Category: Conference

Feedback from ELCE 2023: selection of talks #2

As we reported in previous blog post, almost the entire Bootlin engineering team was at the Embedded Linux Conference Europe in Prague in June. In order to share with our readers more about what happened at this conference, we have asked all engineers at Bootlin to select one talk they found interesting and useful and share a short summary of it. We will share this feedback in a series of blog post: first post, this one being the second post.

Continue reading “Feedback from ELCE 2023: selection of talks #2”

Feedback from ELCE 2023: selection of talks #1

As we reported in previous blog post, almost the entire Bootlin engineering team was at the Embedded Linux Conference Europe in Prague in June. In order to share with our readers more about what happened at this conference, we have asked all engineers at Bootlin to select one talk they found interesting and useful and share a short summary of it. We will share this feedback in a series of blog post, this one being the first of this series.

Continue reading “Feedback from ELCE 2023: selection of talks #1”

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.

Continue reading “Report from the Buildroot Developers Meeting at FOSDEM 2023”

Upcoming Yocto Project Summit 2022.11 – One talk from Bootlin

Headline of the Yocto Project Summit 2022.11.

As every six months for the last two years, a new virtual edition of the Yocto Project Summit is coming, and its schedule has been announced.

This summit will be over 3 days:

  • Tuesday, November 29
    Two tracks in parallel, a beginner track and a “hands-on” track for people already familiar with the concepts.
  • Wednesday, November 30
    Only one track, with intermediate level talks on all kinds of topics.
  • Thursday, December 1
    Only one track, starting with “product showcase” talks and going on with intermediate level talks on various topics too.

Last but not least, at the end of each day, you will get a chance to hangout with other contributors and users, and ask all the questions that you may have.

Bootlin is proud to contribute one talk to this summit: Bitbaking SPDX SBoM which we will prepare and present. This talk will cover one of the topics we explored to document features of the Yocto Project which had no documentation yet. SPDX and SBoM are related to software supply chain security, vulnerability management and license compliance. These are hot topics these days, and there will be another presentation about SBoMs (SBoMs and Supply Chain with the Yocto Project by Joshua Watt), and two about security (Detecting and fixing CVE security issues in yocto based embedded Linux distribution by Mikko Rapeli, and Maintenance and Security of a Yocto Project-based Distribution: A Year of Experiences by Marta Rybczynska).

Bootlin is indeed involved in the Yocto Project by maintaining its documentation (see the active contributors through the git repository), and also a participant to the Yocto SWAT team, keeping track of all the issues encountered by the autobuilder machines and runs.

Though the Yocto Project and OpenEmbedded are Open Source projects, registration for this conference is not free but just costs 40 USD, to cover infrastructure and staffing costs, the event being hosted by the Linux Foundation.

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!

Bootlin at Linux Plumbers conference 2022

Next week, almost the entire Bootlin team will be at the Embedded Linux Conference Europe in Dublin, see our previous blog post on this topic. We will give four talks at this event, on a variety of Linux kernel and embedded Linux topics.

During the same week, also in Dublin albeit in a different location, will take place the Linux Plumbers conference. Bootlin engineer Miquèl Raynal will give a talk at Linux Plumbers, as part of the IoTs a 4-Letter Word micro-conference. Miquèl’s talk will discuss Linux IEEE 802.15.4 MLME improvements, as Miquèl has been working for several months on bringing improvements to the 802.15.4 stack in the Linux kernel.

Embedded Linux Conference Europe 2022: four talks from Bootlin

The schedule for the upcoming Embedded Linux Conference Europe 2022 has been published recently.

Bootlin CEO Thomas Petazzoni is again a member of the program committee for this edition of ELCE, and has helped with other members of this committee in reviewing and selecting the numerous talk submissions that have been received.

Bootlin will obviously be present at this conference. With 13 engineers from Bootlin participating, almost the entire company will be in Dublin for this major event of the embedded Linux community. Also, 4 of the talks that we had submitted have been accepted:

  • Luca Ceresoli on Basics of I2C on Linux
    This talk is an introduction to using I²C on embedded Linux devices. I²C (or I2C) is a simple but flexible electronic bus to allow low-speed communication between the CPU and all sorts of chips: PMICs, ADC/DACs, GPIO expanders, video sensors, audio codecs, EEPROMS, RTCs and many more. It is so popular that knowing it is a must for any embedded system engineer. Luca will first give an introduction to what I2C is at the electrical level. He will then describe how I2C is implemented in the Linux kernel driver model and how that appears in sysfs, how to describe I2C devices using device tree and how to write a driver for an I2C device. Finally he will present the tools to communicate with the chips from userspace and share some debugging techniques, including inspection of the physical bus and software-level debugging.
  • Miquèl Raynal on Improving Wireless PAN Support
    Anybody eager to learn about IoT devices has at least once tried to play with Zigbee or 6lowpan sensors. These two protocols are built on top of a well common MAC/PHY specification: IEEE 802.15.4, also known as Wireless Personal Area Networks: WPAN, designed to be low-rate/low-range wireless networks. There is already substantial support for this protocol in the Linux kernel but when my journey started, several of the MAC-related operations well described in the specification were not implemented, making the subsystem mainly useful for very simple use cases: peer-to-peer transmissions. This is unfortunate as a significant part of the idea behind WPAN is to make these networks quite adaptive and resilient, which requires a minimal subset of the peer management procedure to be supported. Besides a number of preparation changes, the main idea behind the continuous flow of patches was to bring support for the scanning procedure which allows a PAN controller to detect all the compatible devices around it in different ways. Discovering these devices is the first step in order to associate them together and build up starred networks. This talk will be an opportunity to explain the new APIs allowing such discoveries and provide a state of the art of the support in the mainline kernel.
  • Michael Opdenacker on Implementing A/B System Updates with U-Boot
    A popular way to implement system updates is through the A/B scheme, in which you have two copies of the root filesystem, one which is active, and one that is meant to contain the next update. When a new update is successfully applied, you need to make the corresponding partition become the new active one. That’s when a number of practical questions arise, such as how to identify the active partition, how to detect when the new system fails to boot properly, and how to fall back to the previous version? It was hard to find documentation about how U-Boot could address such needs to implement a functional and failsafe A/B system update mechanism. This presentation proposes to address this need by sharing the practical solutions we found, using lesser known commands and capabilities in U-Boot. We will also explain how the Linux side can cooperate with the U-Boot side. Fortunately, you won’t need to erase half of your brain to get updated on this topic.
  • Paul Kocialkowski on Walking Through the Linux-Based Graphics Stack
    The graphics stack used with the Linux kernel is a notoriously complex beast. From userspace down to the kernel level, a number of components are involved and interact with eachother. It is also an area that is constantly evolving to meet new use cases, refresh legacy implementations and achieve better performance. This makes it difficult to have a clear idea of the big picture and what is actually happening when using graphics-related components. This presentation will detail a walk through the graphics stack, with actual examples of displaying a buffer and rendering using the GPU. Going from the application level through the system libraries, down to the kernel and ending with actual hardware configuration. State-of-the-art technologies such as Wayland and DRM will be highlighted with relevant excerpts from the source code of related free software projects that are widely used today.

We look forward to meeting again the embedded Linux community, its developers, users and maintainers, at Dublin during this conference!

Bootlin at Live Embedded Event, 3rd edition

Live Embedded EventTomorrow, on May 18, the third edition of Live Embedded Event will take place. Live Embedded Event is a free and fully online conference, dedicated to embedded topics at large. One can register directly online to receive a link to attend the conference.

Bootlin will be participating to this third edition, with 3 talks from 3 different Bootlin engineers:

  • Michael Opdenacker on LLVM tools for the Linux kernel, at 12:00 UTC+2 in Track 3. Details: Recent versions of Linux can be compiled with LLVM’s Clang C language compiler, in addition to Gcc, at least on today’s most popular CPU architectures. This presentation will show you how. Cross-compiling works differently with Clang: no architecture-specific cross-compiling toolchain is required. We will compare the Clang and Gcc compiled kernels, in terms of size and boot time. More generally, we will discuss the concrete benefits brought by being able to compile the kernel with this alternative compiler, in particular the LLVM specific kernel Makefile targets: clang-tidy and clang-analyzer.
  • Grégory Clement on AMP on Cortex A9 with Linux and OpenAMP, at 15:30 UTC+2 in Track 2. Details: While, usually, the Cortex A9 cores are used in SMP, one could want use one of the core to run an other OS. In this case the system becomes AMP. Typically, it allows running a dedicated real time OS on a core. This presentation will show the step that allow having this support using open sources stacks. First we will see what OpenAMP is, then how the Linux kernel can communicate with external OS using remote proc message, and finally what to adapt in the Linux kernel and OpenAMP in order to support the usage of a Cortex A9. This was experimented on an i.MX6 but the solution presented has the advantage to be easily adapted on any SoC using Cortex A9.
  • Thomas Perrot on PKCS#11 with OP-TEE at 15:00 UTC+2 in Track 2. Details:
    PKCS#11 is a standard API that allows to manage cryptographic tokens, regardless of the platform such as Hardware Security Modules, Trusted Plaform Modules or smart cards. Moreover, modern processors offer a secure area, named Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) that allows the isolation of some operations, datas and devices to guarantee their integrity and confidentiality. OP-TEE is an open source implementation of Trusted Execution Environment that runs in parallel with the operating system, as a companion. In this talk, we will first introduce PKCS#11, then OP-TEE, and finally look at how PKCS#11 operations can be performed through OP-TEE, and what are the benefits. Our presentation will be illustrated with examples based on the NXP i.MX8QXP platform, but should be applicable to other platforms that have OP-TEE support.

Join us at Live Embedded Event, and discover our talks as well as the many other talks from other speakers!

Bootlin at Embedded Recipes and Kernel Recipes 2022, Paris

After 2 editions cancelled due to the pandemic, the famous Embedded Recipes and Kernel Recipes conferences are back: they will take place end of May and beginning of June in Paris!

Bootlin will be present at this event, with several engineers from the team participating:

We look forward to meeting you at this event! If you want to discuss business or career opportunities with Bootlin, do not hesitate to meet Paul, Michael, Kamel or Grégory during Embedded and/or Kernel Recipes!

Bootlin at the Embedded Linux Conference North America 2022

Bootlin CEO Thomas Petazzoni and COO Alexandre Belloni will both be attending the next Embedded Linux Conference North America, on June 21-24 in Austin, Texas.

In addition, both Thomas and Alexandre will be speaking at the event:

  • Thomas Petazzoni will give a talk Buildroot: what’s new?, providing an update on the improvements and new features in the Buildroot build system that have been integrated over the past two years
  • Alexandre Belloni will give a talk Yocto Project Autobuilders and the SWAT Team, during which he will explain what’s happening behind in the scenes in the Yocto Project to review and validate contributions before they are integrated.

Thomas and Alexandre will also naturally be available during the event to discuss business or career opportunities, so do not hesitate to get in touch if you’re interested.

Finally, prior to the event, Thomas Petazzoni will be in the Bay Area on June 13-15, also available for meetings or discussions.