, Evaluation of Data Reliability on Linux File Systems by Yoshitake Kobayashi, Porting the Linux Kernel to x86 MID platforms, by Jacob Pan, Linux without a bootloader? by Greg Ungerer, Kexec – Ready for Embedded Linux by Magnus Damn, Custom hardware modeling for FPGAs and Embedded Linux Platforms with QEMU, by John Williams, Edgar Iglesias.

Both Michael Opdenacker and I will be there at ELC. We hope to meet you during this conference!