News – Page 4 – Bootlin

Embedded Linux and kernel engineer job openings

We’re getting busier than ever! Bootlin is looking for developers:

With experience developing embedded Linux systems
With experience developing device drivers for the Linux kernel, and porting Linux on new hardware. See our contributions to the mainline Linux kernel!
With technical writing skills and an interest for training

We need to fill at least 2 open positions in the next months, and more will follow in 2014.

Newly graduated engineers are welcome too, provided they already have experience in the above technical fields or with Free Software development.

This time, we are looking for people who will be able to join one of our offices in France (Toulouse or Avignon), to strengthen our engineering teams there.

Toulouse is a dynamic city with lots of high-tech and embedded systems companies in particular. Our office in Colomiers can easily be reached by train from downtown Toulouse if you wish to settle there. You would be working with Maxime Ripard and our CTO Thomas Petazzoni.
Our main office is settled in Orange in the heart of the Provence region, close to Avignon, a smaller but dynamic city too. It enjoys a sunny climate and the proximity of the Alps and the Mediterranean sea. Accommodation is very affordable and there are no traffic issues! You would be working with our founder Michael Opdenacker and of course remotely with the rest of the engineering team. In particular, we are interested in foreign engineers who could help us develop our services in their home countries.

If you are unable to relocate this time, don’t hesitate to contact us anyway. Depending on your profile and experience, we are still planning to open home based jobs in a few months or years from now.

If you are interested in these positions, here are nice opportunities to meet us in the next weeks:

Kernel Recipes, Paris, Sep. 24-25, 2013
Embedded Linux Conference Europe, Edinburgh, Oct. 24-25, 2013

See a full description and details about how to contact us.

Bootlin Quarterly – 2013 Q1

The Bootlin team wishes you a Happy New Year for 2013, with success in your professional and personal projects, and in contributing to other people’s lives. We are taking this opportunity to give some news about Bootlin.

In 2012, Bootlin continued to work on multiple development projects. The main difference with 2011 is that the projects were much longer. Here are the most important ones:

Linux kernel code development, adding and maintaining support for Marvell Armada 370 and Armada XP ARM SoCs in the mainline Linux kernel. Months of engineering work! Our commits appear on git.kernel.org.
Linux kernel code development and toolchain work on a new i.MX28 computer-on-module from Crystalfontz, adding support for this system to the mainline Linux kernel. See the project page on Kickstarter!
Build system integration, bootloader and kernel driver development, system update mechanism improvements, and general embedded Linux development work.
Kernel driver development and upstreaming for AT91 analog to digital converters.
Boot time optimization and power management audit on a MIPS based point of sales terminal
Boot time reduction project on a ARM based point-of-sales development kit.
Embedded Linux system integration, development and support.

Through contract work or through direct contributions, 2012 gave us multiple opportunities to contribute to open-source projects, in particular:

195 patches to the Linux kernel, plus the ones which have been accepted by maintainers but haven’t been included by Linus Torvalds yet. See git.kernel.org for details.
448 patches to the Buildroot build system. See git.buildroot.net for details.
9 patches to the U-boot bootloader.
7 patches to the Barebox bootloader. See git.penguntronix.de for details.

By the way, here’s the git command that you can run in the corresponding repositories to count the commits by yourself:

git shortlog --no-merges -sn --author your-domain --since="01/01/2012" --until="12/31/2012"

We gave multiple sessions of our Embedded Linux system development and Linux kernel and driver development courses. We have also completed migrating our training materials from the Open Document Format to LaTeX, and their sources are now available on our public git server, making it much easier to follow changes and contribute to them.

We also created a new Android system development course and delivered multiple sessions of it. It is a four days training course to understand the Android system architecture, how to build and customize an Android system for a given hardware platform, and how to extend the Android platform to take new hardware devices into account.

As in the previous years, we also gave presentations at international conferences:

IIO, a new subsystem (FOSDEM, Brussels, February 2012)
Qt for non graphical apps (FOSDEM, Brussels, February 2012)
Buildroot: a nice, simple and efficient embedded Linux build system (Embedded Linux Conference, San Francisco, February 2012)
Buildroot: a nice, simple and efficient embedded Linux build system (Libre Software Meeting, Geneva, July 2012)
Buildroot workshop (Libre Software Meeting, Geneva, July 2012)
Linux kernel: consolidation in the ARM architecture support (Libre Software Meeting, Geneva, July 2012)
A look through the Android stack (Libre Software Meeting, Geneva, July 2012)
Your new ARM SoC Linux support check-list (Embedded Linux Conference Europe, Barcelona, November 2012)

Also attending these conferences, the Bootlin team also recorded and published videos of the talks:

Thanks to their contributions to the mainline Linux kernel on the ARM platform, Gregory Clement and Thomas Petazzoni have also been invited to the ARM minisummit at the Linux kernel summit in San Jose in August. They were involved in decision making for the next evolutions of the Linux kernel on the ARM architecture.

We also organized and participated to two “Buildroot developer days” events, one in Brussels in February after Fosdem, and one in Barcelona in November after ELC Europe.

We also continued to participate to the development of the community of Linaro, an engineering organization working on improving Linux on the ARM platform. Note that this involvement is now over, allowing Michael Opdenacker to get back to more technical projects.

Now, let’s talk about our plans for 2013.

We plan to continue to hire more engineers to meet growing demand for our development and training services. In particular, a new engineer is joining us in March.

We are also organizing several public training sessions in France, which dates are now available:

Android system development, Toulouse, Apr. 2-5 (French)
Embedded Linux kernel and driver development, Toulouse, Apr. 8-12 (French)
Embedded Linux system development, Toulouse, Jun. 10-14 (French)
Embedded Linux kernel and driver development, Avignon, Jun. 10-14
Android system development, Toulouse, Jun. 18-21
Embedded Linux system development, Avignon, Oct. 7-11

We also plan to announce several new training sessions. Being very busy with projects in 2012, we haven’t had time to make progress in the plans we announced one year ago:

Git training. A two day training session to clearly understand how to use the Git distributed version control system, both for internal projects and for contribution to open-source projects.
Linux kernel debugging, tracing and performance analysis course. A one to two day session to trace kernel execution, investigate bugs and performance issues.
Boot time reduction training. A one to two day workshop to learn and master the methodology and techniques to make your embedded Linux systems boot faster.

As we are only in the very early stages of planning and preparing these courses, don’t hesitate to take the opportunity to contact us to let us know your expectations and influence their contents, in case you are interested in such courses.

We will also continue to participate to the key technical conferences. In particular, Bootlin engineers will be present at the Android Builders Summit and the Embedded Linux Conference in San Francisco, and at Embedded Linux Conference Europe in Edinburgh in October. This participation to conferences allows Bootlin engineers to remain up-to-date with the latest developments in the embedded Linux area and to create useful contacts in the community. Do not hesitate to go to such conferences, develop your technical knowledge and to take the opportunity to meet us there!

Last but not least, we will try harder to really write this newsletter every quarter. In 2012, we were so busy with projects that we didn’t manage to release newsletters for Q3 and Q4.

You can follow Bootlin news by reading our blog (31 articles in 2012) and by following our quick news on Twitter.

Again, Happy New Year!

The Bootlin team.

Software patents: letter to European MPs

The software patent threat is back in the European Union, through the “Unitary Patent” project currently reviewed by the Legal Affairs Committee (JURI) of the European Parliament. In a few words, the idea is to let the European Patent Office (EPO) define what can be patented and what cannot be. The problem is the EPO is well known for supporting software patents, and in addition, there is no democratic control over it.

You will find more details on the unitary-patent.eu and on the Stop Software Patents websites.

After the latest battles against software patents in 2005, it was time for me to take my pen again and try to warn our representatives about the threats from software patents. The below letter was sent last week to each of the JURI committee, in English or in French version.

It doesn’t constitute any in-depth legal study on software patents, because I am only an engineer, without any advanced legal knowledge. It is rather a testimonial of my worries about these patents. These worries are justified by multiple deviances that software patents caused over the years in the whole world, and by the constant pressure faced by our representatives to make such patents legal in the European Union.

It may not be too late to write to your representatives at the European Parliament, but in any case, it isn’t too late to sign the petition that many companies and individuals already signed.

Dear Member of the European Parliament,

I am the creator and General Manager of Bootlin, a young European engineering company specializing in embedded software, supporting worldwide companies in designing embedded systems, on a rapidly growing market.

It’s the availability of a great number of Open-Source building blocks that allowed our company to experience continuous growth since its inception in 2004. Many industrial and consumer electronics products are designed with these building blocks. These blocks are developed by a vibrant community of software developers in the whole world, which our company participates to.

This dynamism would have been reduced if software patents had been legal in the E.U., as they are in the U.S.A. and in Japan. Because of their great number and because they are often trivial, such patents constitute a real “minefield” for inventors creating software and systems embedding software. For a company with limited resources, it is indeed impossible to make sure that the ideas that they implement by programming, or the software components that they reuse, do not step on a method already patented by someone else. The creator of an innovative product including software then runs the risk of having his/her investment ruined by a bigger competitor threatened by this invention. This competitor, if it owns a sufficiently big patent pool, could always find a trivial software patent that the competing product would infringe, and have the distribution of this product stopped. Another danger comes from “Patent troll” companies that do not create any product and only hunt for companies with products that could that infringe the patents they own.

We are also worried by the fact that at least in the software industry, patents are deviated from their primary purpose of fostering innovation. It is the exact opposite that happens, and it seems that patents today are only instruments for giant corporations to fight against competitors, big or small, and to prevent them from distributing competing products. In addition, the first patents granted a temporary monopoly in exchange for revealing a secret manufacturing process. For many software patents, like the famous “double click” patent owned by Microsoft, there is no more secret to reveal, as their effects are very easy to reproduce. However, we continue to grant a monopoly to their owners.

Therefore, our company is worried about the current plans to set up a unitary patent with a flanking unified patent court.

We are concerned that the regulation on the unitary patent, as agreed in December 2011 by the negotiators of the Council, the Commission, and the Committee on Legal Affairs of the European Parliament, leaves any and every issue on the limits of patentability to the European Patent Office (EPO)’s case law, without any democratic control or review by an independent court.

However, in spite of the rejection of software patentability by the European Parliament, through its vote on September 24th, 2003 and July 6th, 2005, the EPO continued to grant software patents, under the deceiving term of “computer-implemented inventions”. That’s perhaps because the EPO has a financial interest in granting as many patents as possible, and therefore fuel an increase in the number of litigation cases, for the profit of attorney offices but discouraging innovation, which is the main driver for our modern economy.

The regulation on the unitary patent is an opportunity for the EU legislators to harmonize substantive patent law in the EU institutional and jurisdictional framework, and to put an end to the EPO’s self-motivated practices extending the realm of patentability to software. Failing to do so, this unitary patent will do more harm than good to the EU ICT firms.

For these reasons, we urge MEPs to adopt amendments which clearly state that the EPO’s decisions are subject to a review from the Court of Justice of the European Union, and which reaffirm the rejection of software patentability, as voted by the European Parliament.

Don’t hesitate to contact me if you wish.

Kind regards,

Michael Opdenacker

Embedded Linux, kernel and Android engineer job openings (2012)

Home based jobs in Europe or at one of our offices in France

Penguin works To meet increasing demand for its Embedded Linux, kernel and Android engineering services, Bootlin is looking for developers:

With experience developing embedded Linux systems
With experience developing device drivers for the Linux kernel, and porting Linux on new hardware
With visible contributions to Free Software used in embedded systems, such as the Linux kernel, BusyBox, build systems, compilers…
With technical writing skills and an interest for training

Experience with Android low-level development, allowing to teach our Android System Development course would also be a strong advantage, though not mandatory.

A first possibility is be hired in France. Being able to join one of our offices in France (Toulouse or Orange) will be an advantage, but working from home in other parts of France will be possible too. We are also open to people living in a country with the Euro currency, working from home, and able to work as full time contractors.

We have a first opening that we would like to fill between September and December 2012. If demand continues to grow, we expect to hire more engineers with the same profile in the following months. We also hope to expand the home based jobs to countries outside Europe in the next years, but it will take a bit more time.

See our careers page for a full description.

Bootlin Quarterly – 2012 Q2

This is the second Bootlin newsletter for 2012. We are happy to share with you the latest news about our projects, training courses and contributions.

New “Android system development” training

As announced in our previous newsletter, we have created a new Android system development training course.

This course targets engineers who need to develop embedded systems with Google Android. In four days, through theory and practical labs, the course makes you familiar with compiling and booting Android, with adapting Android to support a new embedded board (assuming that it is already supported by the Linux kernel), and with building a real system through accessing specific hardware, customizing the filesystem and using debugging techniques. More details and the complete agenda.

The first public session of this training will take place on June 11-14 2012 in Toulouse, France (session taught in English). There are still seats available for this session.

We will start giving on-site sessions of this course in July 2012. Do not hesitate to contact us if you want to organize on-site sessions.

Opening our training materials source code

Since Bootlin’screation in 2004, we have been releasing our training materials under the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license, a free license that allows anyone to share, improve and use our embedded Linux and Linux kernel training materials. Since that time, our training materials were available as PDF files, and as OpenDocument files for the source code, but we were only updating their online version from time to time.

Now, we are proud to announce that our training materials are being converted to the LaTeX language, and their latest version is available at any time from our public Git repository.

For the moment, our embedded Linux slides have been published (about 500 slides) in this Git repository, as well as the instructions for the practical sessions of our embedded Linux and Linux kernel courses. In the near future, we will also publish in LaTeX the slides of our Linux kernel training (which remain available under PDF and OpenDocument formats) as well as the materials of our new “Android system development” course.

The creation of this public Git repository is a strong sign of our commitment for open training materials.

The LaTeX format and the public Git repository now make it easy for everyone to follow updates on our materials, to keep one’s knowledge up to date, and even to teach a training session using our materials (commercial use of our materials is welcome, as it helps to spread knowledge about Free and Open Source Software for embedded systems).

Upcoming public training sessions

Our next public training sessions dates and locations are:

Embedded Linux kernel and driver development
June, 4-8 2012
Toulouse, France
Session given in French
Details
Android system development
June, 11-14 2012
Toulouse, France
Session given in English
Embedded Linux system development
June, 18-22 2012
Avignon, France
Session given in French
Details
Embedded Linux kernel and driver development
July 2-6, 2012
Avignon, France
Session given in French
Details
Embedded Linux kernel and driver development
October, 8-12 2012
Avignon, France
Session given in English
Details
Embedded Linux system development
October, 15-19 2012
Toulouse, France
Session given in French
Details
Embedded Linux system development
December, 3-7 2012
Avignon, France
Session given in English
Details
Embedded Linux system development
February, 4-8 2013
Lyon, France
Session given in French
Details

Projects

Since the beginning of the year, we have been involved in the following projects for various customers:

Boot time optimization and power management evaluation for a MIPS-based platform used in a payment terminal;
Filesystem size optimization, embedded Linux build system integration, Ethernet PHY driver development for an AT91 ARM platform used in satellite video processing;
Embedded Linux build system integration and generic embedded Linux debugging and support for an AT91 ARM platform used as a gateway between medical devices;
Starting in April, we will be working with a major ARM SoC vendor to help mainlining support for their latest SoC in the official Linux kernel sources;
Continued the creation of materials for our new “Android system development” course.
Continued our work on the Linux kernel driver for the Analog-to-Digital converters of the AT91 ARM SoC (see ‘Contributions’, below);
Continued our work on real-time Linux evaluation on AT91 ARM SoC (see ‘Contributions’, below.).

Career opportunities

Bootlin is looking for a kernel developer in the the French Riviera, to be hired with a permanent contract. The job is open to English speaking people who do not speak French, but are ready to settle in the area of Nice, and be hired through a French contract. See details.

Conferences and contributions

Embedded Linux Conference and Android Builders Summit

Three engineers of Bootlin attended the Embedded Linux Conference 2012 and Android Builders Summit 2012 in Redwood Shores, near San Francisco in California, on February. This strong participation of our engineers to technical conferences is a key factor to make sure we remain up to date on embedded Linux technologies and keep a close contact with the community.

During the conference, we have published daily reports about the various talks that we thought were interesting:

After the conference, we also posted videos of the talks:

Our scripts to encode videos to the royalty-free VP8 codec and add a title sequence to the videos are now available on on our public git server.

At this conference, our engineer Thomas Petazzoni has given a talk titled “Buildroot, a nice, simple and efficient embedded Linux build system”. Here are the slides and the video.

FOSDEM conference

Two of our engineers participated to the FOSDEM conference, a community-driven open-source conference, in early February.

Our engineer Maxime Ripard gave a talk on his work around the IIO kernel subsystem, which he used to write an ADC driver for the AT91 SoC. Here are the slides.

Our engineer Thomas Petazzoni gave a talk about “Using Qt for non-graphical applications”. Here are the slides.

AT91 Analog-to-Digital converter drivers

Details about the driver for the AT91 Analog-to-Digital converters driver written by Maxime Ripard from Bootlin have been published on the Atmel Linux4Sam wiki. This driver relies on the IIO framework, and we are in the process of getting this driver merged upstream. See the Atmel Linux4Sam wiki page.

Real-time Linux benchmarks

A report of extensive real-time benchmarks conducted by Gregory Clement from Bootlin on AT91 platforms has been published on the Atmel Linux4Sam Wiki. This report compares a vanilla Linux kernel, the PREEMPT-RT patches and the Xenomai co-kernel approach through timer-based and GPIO-based benchmarks. See the Atmel Linux4Sam wiki page.

Buildroot

Bootlin’sinvolvement in Buildroot is still strong:

Maxime Ripard and Thomas Petazzoni participated to the Buildroot Developer Day organized in Brussels before the FOSDEM conference. A report of this meeting, which gathered several other Buildroot developers, is available at the Buildroot mailing list archives.
Since the beginning of the year, Thomas Petazzoni has contributed 64 patches that have been merged: support for the LTT-ng Linux tracing solution, support to represent host utilities in the menuconfig, many updates and fixes to external toolchain support and many other fixes.
In the same time-frame, Maxime Ripard has contributed 13 patches that have been merged: support for systemd, improvements to the package infrastructure and various fixes.
Thomas Petazzoni has implemented a Web interface that publicly shows the result of our random configuration builds, available at http://autobuild.buildroot.org. The Buildroot community is doing random configuration builds 24/7 on three machines, with various configurations. This Web interface collects the build results and sends a summary every day on the Buildroot mailing-list. This has already allowed to fix many build issues, and will help to improve Buildroot’s quality in the future.

Linux kernel course

Participants to our Embedded Linux kernel and driver development course have also started contributing to the Linux kernel sources during the course itself. Here are the patches which have been merged so far:

During our git lab, instead of asking people to make dummy code changes, we ask them to make real improvements to the Linux sources, and send them for real to the right maintainers and mailing lists. This way, people get a better understanding of how they can interact with the Linux kernel developers to merge their changes and contributions.

See our slides and practical lab instructions for our git lectures and lab.

Blog posts

Bootlin has published several blog posts:

Buildroot Developer Day, Brussels edition
Announcing our Android system development training
Bootlin at FOSDEM: two talks and video recording
Bootlin at the Android Builders Summit and the Embedded Linux Conference: one talk and video recording
HOWTO – Mailing lists with Mailman on Ubuntu 10.04
Our blog posts on Android Builders Summit and Embedded Linux Conference listed previously
Linux on ARM: xz kernel decompression benchmarks
How to boot an uncompressed Linux kernel on ARM
Android gdbclient command
A new tool to ease kernel maintainer life
Experiment with Yocto
Report on extensive real-time Linux benchmarks on AT91
Linux kernel engineer job in Nice

You can follow Bootlin’snews by reading our blog and by following our quick news on Twitter.

By the way, the right column of the Bootlin blog now lists the most popular posts and pages. This can help you to find useful content that you may have missed.

Bootlin remains available to help you in your embedded Linux projects, either through its development and support services or through its training sessions. Do not hesitate to contact us!

Gregory, Maria, Maxime, Michael and Thomas – Bootlin

Linux kernel engineer job in Nice

Penguin works Bootlin is looking for a embedded Linux and kernel engineer in the area of Nice in France (on the French Riviera). The contract will be home based, but will also involve working at customer locations in the same area, possibly for long periods of time.

A detailed job description is available on our careers page.

For this particular job opening, we absolutely need someone with prior experience with kernel and driver development, and contributions to the official Linux kernel sources will be a strong advantage. This is because a customer of ours is looking for an engineer to develop new drivers and port the Linux kernel to pre-silicon and silicon platforms.

Once we find a candidate with the expected skills and profile, and once the customer agrees to contract this person for this initial project, the engineer will be hired by Bootlin under a permanent contract, and will work on the customer site for at least 6 months.

Once the initial assignment is over, our engineer will continue to work on projects for other Bootlin customers, and will also give embedded Linux and kernel training sessions to customers throughout the world.

Note that this position is open to people who do not speak French, but are ready to settle in the French Riviera and to be hired through a French contract.

If you are interested in this position, see our job description for details about how to apply.

New quarterly newsletter: 2011 report, best wishes and 2012 plans

The Bootlin team wishes you a Happy New Year 2012 and all the best for your professional and personal projects. We are taking this opportunity to give some news about Bootlin.

In 2011, Bootlin has:

Worked on multiple development projects for various customers. Amongst the most important ones:

development of an embedded Linux system and Qt-based application for a RFID/GSM device based on the AT91 ARM processor
boot time reduction on a MIPS-based point-of-sale system, by improving the embedded Linux system integration
development of an embedded Linux system for an AT91-based device for the medical field (kernel and bootloader adaptation, system integration, application porting)
porting of the PREEMPT_RT patch set to the 2.6.32 kernel delivered by Texas Instruments
developed the driver for the Analog to Digital converters built-in the AT91 processors
conducted a real-time performance analysis of the PREEMPT_RT and Xenomai solutions on AT91 based processors
developed an Ubuntu-based embedded system on a BeagleBoard, for image acquisition and analysis with OpenCV
boot time reduction on an i.MX-based device, with major bootloader modifications
developed a demonstration system for a racing car control panel on a AT91-based device, with a Qt graphical application

Helped customers solve various embedded Linux related problems, through the support provided by Bootlin engineers

Contributed to various open-source projects:

167 patches to the Buildroot build system
6 patches to the Linux kernel, and more are coming with the mainlining of our AT91 ADC driver
6 patches to the Barebox bootloader
4 patches to the U-Boot bootloader
3 patches to the LTT-ng project

Given multiple sessions of our Embedded Linux system development and Linux kernel and driver development courses. The materials of these courses are being constantly updated and are still freely available under a Creative Commons license.

Prepared materials for a new Android system development course. A four days training session to understand the Android system architecture, how to build and customize an Android system for a given hardware platform, how to extend the Android platform to take new hardware devices into account. A first public session will be organized in June in Toulouse.

Switched the hardware platform used in our Embedded Linux system development course from the aging Calao USB-A9263 platform (AT91-based) to the much more powerful IGEPv2 platform from ISEE (OMAP3-based), offering more possibilities to improve our course.

Hired a new engineer, Maxime Ripard, with Android and embedded Linux experience, and created a new office in Toulouse, France.

Moved its headquarters to Orange, France. While we remain reasonably close the Nice area, where we started, we get closer to other parts of France.

Given two presentations at the Embedded Linux Conference Europe in Prague (Using Buildroot for real projects and Qt for non-graphical applications), gave one presentation on boot time reduction at the GENIVI meeting in Dublin, and gave five editions of an embedded Linux introduction seminar in France.

Attended multiple conferences, for which the Bootlin team also recorded and published videos of the talks:

Participated to the development of the community of Linaro, an engineering organization working on improving Linux on the ARM platform. In addition to making sure that Linaro has all the infrastructure required to nurture a community of developers and users, we also supported Linaro release users on AskLinaro.

In 2012, we expect to:

Work on more development projects in the field of kernel porting, boot time reduction, power management and embedded Linux system integration.

Announce several new training sessions:

Git training. A two days training session to clearly understand how to use the Git distributed version control system, both for internal projects and for contribution to open-source projects.
Advanced Buildroot training. A three days training session to get a clear and detailed understanding of the Buildroot embedded Linux build system: how to add new packages, how to customize it to generate the embedded Linux system for a given hardware platform.

As we are currently preparing those courses, we are definitely interested in having feedback. Do not hesitate to contact us with your ideas and needs about those topics.

Switch our Linux kernel and driver development course to an OMAP3-based platform, and expand it to the development of a driver for an I2C-attached device.

Convert our training materials to a text source format (LaTeX), and maintain them in a public git tree, making it easier to contribute to them and to follow changes between between versions.

Participate to multiple conferences. Bootlin will be present at the FOSDEM in Brussels in February, at the Android Builders Summit and the Embedded Linux Conference in San Francisco in February, and also at the Embedded Linux Conference Europe in Barcelona in October. This participation to conferences allows Bootlin engineers to remain up-to-date with the latest developments in the embedded Linux area and to create useful contacts in the community.

You can follow Bootlin news by reading our blog (24 articles in 2011) and by following our quick news on Twitter.

Bootlin remains available to help you in your embedded Linux projects, either through its development and support services or through its training sessions. Do not hesitate to contact us!

Best regards, and again, Happy New Year 2012!

Gregory, Maria, Maxime, Michael and Thomas – Bootlin

Back from Embedded Linux Conference Europe 2011

As we announced in a previous blog post, a large part of the Bootlin team attended the 2011 edition of the Embedded Linux Conference Europe in Prague last week.

This was the first european edition of the conference to last three days, and this was much appreciated as it gave the opportunity to attend a lot more conferences and to spend more time talking with developers of the community. My colleagues Michael Opdenacker and Maxime Ripard as well as myself really enjoyed this conference. It really allows to connect with members of the community, learn a lot of new things, and bring home a huge motivation to work on various projects. Despite a few marketing-oriented keynotes, the conference has kept its highly-technical profile, which is great.

We have recorded all the talks of the three tracks of the Embedded Linux Conference Europe (unfortunately, there wasn’t a similar video crew for the LinuxCon Europe conference which was taking place at the same time). Many of those videos should have a much higher audio quality than what we had in the past, since we could capture the audio directly for the conference room sound system. Unfortunately, one of our camcorders generates a loud noise when connected both to the audio system of the conference room and to the power adapter (this noise disappears when the camcorder is on battery). Therefore, not all conferences could be recorded with this improved audio quality. The encoding and upload of those videos has started on Sunday evening, just a few hours after landing in Toulouse when coming back from ELCE. The process is running 24/24 on two machines in parallel, and we therefore hope to be able to provide those videos online by the end of the week, or at worst at the beginning of next week.

Kernel Developer Panel. From left to right: Linus Torvalds, Paul McKenney, Alan Cox, Thomas Gleixner and the moderator, Lennart Poettring

As we also announced, I gave two talks at this Embedded Linux Conference Europe event. One on Buildroot, titled Using Buildroot for real projects, which slides are available on the elinux.org site. More than 50 persons attended the conference which seems to indicate that there is interest around Buildroot. I had a few questions but unfortunately had to stop the conference after just 2/3 questions since I had exhausted my time slot. My second conference was titled Qt for non-graphical applications, and the slides are also available on the elinux.org site. About 45-50 persons attended the conference and in this case as well, I had to speak quite fast to make the 40+ slides discussion fit within the time slot allocated for the conference, which gave only the time for a few questions at the end. Generally speaking, these talks have attracted a nice number of attendees compared to many other talks I’ve seen, so it seems that all the preparation work was not done needlessly.

Nicolas Deschene (TI) and Loïc Minier (Linaro)

If you couldn’t attend ELCE and are waiting for the videos, I’m sure you’ll also be interested by the date and locations of the next editions of the conference :

The next Embedded Linux Conference, US edition, will take place on February 14-16 2012 in Redwood City, near San Francisco in California. This is an unusual date for the ELC (which traditionally took place in April), but it allows the conference to match with the Linaro Connect event for the first quarter of 2012.
The next Embedded Linux Conference Europe will take place on November 6-9 2012 in Barcelona, Spain. This is a just a ~4h drive from Toulouse, so definitely, several Bootlin people should be there.

GStreamer 2010 conference videos

Videos from the 2010 edition of the GStreamer conference, Cambridge, UK, Oct. 26, 2010.

After releasing ELC-E videos, here are videos from the 2010 edition of the GStreamer conference. As usual, these videos are released under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution – ShareAlike Licence version 3.0.

Jonas Holmberg
Axis
Case study – GStreamer on Axis devices
Slides
Video (26 minutes):
full HD (223M), 450×800 (72M)

Sebastian Dröge
Collabora Multimedia
WebM and GStreamer
Slides
Video (8 minutes):
full HD (75M), 450×800 (24M)

Florent Thiery
UbiCast
Using gstreamer for building automated webcasting systems
Slides
Video (31 minutes):
full HD (361M), 450×800 (107M)

Zeeshan Ali
Nokia
Implementing DLNA using GStreamer
Slides
Video (29 minutes):
full HD (282M), 450×800 (88M)

Olivier Crête
Collabora
Integrating VideoConferencing into Everyday Applications
Slides
Video (29 minutes):
full HD (334M), 450×800 (103M)

Håvard Graff
Tandberg
Case study – Tandberg and GStreamer
Video (61 minutes):
full HD (734M), 450×800 (212M)

Wim Taymans
Collabora Multimedia
Keynote – GStreamer – Current and future development
Video (47 minutes):
full HD (310M), 450×800 (136M)

Rob Clark
Texas Instruments
GStreamer and OMAP4
Video (37 minutes):
full HD (336M), 450×800 (128M)

Martin Bisson
3D Stereoscopic and GStreamer
Video (13 minutes):
full HD (124M), 450×800 (39M)

Jan Schmidt
Oracle Corporation
Interactivity in GStreamer pipelines
Slides
Video (20 minutes):
full HD (265M), 450×800 (76M)

Mike Smith
Songbird
Cross platform development with GStreamer
Video (51 minutes):
full HD (542M), 450×800 (165M)

Emanuele Quacchio
ST Microelectronics
A GStreamer based framework for adaptive streaming applications
Video (54 minutes):
full HD (592M), 450×800 (174M)

Josep Torra
Fluendo
Intel SMD elements in GStreamer
Slides
Video (50 minutes):
full HD (371M), 450×800 (151M)

Philippe Normand
Igalia
Webkit, HTML5 and GStreamer
Slides
Video (38 minutes):
full HD (229M), 450×800 (106M)

Edward Hervey
Collabora Multimedia
Challenges of video editing in your pocket
Slides
Video (53 minutes):
full HD (416M), 450×800 (174M)

David Schleef
Entropy Wave
Optimizing multimedia with Orc
Slides
Video (58 minutes):
full HD (493M), 450×800 (175M)

Luciana Fujii
Holoscopio
Landell – live streaming for the masses
Slides
Video (21 minutes):
full HD (110M), 450×800 (58M)

Zaheer Merali
Flumotion and GStreamer
Video (35 minutes):
full HD (202M)

Andrey Nechypurenko and Maksym Parkachov
Adaptive video streaming with Ice and GStreamer
Slides
Video (35 minutes):
full HD (279M), 450×800 (107M)

ELCE 2010 videos – Now in full HD

Videos from the Embedded Linux Conference Europe, Cambridge, UK, October 2010

Just a few weeks before the next edition of the Embedded Linux Conference in San Francisco, here are the videos from the previous edition in Europe a few months ago.

These videos took more time to process than expected, because of intense months on our side, but also because of the switch to the VP8 video codec. VP8 is the new Open Source and royalty free video codec, and is a successor to the codec that Theora was derived from. Unlike Theora which is now lagging behind, it is a very close competitor to H264, both in terms of quality and video size.

The switch to VP8 allowed us to release the videos in their original full HD resolution (we now have three full HD camcorders to shoot conference videos), with video files of about the same size.

You will probably need a recent GNU/Linux distribution (such as Ubuntu 10.10) to watch these videos. As this codec released by Google is taking off quickly, you should also find solutions to watch videos on Windows and MacOS X. Don’t hesitate to post comments here about your experience playing these files. You can even watch them on the Panda board, which can decode VP8 with its hardware video decoder.

As usual, these videos are released under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution – ShareAlike Licence version 3.0.

As often in conferences, the videos were unfortunately shot is tough lighting conditions. The organizers usually turn off the lights to make it easier for the audience to read the screen. The consequence is a high contrast between the speaker and the screen, causing the speaker to appear very dark when we film her or him together with the screen. In a number of videos, we tried to solve this by using a beach mode provided by our camcorders. While the speaker now looks great, this unfortunately blurred the screen, causing more inconvenience than benefits. We gave up this mode in the last videos and will shoot ELC 2011 is the standard way, even if the speaker looks dark again. At least, with full HD videos, you will be able to read the slides directly on the screen.

The videos from the 2010 GStreamer conference will also be available in the next days, and to help you produce your own videos, we will release our new video processing scripts soon too.

Ruud Derwig
Welcome speech
Video (15 minutes):
full HD (228M), 450×800 (71M)

Wolfram Sang
Pengutronix
Developer’s Diary: Supporting Maintainers
Slides
Video (46 minutes):
full HD (888M)
Rekha Kumar and Nipuna Gunasekera
Texas Instruments
Panda board demonstration
Video (14 minutes):
full HD (373M), 450×800 (85M)