Category: Conference

Slides from the Embedded Linux Conference

Two weeks ago, the entire Bootlin engineering team (9 persons) attended the Embedded Linux Conference in San Diego. We had some really good time there, with lots of interesting talks and useful meetings and discussions.

Tim Bird opening the conferenceDiscussion between Linus Torvalds and Dirk Hohndel

In addition to attending the event, we also participated by giving 5 different talks on various topics, for which we are publishing the slides:

Boris Brezillon, the new NAND Linux subsystem maintainer, presented on Modernizing the NAND framework: The big picture.

Boris Brezillon's talk on the NAND subsystem

Antoine Ténart presented on Using DT overlays to support the C.H.I.P’s capes.

Antoine Tenart's talk on using DT overlays for the CHIP

Maxime Ripard, maintainer of the Allwinner platform support in Linux, presented on Bringing display and 3D to the C.H.I.P computer.

Maxime Ripard's talk on display and 3D for the CHIP

Alexandre Belloni and Thomas Petazzoni presented Buildroot vs. OpenEmbedded/Yocto Project: a four hands discussion.

Belloni and Petazzoni's talk on OpenEmbedded vs. Buildroot

Thomas Petazzoni presented GNU Autotools: a tutorial.

Petazzoni's tutorial on the autotools

All the other slides from the conference are available from the event page as well as from eLinux.org Wiki. All conferences have been recorded, and the videos will hopefully be posted soon by the Linux Foundation.

Slides from Collaboration Summit talk on Linux kernel upstreaming

As we announced in a previous blog post, Bootlin CTO Thomas Petazzoni gave a talk at the Collaboration Summit 2016 covering the topic of “Upstreaming hardware support in the Linux kernel: why and how?“.

The slides of the talk are now available in PDF format.

Upstreaming hardware support in the Linux kernel: why and how?

Upstreaming hardware support in the Linux kernel: why and how?

Upstreaming hardware support in the Linux kernel: why and how?

Through this talk, we identified a number of major reasons that should encourage hardware vendors to contribute the support for their hardware to the upstream Linux kernel, and some hints on how to achieve that. Of course, within a 25 minutes time slot, it was not possible to get into the details, but hopefully the general hints we have shared, based on our significant Linux kernel upstreaming experience, have been useful for the audience.

Unfortunately, none of the talks at the Collaboration Summit were recorded, so no video will be available for this talk.

“Porting Linux on ARM” seminar road show in France

CaptronicIn December 2015, Bootlin engineer Alexandre Belloni gave a half-day seminar “Porting Linux on ARM” in Toulouse (France) in partnership with french organization Captronic. We published the materials used for the seminar shortly after the event.

We are happy to announce that this seminar will be given in four different cities in France over the next few months:

  • In Montpellier, on April 14th from 2 PM to 6 PM. See this page for details.
  • In Clermont-Ferrand, on April 27th from 2 PM to 6 PM. See this page for details.
  • In Brive, on April 28th from 9 AM to 1 PM. See this page for details.
  • Near Chambéry, on May 25th from 9:30 AM to 5/30 PM. See this page for details.
  • Near Bordeaux, on June 2nd from 2 PM to 6 PM. See this page for details.
  • Near Nancy, on June 16th from 2 PM to 6 PM. See this page for details.

The seminar is delivered in French, and the event is free after registration. The speaker, Alexandre Belloni, has worked on porting botloaders and the Linux kernel on a number of ARM platforms (Atmel, Freescale, Texas Instruments and more) and is the Linux kernel co-maintainer for the RTC subsystem and the support of the Atmel ARM processors.

Bootlin at the Embedded Linux Conference 2016

Like every year for about 10 years, the entire Bootlin engineering team will participate to the next Embedded Linux Conference, taking place on April 4-6 in San Diego, California. For us, participating to such conferences is very important, as it allows to remain up to date with the latest developments in the embedded Linux world, create contacts with other members of the embedded Linux community, and meet the community members we already know and work with on a daily basis via the mailing lists or IRC.

Embedded Linux Conference 2016

Over the years, our engineering team has grown, and with the arrival of two more engineers on March 14, our engineering team now gathers 9 persons, all of whom are going to participate to the Embedded Linux Conference.

As usual, in addition to attending, we also proposed a number of talks, and some of them have been accepted and are visible in the conference schedule:

As usual, our talks are centered around our areas of expertise: hardware support in the Linux kernel, especially for ARM platforms, and build system related topics (Buildroot, Yocto, autotools).

We are looking forward to attending this event, and see many other talks from various speakers: the proposed schedule contains a wide range of topics, many of which look really interesting!

Bootlin speaking at the Linux Collaboration Summit

Bootlin engineers are regular speakers at the Embedded Linux Conference and Embedded Linux Conference Europe events from the Linux Foundation, to which our entire engineering team participates each year.

In 2016, for the first time, we will also be speaking at the Collaboration Summit, an invitation-only event where, as the Linux Foundation presents it, “the world’s thought leaders in open source software and collaborative development convene to share best practices and learn how to manage the largest shared technology investments of our time”.

Collaboration Summit 2016

This event will take place on March 29-31 in Lake Tahoe, California, and the event schedule has been published recently. Bootlin CTO Thomas Petazzoni will be giving a talk Upstreaming hardware support in the Linux kernel: why and how?, during which we will share our experience working with HW manufacturers to bring the support for their hardware to the upstream Linux kernel, discuss the benefits of upstreaming, and best practices to work with upstream.

With a small team of engineers, Bootlin has merged over the last few years thousands of patches in the official Linux kernel, and has several of its engineers having maintainer positions in the Linux kernel community. We are happy to take the opportunity of the Collaboration Summit to share some of our experience, and hopefully encourage and help other companies to participate upstream.

Seminar “Porting Linux on an ARM board”, materials available

Porting Linux on an ARM boardOn December 10th 2015, Bootlin engineer Alexandre Belloni gave a half-day seminar on the topic of Porting Linux on an ARM board in Toulouse, France. This seminar covers topics like porting the bootloader, understanding the concept of the Device Tree, writing Linux device drivers and more. With ~50 persons from various companies attending and lots of questions from the audience, this first edition has been very successful, which shows an increasing interest for using Linux on ARM platforms in the industry.

We are now publishing the 220 slides materials from this seminar, available in PDF format. Like all our training materials, this material is published under the Creative Commons BY-SA 3.0 license, which allows everyone to re-use it for free, provided the derivative works are released under the same license. We indeed re-used quite extensively parts of our existing training materials for this half-day seminar.

We plan to give this half-day seminar in other locations in France in 2016. Contact us if you are interested in organizing a similar seminar in your area (we are happy to travel!).

Bootlin at FOSDEM and the Buildroot Developers Meeting

FOSDEM 2016The FOSDEM conference will take place on January 30-31 in Brussels, Belgium. Like every year, there are lots of interesting talks for embedded developers, starting from the Embedded, Mobile and Automotive Devroom, but also the Hardware track, the Graphics track. Some talks of the IoT and Security devrooms may also be interesting to embedded developers.

Thomas Petazzoni, embedded Linux engineer and CTO at Bootlin, will be present during the FOSDEM conference. Thomas will also participate to the Buildroot Developers Meeting that will take place on February 1-2 in Brussels, hosted by Google.

Bootlin at the Linux Kernel Summit 2015

Kernel Summit 2012 in San DiegoThe Linux Kernel Summit is, as Wikipedia says, an annual gathering of the top Linux kernel developers, and is an invitation-only event.

In 2012 and 2013, several Bootlin engineers have been invited and participated to a sub-event of the Linux Kernel Summit, the “ARM mini-kernel summit”, which was more specifically focused on ARM related developments in the kernel. Gregory Clement and Thomas Petazzoni went to the event in 2012 in San Diego (United States) and in 2013, Maxime Ripard, Gregory Clement, Alexandre Belloni and Thomas Petazzoni participated to the ARM mini-kernel summit in Edinburgh (UK).

This year, Thomas Petazzoni has been invited to the Linux Kernel Summit, which will take place late October in Seoul (South Korea). We’re happy to see that our continuous contributions to the Linux Kernel are recognized and allow us to participate to such an invitation-only event. For us, participating to the Linux Kernel Summit is an excellent way of keeping up-to-date with the latest Linux kernel developments, and also where needed, give our feedback from our experience working in the embedded industry with several SoC, board and system vendors.

Bootlin talks at the Embedded Linux Conference Europe

Father Mathew BridgeThe Embedded Linux Conference Europe 2015 will take place on October 5-7 in Dublin, Ireland. As usual, the entire Bootlin engineering team will participate to the event, as we believe it is one of the great way for our engineers to remain up-to-date with the latest embedded Linux developments and connect with other embedded Linux and kernel developers.

The conference schedule has been announced recently, and a number of talks given by Bootlin engineers have been accepted:

We submitted other talks that got rejected, probably since both of them had already been given at the Embedded Linux Conference in California: Maxime Ripard’s talk on dmaengine and Boris Brezillon’s talk on supporting MLC NAND (which we regret since Boris is currently actively working on this topic, so we are expecting to have some useful results by the time of ELCE, compared to his ELC talk which was mostly a presentation of the issues and some proposals to address them). Interested readers can anyway watch those talks and/or read the slides.

In addition to the Embedded Linux Conference Europe itself:

  • Thomas Petazzoni will participate to the Buildroot developers meeting on October 3/4, right before the conference.
  • Alexandre Belloni will participate to the OEDEM, the 2015 OpenEmbedded Developer’s European Meeting, taking place on October 9 after the conference.