Category: Conference

Back from ELCE 2019: our talks videos, slides, and more!

With 8 engineers participating to the Embedded Linux Conference Europe, almost the entire Bootlin engineering team took part to the conference. As usual, we not only attended the event, but also contributed by giving a total of 5 talks and 2 tutorials, for which we’re happy to share below the videos and slides. Also, as part of this conference, Bootlin CTO Thomas Petazzoni received an award for his contribution to the conference.

Buildroot, what’s new ?

Talk given by Thomas Petazzoni, slides in PDF and slides source code.

Timing boot time reduction techniques

Talk given by Michael Opdenacker, slides in PDF, slides source code.

Integrating hardware-accelerated video decoding with the display stack

Talk given by Paul Kocialkowski, slides in PDF, slides source code.

RTC subsystem, recent changes and where it is heading

Talk given by Alexandre Belloni, slides in PDF, slides source code.

Flash subsystems status update

Talk given by Miquèl Raynal (from Bootlin) and Richard Weinberger (from sigma star gmbh), slides in PDF, slides source code.

Offloading network traffic classification to hardware

Talk given by Maxime Chevallier, slides in PDF, slides source code.

Introduction to Linux Kernel driver programming

Tutorial given by Michael Opdenacker, slides in PDF, slides source document. The video is not yet available, but should be published in the future.

Introduction to the Buildroot embedded Linux build system

Tutorial given by Thomas Petazzoni, slides in PDF, slides source code. The video is not yet available, but should be published in the future.

Award to Thomas Petazzoni

During the traditional closing game of the conference, we were really happy to have Bootlin’s CTO Thomas Petazzoni called on stage, to receive from the hands of Tim Bird, an award for his continuous 11 year participation to the conference, with 24 presentations given, one keynote and for the past two years, participation to the conference program committee. We are honored and proud by this recognition of Thomas contribution to the conference.

Thomas Petazzoni receives ELCE conference award

Thomas Petazzoni receives ELCE conference award

Thomas Petazzoni receives ELCE conference award

Bootlin at the Embedded Linux Conference Europe 2019

This year, Bootlin missed the Embedded Linux Conference North America which took place late August in San Diego, US. It was the first time in many years that Bootlin was completely absent from an Embedded Linux Conference.

But the coming Embedded Linux Conference Europe is going to be different in that respect: Bootlin will once again have a strong presence at this event, which in 2019 takes in Bootlin’s home country, France, from October 28 to October 30. And this year, ELCE is not only in France, but more precisely in Lyon, the city where one of the 3 Bootlin offices is located, so for some of our engineers it will be a very local conference!

Embedded Linux Conference Europe 2019

Of Bootlin staff, Michael Opdenacker, Alexandre Belloni, Grégory Clement, Kamel Bouhara, Miquèl Raynal, Maxime Chevallier, Paul Kocialkowski and Thomas Petazzoni will participate to the event. The schedule of the event, which also includes talks from the Open Source Summit and a number of co-located events, shows a nice selection of interesting talks.

As usual, we don’t limit our participation to just attending: we also give talks and tutorials. This year, the following proposals we made have been accepted:

In addition to being present at the Embedded Linux Conference Europe, Bootlin will also be present:

  • at the Buildroot Developers Meeting, which will take place on the 3 days before the conference, through to the participation of Buildroot co-maintainer Thomas Petazzoni
  • at the Linux media summit, which will take place in parallel to the Embedded Linux Conference Europe. Bootlin engineer Paul Kocialkowski will be part of the attendees.

Bootlin at the X.Org Developers Conference 2019

Every year, the X.Org community organizes the X.Org Developers Conference, the main conference to discuss graphics support in Linux. Despite the name, the conference is no longer restricted to X.Org topics, but also covers Wayland, Mesa3D and many other topics.

XDC 2019

The 2019 edition will take place on October 2-4 in Montréal, Canada, and the schedule of this event is already available.

Bootlin engineer Paul Kocialkowski will participate to this conference. Paul is Bootlin’s display and graphics expert, he is one of the developer of the Allwinner VPU support in Linux and has made several contributions to the Allwinner DRM driver, as well as worked on the RaspberryPi graphics controller automated testing. Participating to this conference allows us to stay up-to-date with the latest developments in the Linux graphics community.

If you’re attending the conference, do not hesitate to get in touch with Paul!

Bootlin at Kernel Recipes 2019

Kernel Recipes has become over the past few years a well-known conference, with an interesting line-up of speakers and an audience limited to 100-150 attendees giving a particular atmosphere to this event. Bootlin engineers have regularly participated and gave several talks at Kernel Recipes or Embedded Recipes in previous editions (2013, 2016, 2017, 2018).

This year, Bootlin engineer Grégory Clement will participate to the 3 days of Kernel Recipes in Paris, on September 25-27. Do not hesitate to get in touch with Grégory during the event, to discuss Linux kernel development, embedded Linux, career or business opportunities with Bootlin.

Bootlin at the Linux Plumbers conference, September 9-11

The next edition of the Linux Plumbers conference will take place from September 9 to September 11 in Lisbon, Portugal. A number of engineers from Bootlin will participate to Linux Plumbers, to attend the Networking Summit track and many of the other micro-conferences organized as part of this event.

Linux Plumbers 2019

Overall, from Bootlin, Alexandre Belloni, Maxime Chevallier, Thomas Petazzoni, Miquèl Raynal and Antoine Ténart will be in Lisbon for this event. Do not hesitate to get in touch with us if you’re also attending!

Feedback from the SiFive Tech Symposium in Grenoble

SiFive LogoSiFive is a semi-conductor company that produces chips based on the RISC-V architecture. On May 15th, they organized a Technical Symposium in Grenoble on May 15th and we took the opportunity to attend, as the agenda looked interesting.

It was especially nice having Krste Asanovic present many of the topics, wearing different hats (RISC-V Foundation Chairman of the Board and SiFive Co-Founder and Chief Architect). The RISC-V architecture and its history and use cases were presented. One of the main benefit of having a brand new ISA (instruction set architecture), Asanovic said, is that it doesn’t have to handle legacy instructions and compatibility. Moreover, RISC-V is a frozen ISA, the base instructions are frozen and optional extensions which have been approved are also frozen. Finally, the ISA is open and anybody can implement a CPU core. During the presentation, the RISC-V ISA was (obviously) favorably compared to competing ISAs, mainly ARM.

Another interesting topic was the presentation of SiFive’s business model. They want anyone, including small companies to be able to design an SoC fitting their particular product, instead of having to choose from a set of more general purpose SoC. This can be done by using an existing SiFive RISC-V core or by customizing one. SiFive then offers a library of IPs that can be added on the SoC and third party IPs are available through their Designshare program. They handle NDA, contract and licensing and will collect non recurring engineering costs and royalties once the SoC is mass produced but not during the prototyping phase. They first provide virtualized chips and then sample chips. For the core, they also provide RTL that can run on FPGAs. For mass production, SiFive partnered with TSMC and their customers can benefit from their process (down to 7nm).

The most relevant topic for us was the software ecosystem. There is a very nice will to get code upstream and this is the case for GCC, binutils, newlib, gdb, glibc, qemu. Clang/LLVM is coming up. Regarding the Linux kernel port, it still requires some work as the core architecture support is there but no devices drivers or device tree support yet. There is however a fully working vendor tree. FreeBSD seems to be in the same state.

Most of the remaining time was focused on the design and customization tool available here.
SiFive Chip Designer

SiFive also Sponsored Linus Sebastian (from Linus Tech Tips) for a video:

To conclude, it was an very interesting day. At Bootlin, we are delighted to see architecture designers and silicon vendors actively pushing software support upstream and we are looking forward to work on RISC-V platforms.

Real-Time Summit 2018

This year, Bootlin engineer Maxime Chevallier attended the Real-Time Summit, which took place after ELCE in Edinburgh. In a similar fashion to the Linux Media Summit, this was a 1-day conference dedicated to Real-Time topics in the Linux ecosystem, more specifically the Linux Kernel.

The future of Preempt-RT

Real-Time (or should we say, deterministic) behavior in the Linux kernel has been pursued for a long time, the most famous effort being the Preempt-RT patch. As Steven Rostedt announced during his talk at ELCE 2018, the Preempt-RT patch is close to being fully merged in mainline Linux, we can expect to see this happen in 2019.

Some of the maintainers of the Preempt-RT patch were present at the Real-Time summit, including Thomas Gleixner who lead the discussion throughout the day.

This was the occasion to discuss the remaining points to be addressed for Preempt-RT to make it into mainline Linux :

  • Printk : As Steven Rostedt explained at ELCE 2017, printk is not very real-time friendly. The main issue was worked around, but John Ogness presented his current work of fully redesigning printk’s behaviour.
  • Thomas Gleixner talked about the current state of softirq handling, which is also a critical point for determinism. They work by “stealing” some irq context time, falling back to ksoftirqd when necessary. This is particularly problematic for networking drivers that heavily rely on softirq.
  • Peter Zijlstra exposed the different scheduler related issues that needs to be addressed, focusing on SCHED_DEADLINE.

Modeling and analyzing the kernel behavior

All the talks weren’t about the Preempt-RT match merging effort. Daniel Bristot de Oliveira presented his ongoing academic work on modeling the Linux task model. The idea here is to build a formal model that doesn’t take shortcuts or idealize the way tasks are handled in the kernel, so that this can be used as a basis for academic research on topics such as scheduling.

One of the main arguments is that there’s a gap in terms of language and methodology used between kernel developers and the academic world. Daniel explained how he managed to build a huge state-machine representing the task model, and how he uses it now to verify that tasks behave how they should by running trace events in the state machine.

This talk sparked a lot if interesting discussions, for example Peter Zijlstra suggested to compile the state machine into eBPF code and run it live in the kernel.

Julia Lawall was present in the room, and improvised a talk inspired by Daniel’s presentation. She presented DSAC, a static analysis tool dedicated to finding Sleeping in Atomic Context bugs. Julia is involved in the development and use of the coccinelle tool, and explained that it is quickly limited when trying to find that categories of bugs, where sleeping calls can be deeply nested in a call stack protected by spinlocks. Using LLVM, DSAC can analyze complex scenarios with multiple level of nesting and indirect calls to detect SAC bugs. After analyzing the v4.17 kernel sources for only a few hours, the tool was able to detect more than 1000 bugs, 220 of which were confirmed.

The overall technical level of the different talks was high, leading to passionate discussions and suggestions on every topic that was brought during the day.

Feedback from Bootlin at the Linux Plumbers Conference 2018

The Linux Plumbers Conference (LPC) was held a few weeks ago in Vancouver, BC. As always there were several tracks where contributors gave a presentation of on-going or future work, and discussed it with the audience, on specific topics such as thermal, containers, real time, device tree and many more. For the first time at LPC a 2-day networking track took place. As we work on a diversity of networking projects at Bootlin we decided to attend.

Networking track at LPC. Photo @linuxplumbers.

The hot topic of the last couple of years in conferences in the network subsystem is XDP, so the conference was not exception. We saw a handful of talks and discussions about the on-going work and support of XDP within the kernel. XDP provides a programmable network data path (using eBPF) in the Linux kernel to process bare metal packets at the lowest point in the network stack. Packets are processed directly in the drivers’ Rx queues, before any allocation happen (such as socket buffers). Facebook is one well known heavy user of this technology (every packet toward Facebook is processed by XDP) and its engineers gave feedback about how they use XDP and the issues they faced. Other projects and companies are currently evaluating and starting to use XDP as well: we also saw presentations about XDP/eBPF in Open vSwitch, DPDK or kTLS.

While XDP/eBPF was featured in most of the discussions, other interesting topics where brought up. Andrew Lunn gave a presentation about the current need to go beyond 1G copper PHYs for many Linux enabled embedded devices. This was very interesting for us as we used and worked on the technologies used within the Linux kernel to address this, such as Phylink and the SFP bus (we used those when enabling 10G interfaces in the Marvell MacchiatoBin board).

Another presentation caught our attention as the topic was related to what we do at Bootlin. Jesse Brandeburg from Intel talked about the networking hardware offloads and their APIs. He exposed a brief history of the offloads supported by NICs and then showed some issues with the current APIs, where some use cases or behaviors are not clearly defined and sometimes overlap. This is a feeling we share as we experienced it while implementing some of those hardware networking offloads. Jesse’s idea was to open a discussion to come up with better solutions within the next years, as NICs offloading continue to grow.

The Linux Plumbers Conference was very pleasant and well organized. We had the chance to attend the networking track, seeing lots of great cutting-edge topics being discussed; as well as other interesting tracks.

We’d like to thank the conference and track organizers, we had a great time! Videos, slides and papers are now available on the official website or on Youtube.

Bootlin at the Linux Media Summit 2018

This year’s edition of the Linux Media Summit happened a month ago, in Edinburgh, right after the Embedded Linux Conference. Since we were already at the ELCE, and that we’ve been more and more involved in the media community thanks to our work on the Allwinner CSI driver and more importantly the Cedrus driver, it was natural for us to attend.

The media summit is usually a meeting to discuss the hot topics, so the whole day was a mix and match of various status updates and discussions on the future needs and developments around the Video4Linux2 framework.

Linux Media Summit attendees

Most of the discussion was about how to improve the contributor’s experience and improve the maintenance. The DRM subsystem was used as an example, since the number of patches are in the same order of magnitude, and a number of v4l2 contributors are also contributing to DRM drivers. Part of the improvement of both the maintenance and contribution experience will also come through some CI work, so there was a lot of discussions on how to improve the already existing tools (such as v4l2-compliance) but also how to setup some automatic tooling to run those tests as early as possible.

A good part of the day was also spent on dealing with the current developments, such as the Request API we’ve used in the Cedrus driver, and how to integrate that API into popular multimedia frameworks like gstreamer or ffmpeg. It looks like our libva implementation was well received, so it will probably be made standard and hosted on linuxtv.org in the near future. Other developments discussed were fault tolerant v4l2, in order to deal with video pipelines where one or several components might not work anymore, and storing the v4l2 controls state in a persistent way.

It was overall a very productive day, and it’s always nice to meet people you interact with over mailing list and IRC on a regular basis. If you want more information, you can read the extensive report.

Bootlin at Capitole du Libre in Toulouse, France

Capitole du LibreNext week-end, a local free and open-source software conference called Capitole du Libre will take place in Toulouse, France, where Bootlin has one of its offices. Bootlin will participate to this event in several ways:

We encourage free software developers and users from the south west of France to join this event, which has been organized for several years, and provides a very nice selection of talks and tutorials. And of course, this conference is entirely free, and no registration is required.