Cyber Resilience Act (CRA) – overview

The Cyber Resilience Act (CRA) was adopted by the European Council on October 10, 2024. It was then published in the Official journal of the EU on November 20, 2024 and enters into force today, December 10, 2024. Most of the law will start applying in 3 years, on December 11, 2027.

However, the obligation for manufacturers to report any actively exploited vulnerability or any security incident impacting the security of their product to ENISA will apply from September 11, 2026.
The other parts of the law that will start applying from June 11, 2026 apply to the member states and specify the details of setting up the administrative entities that will assess conformity with the CRA.

At Bootlin, we have been paying close attention to this topic for several reasons. First, the CRA will affect a large number of our clients, as almost every embedded device sold in the EU will need to comply with it. Second, the CRA also affects us directly, for instance as the maintainer of Snagboot.

This post is therefore the first in a series that will present our understanding of the CRA, and clearly lay out what one needs to have in mind in order to be confident of one’s compliance on time.

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OpenWrt support for STM32MP updated and STM32MP2 added

Bootlin is happy to announce a new release of our OpenWrt feed openwrt-feed-st, which  provides integration of ST’s STM32MP platforms with the OpenWrt build system. This new release openstlinux-6.1-openwrt-master-mpu-v24.06.26 updates the BSP software components and adds support for the new STM32MP2 platform.

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Upgrading Snagboot to a fully-fledged factory flashing tool

Snagboot is a fully open-source and vendor-agnostic recovery and flashing tool released by Bootlin in 2023. It is composed of snagrecover and snagflash, which respectively run U-Boot on a target platform using USB recovery mode and flash non-volatile storage devices using USB gadgets exposed by U-Boot.

While the combination of snagrecover and snagflash allows to reflash a board during development, it doesn’t fully address the needs of factory flashing: fast processing of multiple boards in parallel, monitoring of individual board statuses during the flashing process, and compatibility with Windows, which is the most often used operating system on factory floors.

Back in March 2024, Texas Instruments contacted Bootlin with a project request: to grow Snagboot into an efficient factory flashing tool. The goal was for factory operators to have a way of efficiently flashing groups of devices using a single user-friendly interface.

While this project could have been executed internally by engineers at Texas Instruments, the team at TI realized the importance of keeping this work agnostic to TI and driving this truly as an Open Source project. We thank TI for partnering with us and sponsoring us to deliver this tool that will cater to the flash writing needs of a variety of small and medium sized manufacturing houses & industry in general.

Consequently, Bootlin is proud to release the 2.0 version of Snagboot, which includes a factory flashing tool that runs on both Windows and Linux!

This tool supports a wide range of platforms from different vendors. All boards using supported SoCs are themselves supported without any extra effort, provided proper U-Boot support exists and USB recovery ports are routed in hardware.

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Linux 6.12 released, Bootlin contributions inside

Linux 6.12 has been released during the past week-end, pretty much as expected after 7 release candidates. As usual, we recommend our readers to go through the amazing LWN.net articles covering the 6.12 merge window (part 1, part 2) to get a high-level overview of the major new features and improvements in this 6.12 release. One of the prominent improvement in this release, as far as the embeded industry is concerned, is obviously the merge of the final bits enabling PREEMPT_RT… which already caused our Real-Time Linux with PREEMPT_RT training course to be updated.

As usual, Bootlin again contributed to this release: with 118 commits merged, we are again in the top 20 contributing companies! Also, in addition to contributing our own code, several of our engineers are also maintainers, and as part of this work those engineers review and merge patches from other contributors. As part of this effort, for this 6.12 release:

  • Alexandre Belloni, as the RTC and I3C subsystems maintainer, merged 29 patches from other contributors
  • Miquèl Raynal, as the MTD subsystem co-maintainer, merged 24 patches from other contributors
  • Grégory Clement, as the Marvell platform maintainer, merged 4 patches from other contributors

Overall, 13 active Bootlin engineers made contributions to this release, which on a total staff of 24 people, means that more than half of our team has contributed to the Linux kernel for 6.12, a good indication of our strong focus on Linux kernel development and upstreaming!

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2025 internships at Bootlin

We have just published our 2025 internships booklet, documenting the internship topics we are offering to students in engineering who are completing their studies by a final internship.

Since this is mainly targeted at students based in France, who can join our offices in Lyon (France) or Toulouse (France), the internship descriptions are in French.

The topics we are proposing this year are:

  • exploration of Machine Learning solutions for embedded Linux
  • improvement of Snagboot, the universal embedded flashing tool
  • drivers and hardware support in Linux or U-Boot
  • enhancement of Device Tree support in the Linux kernel
  • porting Bootlin training to Qemu
  • evaluation and porting of Bootlin training to a new hardware platform
  • contributions to the Yocto ecosystem
  • contribution to the Buildroot project
  • monitoring the security of Linux BSPs
  • reference implementation of a secure embedded Linux OS
  • Ultra Wide Band (UWB) support in the Linux kernel
  • open topic on embedded Linux or Zephyr



Bootlin welcomes cybersecurity expert Olivier Benjamin

We’re happy to announce that Olivier Benjamin has recently joined the Bootlin engineering team!

For anyone in the tech industry, and especially the embedded industry, it is clear now that security is one of the most important topics of the recent and coming years both from a technical standpoint and from a regulatory standpoint (with regulations such as the CRA). Bootlin has already been helping its customers improve the security of their embedded Linux products by providing expertise on secure boot, encryption, TPM or maintenance of Linux BSPs.

With the arrival of Olivier in our team, we’re really happy to be significantly strengthening our security expertise. Indeed, Olivier has a very strong and solid security background: he started his career at security R&D firm Quarkslab doing embedded device security assessment, then he worked for several years for the french Ministry of Defense reverse engineering security implementation in embedded devices, searching for vulnerabilities and developing proofs of concept. He then joined AWS at Amazon, going through various security roles including incident response as well as looking into security vulnerabilities of concern for the hypervisor and kernel layers of EC2.

In addition to being a security expert, Olivier is also passionate about Linux and Open Source, matching well Bootlin’s DNA. Most notably, Olivier is a contributor to the UBPorts project, looking specifically at the Pine64 native port.

Check out Olivier’s profile on our website for more details. Once again, welcome Olivier!

Welcome to Mathieu Dubois-Briand

Mathieu Dubois-BriandWe’re happy to announce that Mathieu Dubois-Briand has just joined the Bootlin engineering team!

Mathieu graduated from the UTBM, Mathieu spend 12 years at Witekio, where he worked first on Android AOSP, and then on many Linux-based Board Support Package, based on Yocto or Buildroot, for various ARM and ARM64 platforms such as the NXP i.MX and TI OMAP families. During this process, he wrote Device Trees and developed Linux kernel drivers for common devices, such as touchscreen controllers, 3-axis accelerometers, and network PHYs.

In addition to development, Mathieu has managed the maintenance of several projects, including CVE analysis and updating software components throughout the product lifecycle. His work has also involved security-related topics, including secure boot, Trusted Execution Environment, and Trusted Applications using OP-TEE, as well as secure communication between devices, primarily employing TLS and DTLS protocols.

Furthermore, Mathieu has some experience with microcontroller development, using real-time operating systems like FreeRTOS and Zephyr on MCUs from the i.MXRT, ESP32, and STM32 families.

Mathieu has joined our engineering team based in Lyon, and will help us offer more embedded Linux expertise to our customers, including some additional expertise on BSP development, maintenance, CVE analysis, and security. As a Bootlin engineer, Mathieu already participated to the Open Source Summit Europe in Vienna, and is directly contributing to the build engineering effort of the upstream Yocto Project.

Please see Mathieu’s Bootlin page and LinkedIn profile.

Bootlin contributions to Linux Plumbers conference: slides and videos

Luca Ceresoli and Hervé Codina speaking at Linux Plumbers conference 2024After the participation of 13 Bootlin engineers to Open Source Summit 2024, no less then 8 Bootlin engineers attended the Linux Plumbers Conference that took place right after Open Source Summit Europe in Vienna.

In addition to participating, we contributed 3 talks/discussions (Linux Plumbers is primarily designed to host discussions, not pure talks): Representing the front-facing ports of Ethernet interfaces, Hotplug DRM pipeline components on non-discoverable video busses and Runtime hotplug on non-discoverable busses with device tree overlays.

In this blog post, we’re happy to share the slides and videos of those talks.

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Bootlin talks at Open Source Summit Europe 2024: slides and videos

João Marcos Costa giving his talk at Open Source Summit Europe 2024No less than 13 Bootlin engineers attended the Open Source Summit Europe 2024 in Vienna earlier this month, and two Bootlin engineers gave talks at this conference, keeping with Bootlin’s long standing tradition of sharing knowledge with our peers of the broader embedded Linux community.

In this blog post, we’re happy to share the slides and videos of the two talks we have during this event: Linux Power Management Features, Their Relationships and Interactions and Inspecting and Optimizing Memory Usage in Linux

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Linux 6.11 released, Bootlin contributions inside

Linux 6.11 has been released a week ago, the day before Open Source Summit Europe started, but as a large part of the Bootlin team was attending this conference and the immediately following Linux Plumbers conference, we are only posting now our usual blog post about our Linux 6.11 contributions.

As usual, we warmly recommend our readers to look at the articles from LWN.net covering the 6.11 merge window (part 1, part 2) to get a good high-level overview of the major new features and hardware support added in 6.11. CNX-Software also has a useful article on the 6.11 features relevant for embedded platforms.

From a Bootlin perspective, we contributed a total of 120 commits in this release, making us the 19th contributing company by number of commits, worldwide, according to the statistics. In addition to those 120 commits authored by Bootlin engineers, we reviewed and merged 76 patches from other contributors, as part of the Linux kernel maintainer role of several Bootlin engineers (Alexandre Belloni as the RTC and I3C maintainers, Miquèl Raynal as the MTD co-maintainer, and Grégory Clement as the Marvell platform maintainer).

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