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...

Linux 6.2 released, Bootlin contributions inside

Linux 6.2 was released a few days ago, and as usual we point our readers to the LWN coverage of the merge window (part 1 and part 2), or the traditional KernelNewbies page or alternatively the embedded focused CNX Software coverage.

At Bootlin, we contributed a total of 122 patches to this release, making Bootlin the 21st contributing company by number of commits according to statistics. Also Bootlin engineer Paul Kocialkowski appears in the top developers by changed lines in the Linux 6.2 statistics.

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Report from the Buildroot Developers Meeting at FOSDEM 2023

With the FOSDEM conference taking place on-site again after 2 years of virtual conference, this month of February also saw the return of the traditional Buildroot Developers Meeting from the Buildroot project.

This meeting is traditionnally held twice a year, around FOSDEM and around the Embedded Linux Conference Europe, and allows maintainers and contributors to the Buildroot project to gather for a few days and make progress on various tasks/topics.

This year, the post-FOSDEM Buildroot Developers Meeting took place on February 6, 7 and 8 in Brussels, and was hosted at the Smile offices, who kindly sponsored the location for the meeting.

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Embedded Linux and Yocto training courses now available in Italian

Flag of ItalyBuongiorno!

For many years, we have been offering our training courses in both English and French. We are happy to announce that we are now expanding our offering towards our Italian customers: we are now able to deliver our very popular Embedded Linux system development and Yocto Project and OpenEmbedded development training courses in Italian. Those courses are delivered by a native Italian speaker, Bootlin engineer Luca Ceresoli. Luca has 20 years of experience working with embedded systems, including 15 years on embedded Linux.

Thanks to this offering, our Italian customers can enjoy a training course delivered in their native language, which obviously facilitates communication, understanding and interaction. We can offer our Embedded Linux course and Yocto course in Italian through either private on-site sessions or private on-line sessions. Contact us at training@bootlin.com for details and pricing!

Ti aspettiamo!

Embedded Linux Conference Europe 2022: a selection of talks by Bootlin engineers

Almost the entire engineering team of Bootlin attended the Embedded Linux Conference Europe 2022 in Dublin mid-september, an important event for Bootlin as it helps everyone in the team stay up to date with the latest developments in the Embedded Linux ecosystem, and connect with members of the community.

All the slides and videos are available at https://elinux.org/ELC_Europe_2022_Presentations, which is one of the great things about the Embedded Linux Conference.

After such conferences, we have a tradition at Bootlin: share with our readers a selection of talks that we found interesting. Several members of our engineering team were asked to select one of their favorite talks, and highlight it with a short summary.

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Welcome to Alexis Lothoré

Welcome on board!Bootlin is really happy to welcome another engineer in its team: Alexis Lothoré, who joined us on January 3, 2023.

Alexis graduated in 2016 from INSA Toulouse and built his experience on embedded systems and embedded Linux while working for Smile and then Somfy Protect. In addition to his experience on embedded Linux, Alexis has experience on micro-controller based development, with real-time operating systems such as FreeRTOS, and also has a wide knowledge around connected systems: protocols, security, robustness, evolutivity.

Alexis is now joining our team located in Toulouse, France, where he will work at our office with Hervé Codina, Paul Kocialkowski, Köry Maincent, Thomas Perrot, Miquèl Raynal, Jérémie Dautheribes and Thomas Petazzoni.

For more details, see Alexis page on Bootlin.com and his LinkedIn profile.

Debugging, tracing and profiling training course materials published

Icon from flaticon.comBack in November 2022, we announced the availability of a new training course titled Linux debugging, profiling, tracing and performance analysis.

At the time, this training course was still being prepared, but since then Bootlin engineer Clément Léger finished the preparation and successfully delivered the training course to a group of participants.

We are now happy to announce the availability of the training materials corresponding to this course, continuing Bootlin’s long commitment of free availability of all its training materials. On the training page, you can access:

We have a public on-line session of this course planned on January 30-February 2 which is full, but we have a few seats left for the next session on March 20-23, registration available on-line.

We will of course schedule other public on-line sessions of this course this year. If you have a sufficiently large group of participants to train, we also offer private on-line and private on-site sessions.

The icon used in this blog post comes from flaticon.com.

Linux 6.1 released, Bootlin contributions

Linux 6.1 has been released yesterday, a week later than expected. Head over to LWN (part 1, part 2) or KernelNewbies for an overview of the major features merged in this release.

For this release, Bootlin contributed a total of 38 patches, with the following highlights:

  • Maxime Chevallier added initial support for the QUSGMII PHY mode, together with supporting code in the lan966x MAC driver and lan966x PHY driver.
  • Maxime Chevallier added a new PCS driver for the Altera PSE
  • Maxime Chevallier converted the Altera TSE MAC driver to phylink
  • Paul Kocialkowski contributed many improvements to the Allwinner sun6i camera interface driver, which are preparation commits to introduce support for interacting with the Allwinner ISP

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Bootlin at Capitole du Libre 2022: sponsor, booth and talks

Capitole du Libre 2022Capitole du Libre is a free-software/open-source conference with a local/regional scope organized in Toulouse, France, since ~2012. As one of the Bootlin offices is also located in Toulouse, Bootlin has often participated to this event by giving talks or simply by attending.

The 2022 edition, the first after 2 years of interruption due to the COVID19 crisis, will take place on November 19 and November 20. Bootlin will participate by:

If you’re in the Toulouse area and a free-software/open-source enthusiast, we strongly recommend you to attend Capitole du Libre. The event is free, no registration is required, and there’s a very nice line-up of talks and workshops!

Welcome to Jérémie Dautheribes

Welcome on board!Bootlin is really happy to welcome another engineer in its team: Jérémie Dautheribes, who joined us on November 2, 2022.

Jérémie Dautheribes graduated in 2020 with a master degree in Ambiant, Mobile and Embedded Systems from the Toulouse University. After graduating, he worked at the french research institute INRIA on cache optimization for FreeRTOS multicore programs, and then in a company called EPSI where he was in charge of developing and maintaining Linux-based BSPs for i.MX6 and Tegra platforms, based on Yocto.

In addition, Jérémie has some experience in using the Rust programming language for low-level development, a skill that might prove to be useful for doing Linux kernel development in the future!

Jérémie is now joining our team located in Toulouse, France, where he will work at our office with Hervé Codina, Paul Kocialkowski, Köry Maincent, Thomas Perrot, Miquèl Raynal and Thomas Petazzoni.

For more details, see Jérémie’s page on Bootlin.com and his LinkedIn profile.

New training course: Linux debugging, profiling, tracing and performance analysis

Since its inception, Bootlin has offered training courses on technical topics related to the use of Linux in embedded systems, with freely accessible training materials, and trainers with in-depth and real-life experience in their field. Based on these ideas, we have progressively extended our training portfolio over the years.

Today, we are extremely happy to announce a brand new course: Linux debugging, profiling, tracing and performance analysis. Many of our customers working on embedded Linux systems have expressed interest in diving into these complex topics, so we’ve created this course to:

  1. Give enough background information about how Linux works to be able to have a solid reasoning when investigating performance issues or simply bugs. Our course therefore details how user-space vs. kernel-space works, scheduling, and memory management, as a prerequisite to understanding better how Linux works.
  2. Give a strong introduction to the most important debugging, profiling and tracing tools in Linux, which are often not easy to get started with. We cover a very large spectrum of tools: strace, gdb, perf, ftrace, LTTng, kgdb, kmemleak, and many more. All these tools are illustrated through practical examples.

See the complete agenda for this course: debugging-online-agenda.pdf. The complete training materials will be freely available after the first session has been delivered, end of November 2022.

This course is currently being prepared by Bootlin engineer Clément Léger, who will also be teaching this course. Clément has a deep knowledge of how CPUs work and how Linux runs on a given CPU architecture, by having ported the Linux kernel to a brand new CPU architecture.

While the first session of this course will be delivered to a private customer, we have already scheduled a first public session which will take place on January 30, 31, Feb 1, 2, 2023, plus an extra session on Feb 3, 2023 if needed to cover all topics/questions. This session will take place each day from 14:00 to 18:00 UTC+1 (Paris time). Registration takes place directly online: the pricing is 569 EUR per seat at the discounted rate, or at 669 EUR per seat at the normal rate.

We can also organize a private session of this course for your team/company, either on-line or on-site: contact us to request a quote if you’re interested.