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...
Since April 2020, we are offering our training courses online, both in public sessions available to individual registration and in dedicated sessions for specific customers.
So far, our public sessions have always been organized from 2 PM to 6 PM Paris time, which was a good fit for our customers in Europe and in the US East Coast, but not so much for our customers in the US West Coast, in the Middle East and Asia.
Therefore, we are happy to announce that we have opened two sessions of our Embedded Linux system development course at different times, to suit the needs of customers in different parts of the world:
An Embedded Linux system development course will start on November 22, spread over 7 sessions of 4 hours organized from 09:00 to 13:00 Paris time (UTC+1), which is 13:30 to 17:30 in India, and 16:00 to 20:00 in China. This time is best for our customers in Europe, Middle East and Asia. Registration is possible directly online or by contacting us to get a quotation. The trainer for this course will be Grégory Clement.
An Embedded Linux system development course will start on November 29, spread over 7 sessions of 4 hours organized from 18:00 to 22:00 Paris time (UTC+1), which is 09:00 to 13:00 in the US West Coast, and 12:00 to 16:00 in the US East Coast. Registration is possible directly online or by contacting us to get a quotation. The trainer for this course will be Michael Opdenacker.
In both cases, the course is offered at 829 EUR per participant in the early bird rate (valid for registrations at least one month prior to the course starting date), or otherwise at 929 EUR.
Of course, like for all our training courses, the training materials are fully open, so that you can verify that the course suits your needs. See Embedded Linux system development training page for the complete agenda, slides and lab instructions.
If there is sufficient interest in these new time zones, we will consider offering our other courses at similar times in the future.
After finally publishing about our Linux 5.12 contributions and even though Linux 5.14 was just released yesterday, it’s hopefully still time to talk about our contributions to Linux 5.13. Check out the LWN articles about the merge window to get the bigger picture about this release: part 1 and part 2.
In terms of Bootlin contributions, this was a much more quiet release than Linux 5.12, with just 28 contributions. The main highlights are:
The usual round of RTC subsystem updates from its maintainer Alexandre Belloni
A large amount of improvements in the MTD subsystem by its co-maintainer Miquèl Raynal, continuing his effort to improve the ECC handling in the MTD subsystem. See Miquèl’s talk at ELCE 2020 for more details on this effort: slides and video.
A small fix for an annoying regression in the musb USB gadget controller driver.
Even though we contributed just 28 commits to this release, as maintainers, some of us also reviewed and merged code from other contributors: Miquèl Raynal as the MTD co-maintainer merged 63 patches, Alexandre Belloni merged 22 patches, and Grégory Clement 6 patches.
Here are the details of our contributions to Linux 5.13:
Yes, Linux 5.13 was released yesterday, but we never published the blog post detailing our contributions to Linux 5.12, so let’s do this now! First of all the usual links to the excellent LWN.net articles on the 5.12 merge window: part 1 and part 2.
LWN.net also published an article with Linux 5.12 development statistics, and two Bootlin engineers made their way to the statistics: Alexandre Belloni in the list of top contributors by number of changesets, with 69 commits, and Paul Kocialkowski in the list of top contributors by number of changed lines, with over 6000 lines changed.
Here are the highlights of our contributions:
Addition of a new driver for the SilvacoI3C master controller. This was contributed by Miquèl Raynal, who became the maintainer for this driver. Bootlin has pioneered support for I3C in Linux, by introducing the complete drivers/i3c subsystem a few years ago, together with the first controller driver, for a Cadence IP, see our blog post from 2018.
Implementation of mqprio support in the Marvell Ethernet controller driver mvneta, see this commit. As explained in the tc-mqprio man page, the MQPRIO qdisc is a simple queuing discipline that allows mapping traffic flows to hardware queue ranges using priorities and a configurable priority to traffic class mapping. This was contributed by Maxime Chevallier
Improvements in the IIO driver for the ms58xx family of sensors, contributed by Alexandre Belloni.
The final removal of the atmel_tclib code, which has been replaced by proper drivers for the TCB timers on Atmel/Microchip ARM platforms over the past few releases, also by Alexandre Belloni.
As usual, a large amount of fixes and improvements in the RTC subsystem, by its maintainer Alexandre Belloni.
Here is the detailed list of our contributions to this release:
The second edition of Live Embedded Event took place on June 3rd, exactly 6 months after the first edition. Even though there were a few issues with the online platform, it was once again great to learn new things about embedded, and share some of the work we’ve been doing at Bootlin on various topics. For the next edition, we plan to switch to a different online platform, hopefully providing a better experience.
But in the mean time, all videos of the event have been posted on the Youtube Channel of the event. The talks from Bootlin have been posted on Bootlin’s Youtube Channel.
Indeed, in addition to being part of the organization committee, Bootlin prepared and delivered 5 talks as part of Live Embedded Event, covering different topics we have worked on in the recent months for our customers.
Understanding U-Boot Falcon Mode and adding support for new boards, Michael Opdenacker
Throughout this first half of 2021, our online training courses available for individual registration have been very popular. We have added some new dates for this summer and early fall for all our courses:
You can register directly online through Eventbrite and pay by credit card, or request an invoice. Note that our sessions are regularly full: our embedded Linux training course next month is full one month before the session, so make sure to book your seat early enough. We offer a 100 EUR early bird discount for registrations taking place at least one month before the course.
These courses are delivered entirely online: you don’t need any hardware to participate, as the hands-on labs are replaced by live demonstrations made by the trainer. All you need is a web browser, a good Internet connection and an audio headset!
We can also organize private courses upon request, if you have a larger group of engineers to train on these topics. Contact us for details!
Since June 1st, we’re happy to have an additional engineer in our team, Clément Léger!
After graduating from ENSIMAG in 2012, Clément spent 9 years working for Kalray, a silicon vendor company based in France, designing and producing an innovative and advanced new multi-core CPU architecture. At Kalray, Clément was in charge of porting a bootloader and the Linux kernel to this new CPU architecture, working on all aspects needed to support the CPU in the arch/ of Linux (syscalls, interrupts, exceptions, MMU, etc.) as well as developing a number of core kernel drivers such as pinctrl, irqchip, remoteproc and spimem.
In our engineering team at Bootlin, Clément will help our customer with bootloader porting, Linux kernel porting, device driver development, integration of complete Linux BSPs and more. He brings an additional significant experience in low-level kernel development and debugging to our team of experts. Clément will be working remotely from Grenoble, in tight connection with our team in Lyon.
Initially planned to take place in Dublin, Ireland, the unique edition this year of the Embedded Linux Conference will take place in Seattle, US and virtually from September 27 to September 30, 2021. See also the conference website. Bootlin CEO Thomas Petazzoni is again a member of the program committee for this edition of ELC.
This kind of event is only possible thanks to the talks proposed by its participants! As detailed on the Call For Papers, the last date to submit your proposals is June 13, 2021. There is really a wide range of suggested topics, and ELC is an excellent place to talk about advancements in the Linux kernel for embedded platforms, in user-space libraries and stacks relevant to embedded, about practical experiences in using Linux in embedded devices, about real-time, boot time, power management, build systems, open hardware, and more.
Bootlin has been offering for several years a Buildroot system development course, which allows engineers interested in learning and understanding the Buildroot embedded Linux build system to get up to speed very quickly.
In preparation for our public Buildroot system development course next week, we updated our training materials, both slides and labs to Buildroot 2021.02, which is the latest stable Buildroot release as of today, and is also a Long Term Support release.
In addition to updating to a newer Buildroot version, we also use newer U-Boot and Linux versions for the practical labs on BeagleBone Black Wireless. The slides were also updated to document some new features that appeared between 2020.02 and 2021.02. If you’re interested, check out the materials on the training page.
We have one seat left for this training course next week, which will be taught by long-time Buildroot contributor and developer Thomas Petazzoni. Register now and take the last seat!
The schedule for the next edition of Live Embedded Event has been published! This 100% online and free conference will take place on June 3rd, 2021. Thanks to the proposals received, the event will feature 4 tracks during the entire day, covering a wide range of topics: hardware for embedded systems, embedded Linux, RTOS, IoT, FPGA, RISC-V, and more.
Live Embedded Event #2 agenda
Bootlin is once again part of the organization team for this event, and in addition 5 talks proposed by Bootlin have been selected into the schedule. See below the details of our talks.
Understanding U-Boot Falcon Mode and adding support for new boards, Michael Opdenacker
The Falcon Mode is a U-Boot feature that allows to directly load the operating system kernel from the first stage of U-Boot (a.k.a. “SPL”), skipping the second stage of U-Boot. Doing this can save up to 1 second in the boot process, and this way, you can keep a full featured U-Boot that you can still fall back to for maintenance or development needs. However, using Falcon Mode is not always easy, as it requires extra code that most boards supported by U-Boot don’t have yet. At Bootlin, we had to add such support to U-Boot for several boards. This presentation will explain how Falcon Mode booting actually works in U-Boot and the implementation and usage choices made by U-Boot developers. It will show you how to add such Falcon Mode support to U-Boot for your own board.
In embedded systems, deploying firmware updates in the field has now become an obvious requirement, to ensure that security vulnerabilities are addressed, that bugs are fixed, and new functionalities can be delivered to the users. Among a range of different open-source solutions, RAUC provides an interesting firmware update mechanism for embedded system. In this talk, we will introduce the main features of RAUC, its integration in build systems such as Buildroot or the Yocto Project, as well as its integration with the U-Boot and Barebox bootloaders. Finally we will explore some common update scenarios that are fully supported by RAUC features.
Talk given by Kamel Bouhara, at 3:30 PM CEST on June 3rd, 2021.
Security vulnerability tracking tools in Buildroot, Thomas Petazzoni
Buildroot is a popular and easy to use embedded Linux build system. With the increasing concern around security vulnerabilities affecting embedded systems, and the need to keep them updated, Buildroot has been extended with new tooling for security vulnerability tracking. This tooling allows to monitor the CVEs that affect the packages present in Buildroot. In this talk, we will introduce the principle of CVEs and CPEs, present the tools now available in Buildroot to help keep track of the security vulnerabilities, show how they can be used for a project and identify the current limitations of this tooling.
Talk given by Thomas Petazzoni, at 1:30 PM CEST on June 3rd, 2021.
Secure boot in embedded Linux systems, Thomas Perrot
Secure boot is a integrity mechanism, based on signature verification, that allows to detect software corruption or malicious code, during the boot process. Implementing secure boot is not always obvious, as it requires multiple stages of verification, at the bootloader, Linux kernel and root filesystem level, as well as integration into the build system, CI infrastructure, firmware upgrade mechanism, and more. Based on a recent experience to bring secure boot on an NXP i.MX8 platform, Thomas will present how to implement the chain of trust from the SoC ROM code to the root filesystem, as well as other considerations related to the implementation of secure boot. While the presentation will use the i.MX8 as an example, most of the discussion will apply to other platforms as well.
Talk given by Thomas Perrot, at 3:30 PM CEST on June 3rd, 2021.
Device Tree overlays and U-boot extension board management, Köry Maincent
In this talk, we will start by introducing the mechanism of Device Tree Overlays, which are a way of extending the Device Tree itself to describe additional hardware. We will show how Device Tree Overlays are written, compiled, and applied to a base Device Tree, and what is the status of Device Tree Overlays support in U-Boot and Linux. We will take the example of the BeagleBoard.org project, showing how Device Tree overlays are used to make CAPE extension boards compatible with different boards. Finally, we will describe our proposal, already submitted to the community, to add an extension board management facility to U-Boot, which automatically detects, loads and applies the appropriate Device Tree Overlays depending on the extension boards that are detected.
Talk given by Köry Maincent, at 1:30 PM CEST on June 3rd, 2021.
Since March 1st, 2021, we’re happy to have an additional engineer, Hervé Codina, in our engineering team based in Toulouse, France.
Hervé has 20 years’ experience working in embedded systems, both bare-metal systems and embedded Linux systems, in a wide range of applications. Hervé has experience working with U-Boot, Barebox, Linux, Buildroot, Yocto, on ARM platforms from various silicon vendors. Hervé will work within our engineering team to deliver ready-to-use Linux Board Support Packages, port bootloaders and the Linux kernel to new platforms, develop Linux kernel device drivers, implement custom Linux systems with Buildroot or Yocto, and more. His 20 years experience will further increase the expertise that Bootlin provides to its worldwide customers.
Since March 1st, 2021, we’re happy to have an additional engineer,