Welcome to Antonin Godard

After Mathieu Dubois-Briand and Olivier Benjamin, a third engineer joined this September our team at our Lyon office in France: we’re happy to welcome Antonin Godard.

After graduating from the french Telecom Paris engineering school in 2020, Antonin spent 4 years at Witekio, exclusively dedicated to embedded Linux system development. He has primarily been involved in Yocto-based projects, designing and architecturing BSPs for various customers and maintaining them. He also has experience with secure boot, CI/CD , CVE analysis, OTA updates and automated testing. Antonin also worked for a year in Witekio’s Seattle office, where he pursued his work on Yocto-based projects for American customers.

Over the years, Antonin got to work with Xilinx Zynq Ultrascale and NXP Layerscape SoCs as well as some experience with i.MX and x86 based-SoCs – for which he got bootloaders (U-boot / Grub), the Linux kernel and various open-source software up and running.

As part of his work at Bootlin, Antonin has already been involved in contributing to the Yocto Project documentation, and he will bring his expertise to help our customers on all embedded Linux topics. See Antonin’s profile on our website for more details.

Once again, welcome Antonin!

Bootlin Live #0, live video podcast on embedded Linux

We’re happy to announce that we’re starting Bootlin Live, a (hopefully) regular live video podcast that will cover embedded Linux topics in the broadest sense, as we aim at also covering open-source RTOS, hardware, and other related topics relevant to embedded open-source developers. Save the date of Sep 30 at 6 PM UTC+2 for the first episode and read on for more details on this new initiative.

Continue reading “Bootlin Live #0, live video podcast on embedded Linux”

Snagboot 1.3 release overview

Snagboot, Bootlin’s vendor-agnostic recovery tool for embedded platforms, has been under continued development since its first release in May 2023. Let’s take a look at the main changes brought by version 1.3, published just a few days ago.

Passing USB device paths

Both snagrecover and snagflash previously relied on USB vendor ID:product ID addresses to find recovery devices exposed by boards. This was problematic in the case where two boards with the same vendor and product IDs had to be recovered or reflashed simultaneously. To solve this issue, we added the ability for snagrecover and snagflash to use USB paths of the form bus:port1-port2-... instead.

The main challenge we faced while implementing this feature was integration into the NXP i.MX recovery process. In Snagboot 1.2, i.MX recovery relied on the Python ctypes bindings to the hidapi library. These bindings did not allow searching for an HID device using bus/port paths. This, and other issues we encountered with hidapi bindings led us to drop them entirely and reimplement a partial HID library inside the Snagboot codebase.

i.MX53 support

Martin Fuzzey contributed a set of changes to snagrecover that added support for the i.MX53 family of SoCs. A few changes to the protocol layer of Snagboot were necessary since these SoCs used a raw USB device instead of an HID device.

Improvements to the AM335x setup script

Recovering AM335x platforms with Snagboot requires setting up a recovery shell using a special helper script. We’ve cleaned up the syntax and some of the logic of this script to bring it closer to POSIX compatibility and allow non-Bash shells such as Fish shell to run it successfully.

These are the main changes brought by v1.3. If you’re curious to see more, you can view the full changelog here. Thank you to all the people who contributed to this release!

Welcome to Thomas Richard

Welcome on board!Bootlin is really happy to welcome another engineer in its team: Thomas Richard, who joined us on July 3, 2023 (missing a participation to the Embedded Linux Conference Europe by just one week!).

Thomas graduated from INSA Toulouse in 2015, and then started his embedded software engineer career at Kontron, where he worked on numerous aspects of embedded Linux system development:

  • Thomas developed an OpenWRT based embedded Linux OS for railway systems, including virtualization support and security features such as TPM-based secret sealing, Host Intrusion Detection System (HIDS), and Linux Security Modules (LSM)
  • Thomas used both Yocto and Buildroot as build systems to create custom embedded Linux systems, in particular to support VME/VPX boards.
  • Thomas has developed several Linux kernel drivers, for GPIOs, HDLC, UART, watchdog, and more, to address the needs of several Kontron products
  • Thomas has also worked on cyber-security challenges, by creating a streamlined process to merge results from different vulnerability scanners and generate comprehensive reports for customers, to allow them to keep their embedded Linux systems updated in terms of security fixes.

Thomas is joining our team located in Lyon, France, where he will work at our office with Alexandre Belloni, Grégory Clement, Théo Lebrun and Kamel Bouhara, and of course with the rest of our team in Toulouse and remote.

For more details, see Thomas’ page on Bootlin.com or his LinkedIn profile.

Releasing Snagboot: a cross-vendor recovery tool for embedded platforms

Recovering and reflashing a bricked board can be a tedious process. It often involves flashing an SD card to bring your device back up, and it gets worse if the board does not have an SD card slot to begin with. Thankfully, most embedded platforms almost always include some form of recovery via USB or UART, which usually involves sending a boot image to the platform’s ROM code. A few tools exist that leverage this functionality to offer quick recovery and reflashing via USB, such as STM32CubeProgrammer, SAM-BA or UUU. However, these tools are all vendor-specific, which means that developers working on various kinds of platforms have to switch between different tools and learn how to use each one.

To address this issue, Bootlin is happy to release today a new recovery and reflashing tool, called Snagboot, which intends to be a generic and open-source replacement to the vendor-specific tools mentioned earlier. It is composed of two parts:

  • snagrecover, which uses vendor-specific ROM code mechanisms to initialize external RAM and run your bootloader (typically U-Boot), without modifying any non-volatile memories.
  • snagflash, which communicates with your bootloader over USB to flash system images to non-volatile memories, using either DFU, USB Mass Storage or fastboot.

Snagboot currently supports about 50 different SoC models, from six different SoC families:

  • STMicroelectronics STM32MP1
  • Microchip SAMA5
  • NXP i.MX6/7/8
  • Texas Instruments AM335x
  • Allwinner Sunxi
  • Texas Instruments AM62x

You can get it from PyPI or browse the sources on github. Our extensive user guide gives all the details on how to setup and use Snagboot on supported platforms. We hope that this tool will be useful to embedded software engineers and that it will continue to grow as support for more SoCs/platforms is added! If you’re familiar with a certain SoC family’s boot process, don’t hesitate to contribute to the project by adding support for your platform!

Updated Yocto support for SiFive RISC-V platforms

SiFive logoA few months ago, we started supporting SiFive in their effort to maintain and improve the Yocto support for their RISC-V processors and platforms. The Yocto support for SiFive platforms is divided into two layers:

These layers allow to build ready-to-use Yocto images for the Qemu RISC-V 64-bit emulation, the HiFive Unleashed and HiFive Unmatched development boards.

As part of our work on the Yocto support for SiFive platofrms, we have already published three new releases of these layers: 2022.06, 2022.08 and 2022.10. In this blog post, we review the main highlights of those releases.

Continue reading “Updated Yocto support for SiFive RISC-V platforms”

Welcome to Théo Lebrun!

Welcome on board!We are happy to announce that Théo Lebrun has joined our engineering team, as of September 9, 2022, just in time to attend the Embedded Linux Conference Europe with the rest of the Bootlin engineering team.

Théo has just graduated from the Université de Technologie de Belfort Montbéliard, and did his final 6-month internship at Bootlin, where he worked on PipeWire and support for the A2B Audio Bus in the Linux kernel.

Théo is joining our team based in Lyon, where Alexandre Belloni, Grégory Clement and Kamel Bouhara are based.

Welcome on board Théo!

2021 at Bootlin, a year in review

2021 has come to an end, a year that everyone will most likely consider as somewhat complicated and unusual, even though the current situation seems to now becoming the new normal. The switch to a new year is generally a good moment to take a step back, and review what happened in the past year, and draw some directions for the coming year.

In this blog post, we’d like to do exactly this for Bootlin, which has seen a number of significant changes this year, as well as a continuation of its usual activities.

We also take this opportunity to wish you all an happy year 2022, and send you our best wishes. May 2022 be full of interesting projects and also be a safe year for everyone.

Here are the main topics that we cover in this lengthy blog post:

Acquisition and recruiting

One major change for Bootlin in 2021 is that the company was acquired by Thomas Petazzoni, former CTO, and Alexandre Belloni. So it’s an internal acquisition, by former employees, meaning that Bootlin has kept the same offering and spirit. Further, Bootlin’s original founder Michael Opdenacker is still in the team, but now as an employee. See our blog post regarding the acquisition, back in February.

In 2021, we also recruited several engineers, bringing significant additional expertise to our team:

  • Thomas Perrot, who joined just before the start of 2021, bringing 10 years of experience in embedded Linux BSP development, with a strong Yocto expertise.
  • Hervé Codina, who joined in March 2021, bringing 20+ years of experience in bare-metal and Linux embedded development.
  • Clément Léger who joined in June 2021, bringing 10 years of experience in Linux kernel development, including the expertise on porting the Linux kernel to a brand new CPU architecture.

We continue to have open positions for embedded Linux engineers, and we plan to hire 3 to 4 engineers in 2022, hiring for the first time engineers located outside of France.

Engineering projects

As is the case every year, our engineering team has been kept busy this year mostly by our engineering projects, all focused on our core expertise of low-level embedded Linux development.

We have selected below a few highlights of our work in 2021, in various areas.

Build systems

Apart from delivering numerous BSPs based on Yocto or Buildroot to our customers, we have also directly contributed to both the Yocto and Buildroot open-source projects.

On the Yocto Project side:

  • Bootlin engineer Michael Opdenacker has become one of the co-maintainers of the official Yocto Project documentation, making numerous improvements and contributions to this documentation. See our blog post on this topic. We will continue this involvement in the Yocto Project documentation in 2022.
  • Bootlin engineer and COO Alexandre Belloni has been active in the build and release engineering effort of the Yocto Project, as a member of the Yocto Project SWAT team. Alexandre has been working directly with the main Yocto Project architect, Richard Purdie, on the review and validation of new contributions. Other Bootlin engineers have also helped in investigating and resolving specific bugs. We will also continue this involvement in the Yocto Project build engineering in 2022.

On the Buildroot side:

  • We have continued our work towards the implementation of top-level parallel build support in Buildroot. Bootlin engineer Hervé Codina has posted several iterations of a patch series bringing a mechanism preventing file overwrites between packages, a requirement for proper top-level parallel build.
  • We implemented and published, in partnership with ST, a Buildroot BR2_EXTERNAL called buildroot-external-st which contains example configurations for the STM32MP1 platforms from ST.
  • We contributed support for hybrid ISO9660 images, supporting in a single image PC platforms based on legacy BIOS, 32-bit UEFI BIOS and 64-bit UEFI BIOS, using the grub2 bootloader.
  • We helped one of our customers reduce their out-of-tree Buildroot patches by upstreaming a number of new Buildroot packages.

Outside of our the Yocto Project and Buildroot, we also ventured into the world of Debian/Ubuntu for embedded systems, by using the ELBE tool, to which we contributed support for building Ubuntu-based images. See our blog post that describes how to use ELBE to automatically build Ubuntu-based images for the Raspberry Pi.

Audio support in Linux

Audio support in the Linux kernel is another area where Bootlin engineers have specific expertise with. Here are some examples of audio related projects we worked on in 2021:

  • Integration of audio support for an i.MX6 platform with a complex dual AD1978 audio codec configuration, with a TDM8 audio interface between the SoC and the audio codecs.
  • Development of a brand new and complete ALSA driver for a new PCIe sound card, based on a FPGA.
  • Integration of audio support for an i.MX8 platform used in the automotive space with a complex audio configuration that involves multiple A2B transceivers through the Analog Devices AD2428 A2B master, Bluetooth audio, and more.

OP-TEE

In 2021, we started working on a major project: adding support for the Microchip SAMA5D2 processor to the OP-TEE project. This project is already well underway, as we have a functional port of OP-TEE, which is now being upstreamed.

As part of this, Bootlin engineer Clément Léger has implemented and contributed a generic clock framework for OP-TEE, which has already been accepted upstream. See our blog post for more details.

Clément also gave a talk at the Embedded Linux Conference 2021 on the topic of OP-TEE, titled OP-TEE: When Linux Loses Control. Slides and video are available.

We expect to continue the upstreaming of the SAMA5D2 support in 2022, and also develop support for additional SAM5D2 hardware capabilities in OP-TEE.

U-Boot extension board manager

In collaboration with the BeagleBoard.org community, we developed and contributed to U-Boot a generic extension board manager. This mechanism allows hardware platforms such as the BeagleBone to automatically detect extension boards that are connected, and apply the Device Tree overlays that provide the hardware description for those extension boards.

This work was covered in detail in the talk given by Bootlin engineer Köry Maincent at the Live Embedded Event in June 2021, see the slides and video.

Modems

In 2021, we had the opportunity to work on several projects that involved 3G/4G/5G modems, strengthening our knowledge of the modem stack in Linux, especially around modem-manager, libmbim and libqmi.

For example, we worked on the support of a Quectel BG95 modem interfaced with a RaspberryPi 4, or the support of a Sierra Wireless EM9190 modem interfaced over PCIe to an NXP i.MX6. The latter was particularly challenging and is still on-going, as the upstream Linux support for PCIe 5G modems is still very recent. We contributed a few fixes in this area.

Secure boot

Secure boot remains an important topic for a growing number of projects, and in 2021, we helped customers with secure boot on several i.MX6 platforms, and on one i.MX8 platform. The Yocto integration of secure boot was also a key aspects in those projects, to get a proper process for signing and verifying all states of the boot process. We also have a few U-Boot contributions in our contribution pipeline related to improving secure boot support. See for example the talk from Thomas Perrot at Live Embedded Event, relating the secure boot setup on i.MX8.

Camera, ISP and video support

We finished 2020 with a lot of on-going contributions to the Linux Video4Linux subsystem, which we had summarized in a blog post early 2021. In particular, our drivers for the OV5568 and OV8865 camera sensors were merged upstream.

In 2021, Bootlin engineer and multimedia expert Paul Kocialkowski continued to work on several multimedia topics. Some of the key projects included:

  • Optimizing the H264 decode → rescale → H264 encode pipeline of one of our customers, on an Allwinner H3 platform. We were able to significantly optimize the pipeline by leveraging the H264 decoder built into the Allwinner processor, for which Paul had written a Linux kernel driver several years ago, and by developing a custom ffmpeg plugin that offloaded the rescaling to the GPU, using the open-source lima support. A fully open-source solution!
  • Developing a proper Linux kernel driver for the Allwinner ISP, with support for debayering and noise filtering. This was a significant challenge as the Allwinner ISP was so far only supported through closed-source binary blobs. We have already submitted a first iteration to the upstream Linux kernel community. See our blog post for more details, as well as the talk given by Paul at the Embedded Linux Conference: slides and video.
  • Improving the Allwinner Linux kernel camera driver to support single buffer capture. This is useful in scenarios where camera sensors are not used to capture a sequence of frames, but just single frames, and the available memory is limited. This is particularly true on platforms such as the Allwinner V3s, which may be limited to just 64MB of RAM. This is going to be submitted upstream soon, as part of our on-going work on the Allwinner camera driver.

NAND and flash support

With Bootlin engineer Miquèl Raynal being a maintainer of the NAND subsystem in Linux and a co-maintainer of the MTD subsystem, it should be no surprise that we have continued to deal with a number of flash memory related projects in 2021:

  • We have brought in mainline the support for several NAND flash controllers:
    • For the Arasan NAND controller, used in some Xilinx processors. See our blog post on this topic.
    • For the ARM Primecell PL35x NAND controller, used in some other Xilinx processors. See our blog post on this topic.
    • For the NAND controller found at least in the the Renesas R-Car Gen3 and RZ/N1 processors.
  • Contributed support for the NV-DDR interface, which is used by some NAND flash chips and controllers to increase the throughput. See our blog post.
  • Continued our work on generalizing ECC support in the MTD subsystem, so that all ECC setups (software ECC, on-die ECC, ECC in the NAND controller, or external ECC engine) can be supported regardless of the NAND interface (serial or parallel). See the talk from Miquèl Raynal, ECC engines given at last year’s ELCE.
  • Improved the TI GPMC NAND controller driver to properly support NAND chip with large pages (larger than 4KB).

ADC/IIO support

We’ve helped a few customers with Linux kernel support for ADC devices, namely:

  • Extend the support for the MAX1027 family of ADCs, with support for external triggers
  • Bring support for the ADC found in TI AM437x processors

All of these were contributed to the upstream Linux kernel, Miquèl Raynal also wrote a extensive blog post on various aspects of the IIO subsystem and has taken the opportunity of these projects to also improve/clarify various aspects of the IIO core in a recent patch series.

Networking

Networking support in the Linux kernel is also one area where Bootlin is very active. Here are some key projects we worked on in 2021, some of them being on-going with additional work expected in 2022:

  • We implemented support for PTP offloading for the Qualcomm AR803X PHY.
  • We started working on QUSGMII support in Linux, a new standard that allows PTP time-stamps to be included directly on the preamble of QSGMII frames.
  • We started working on the 802.15.4 stack in the Linux kernel, with our initial step being support for passive scanning.
  • We implemented mqprio support in the mvneta Linux kernel driver, used for some Marvell platforms. mqprio is a queuing discipline that allows mapping traffic flows to hardware queue ranges using priorities and a configurable priority to traffic class mapping.
  • We implemented Frame DMA support in the Ocelot Ethernet switch driver, significantly improving the performance of frame injection/extraction by the CPU into/from the switch traffic.
  • We developed proper SFP support in Linux and U-Boot, with dynamic reconfiguration (in Linux only), for a customer using the Zynq 7000 platform and a complex network setup.

BSP development

Many of our projects are obviously related to the development of update of complete Linux BSP for our customers (bootloader, Linux kernel, custom embedded Linux distribution). Here are a few examples:

  • Development of a brand new U-Boot, Linux and Yocto based BSP to migrate an existing product running Windows CE on a ST Spear320 processor to Linux. This sort of development proved to be challenging as the Spear320 support in both U-Boot and Linux is close to be abandoned (and in fact has since then been removed from U-Boot upstream). We hope to be able to contribute to improve the upstream Spear320 support in 2022.
  • Migration of an AM335x/Buildroot based BSP to newer Linux kernel and Buildroot releases, for a customer in the healthcare industry
  • On-going migration of an i.MX6 BSP from an old kernel release and a custom build-system to recent versions of U-Boot and Linux as well as a proper standardized Yocto Project based Linux distribution. This project presents some interesting challenges as it uses only one of the two Cortex-A9 cores to run Linux, the other one runs a bare-metal application, and we will also migrate this to a proper usage of the remoteproc and rpmsg mechanisms.
  • We worked with several customers on STM32MP1 platforms, helping with porting on new platforms, extending the Device Tree and device drivers, developing custom Yocto-based or Buildroot-based distributions. STM32MP1 is definitely becoming a popular platform for a number of new projects.
  • We also worked with several customers on custom platforms based on the RasberryPi Compute Module, doing Device Tree configuration/tweaking and Yocto integration.

Over-the-Air update integration

We continued to help our customers with the integration of Over-The-Air update solutions in their embedded Linux systems. A few examples:

  • We integrated RAUC for an i.MX6 platform, using the Barebox bootloader and Yocto Project based distribution. Bootlin engineer Kamel Bouhara wrote a detailed blog post on this topic, as well as the talk from Kamel at Live Embedded Event
  • We integrated the Azure Device Update for IoT Hub, using the U-Boot bootloader on a RaspberryPi CM4 platform, also with a Yocto Project based distribution. Internally, the Device Update for IoT Hub is based on swupdate
  • As part of a migration of an existing embedded product based on Debian to a Yocto-based distribution, we are integrating Mender.

Crédit Impôt Recherche

For our French customers, another important milestone achieved by Bootlin in 2021 is the delivery of our Crédit Impôt Recherche agreement, which allows our French customers to benefit from tax incentives on research and development activities done by Bootlin for their projects. See our blog post for more details.

Training

With the COVID19 still making travel conditions difficult and uncertain, most of our training activity in 2021 was dedicated to on-line training courses. Indeed, 69 out of our 72 training sessions were delivered online this year. In total, we delivered our training courses to 906 engineers in 2021.

In 2021, we published two new training courses:

Just like all our other training courses, the complete training materials for those new courses are freely available, distributed under the CC-BY-SA license.

Another major event in 2021 was our work to get the French Qualiopi certification, which proves the quality of our training organization and processes. As part of this, we have improved several aspects of our training courses, mainly regarding feedback collection and handling as well as the evaluation of the participants.

In 2022, we expect to at least:

  • Improve how our online course are delivered, by ensuring more participants can do the practical labs by themselves, which is an important part of the learning process
  • Publish at least one more training course. We already have plans for a course on a topic that we think will be very relevant to many embedded Linux engineers. Stay tuned for updates on this!
  • Have additional capacity to deliver our training courses, which are seeing significant demand.

For more details about our training offering, see our training page, which details our dedicated on-line and on-site sessions as well as our public on-line sessions.

Contributions

In Bootlin continued and strong open-source focus, we once again contributed to different open-source projects in 2021:

  • Linux kernel. The best summaries are our blog posts about our contributions to Linux 5.10, Linux 5.11, Linux 5.12, Linux 5.13, as well as Linux 5.14 and 5.15. Some of our significant contributions: huge effort on ECC engine support in the MTD subsystem, rv3032 RTC driver, support for new MIPS platforms from Microchip, a Simple Audio Mux driver, major work on timer/TCB support on Microchip ARM platforms, new I3C master controller driver for the Silvaco I3C IP, new drivers for the OV5568 and OV8865 camera sensors, NAND controller drivers for the Arasan, PL35x and Renesas IPs, enabling of ADC support on TI AM437x.
  • U-Boot. Our biggest contribution has been the extension board manager, which is described earlier in this blog post. We also contributed various small fixes and improvements.
  • OP-TEE. We contributed a generic clock framework, and the support for the SAMA5D2 clock tree and TRNG driver. So far 55 commits from Bootlin have been integrated in OP-TEE.
  • Buildroot. We contributed a total of 257 patches. The main contributions are in the area of tooling to list security vulnerabilities in Buildroot packages, support for Bootlin external toolchains, improved SELinux support, support for the Beagle-V RISC-V platform, a good number of new packages, support for hybrid ISO9660 images. In addition, Thomas Petazzoni continued his work as a co-maintainer of the project: Thomas has reviewed and merged close to 2000 patches from Buildroot contributors throughout 2021.
  • Yocto Project. As outlined above in this blog, we did major contributions to the Yocto Project, with Michael Opdenacker becoming co-maintainer of the Yocto Project documentation, and Alexandre Belloni being involved in the build and release engineering effort.
  • Linux Test Project. We fixed a number of issues in LTP tests that prevented from using LTP in embedded-oriented systems, such as the ones that can be generated using the Yocto Project. See our blog post for more details.
  • Our training materials, which are all freely available, have seen no less than 872 commits. These includes updates to our existing training courses, but also our new Real-Time Linux with PREEMPT_RT training course.
  • Our freely available toolchains have also been improved and updated. See our blog post.
  • We continued to maintain our very popular Elixir code indexing tool.

Conferences

Here are the talks that we presented this year, at various virtual events:

  • FOSDEM 2021
    • Networking Performance in the Linux Kernel, Getting the most out of the Hardware, by Maxime Chevallier. Slides and video.
    • Embedded Linux from scratch in 45 minutes, on RISC-V, by Michael Opdenacker. slides and video.
  • Live Embedded Event
    • Security vulnerability tracking tools in Buildroot, by Thomas Petazzoni. Slides and video.
    • Secure boot in embedded Linux systems, by Thomas Perrot. Slides and video.
    • Understanding U-Boot Falcon Mode, by Michael Opdenacker. Slides and video.
    • Device Tree overlays and U-Boot extension board management, by Köry Maincent. Slides and video.
    • Getting started with RAUC, by Kamel Bouhara. Slides and video.
  • Embedded Linux Conference
    • I3C in tomorrow’s design, by Miquèl Raynal. Slides and video.
    • Embedded Linux nuggets found in Buildroot package Eldorado, by Michael Opdenacker. Slides and video.
    • OP-TEE: When Linux Loses Control, by Clément Léger. Slides and video.
    • Advanced Camera Support on Allwinner SoCs with Mainline Linux, by Paul Kocialkowski. Slides and video.
  • A webinar organized in partnership with ST, Device Tree 101, by Thomas Petazzoni. Slides and video.
  • A webinar organized in partnership with Microchip, Improving Linux Boot Time in Your Embedded Application, with the participation of Thomas Petazzoni. Link.

Bootlin welcomes Clément Léger in its team

Welcome on board!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.

See Clément Léger’s page on our site, as well as the rest of our team.

Bootlin acquired by Bootlin CTO Thomas Petazzoni and engineer Alexandre Belloni

We are happy to announce that Bootlin (formerly Free Electrons) has been acquired by two of its employees, Thomas Petazzoni and Alexandre Belloni.

Bootlin was founded in 2004 by Michael Opdenacker, with the goal of promoting the use of Linux and Free Software in embedded systems worldwide.

Thomas Petazzoni joined Bootlin in 2008, as the first employee. Thomas expanded the company offering by starting an engineering services activity, contributed to the growth of the company and took a CTO position. Thomas has a strong technical, open-source and embedded Linux background: he is the co-maintainer of the Buildroot project, has contributed to the Linux kernel, spoke at multiple international conferences and is the member of several embedded Linux conferences program committees. As Bootlin CTO, Thomas has been in charge of the complete engineering services activity: communication, sales, customer interaction, project management, scheduling and review.

Alexandre Belloni joined Bootlin in 2013, as an embedded Linux engineer. Alexandre has a deep open-source and technical background as well: he is the maintainer of multiple subsystems in the Linux kernel to which he has made significant contributions, and is an expert of the Yocto Project. He has been working closely with Thomas for many years in expanding and managing the engineering services activity.

As part of this acquisition, Thomas Petazzoni will become Bootlin’s CEO, while Alexandre Belloni will take the role of Bootlin’s COO. Michael Opdenacker will stay within Bootlin as an embedded Linux engineer and trainer.

“This acquisition is a logical continuation of my involvement in Bootlin and in the broader embedded Linux community” said Bootlin’s CEO Thomas Petazzoni, who added “I am proud to be leading the excellent engineering team at Bootlin, who will continue to offer the same training and engineering expertise to its customers worldwide”.

Alexandre Belloni, Bootlin’s COO, continued: “with two owners having both a strong technical background and a deep involvement in the open-source community, we intend to continue driving Bootlin with the same core values: technical excellence, open-source contribution and knowledge sharing”

Michael Opdenacker, Bootlin’s founder and former CEO, concluded: “Maria Llavata and I, after more than ten years of dedication to Bootlin’s customers and to the worldwide community of embedded Linux users and developers, are really happy to hand over the baton to Alexandre and Thomas, who have all the energy and enthusiasm needed to continue, expand and renew this beautiful adventure. I believe that Bootlin still has many new things to offer to the world, the fact that I am still on board is a proof of our trust in its new leadership.”