From the 13th to 16th of July in Rome, Italy, 130 Linux Kernel developers specialized in networking gathered at the Netdev 0x1a Conference, accompanied by 50 people attending remotely.
As someone who works a lot on Network drivers for Embedded Linux devices, I attended the event as well as the Netconf conference, a smaller conference that took place on the first day of the event and gathered Network Maintainers and Contributors to discuss ongoing topics in the Linux Kernel Networking ecosystem.
Bootlin has been maintaining Freedom-U-SDK (FUSDK), a Yocto/OpenEmbedded-based software development kit for RISC-V platforms from SiFive, in collaboration with SiFive since 2022.
The Yocto support for SiFive RISC-V platforms is split into two layers:
In a previous blog post we summarized the work done up to the 2022.10 release. This new post covers everything since then, up to the latest 2026.07.00-lts release which was published recently.
Continue reading “Updated Yocto support for SiFive RISC-V platforms”
Rockchip is a well-known silicon vendor whose System-on-Chips (SoCs) are integrated in a wide range of embedded Linux systems. For example, Pine64, a company manufacturing embedded devices targeted for the Open Source community uses the RK3399 for its PinePhone Pro, and the RK3566 for its PineTab 2. Rockchip SoCs implement a rather powerful recovery bootflow.
Unfortunately, that capability is poorly documented, and the tooling available is fragmented and only partially open source.
The aim of this article is to present this capability and give a step-by-step guide to using it.
We are happy to announce a new release of our OpenWrt feed openwr-feed-st which provides integration of ST’s STM32MP (MP1 and MP2) platforms with the OpenWrt build system. This new release (openstlinux-6.6-openwrt-24.10.6-mpu-v26.02.18) is based on OpenWrt 24.10.6 and uses the ST BSP v6.2.
Continue reading “Updated OpenWrt support for STM32 platforms, OpenWrt 24.10.6 with ST BSP v6.2”
Even if the presence of Rust is slowly increasing in the Linux kernel code base, the project largely remains written in C, and while this is the de facto language to write low level code, it unfortunately also comes with a significant ability of making mistakes, with the corresponding failures then coming in a wide variety of shapes: undefined behaviors, buffer overflows, segmentation faults… The kernel is not immune to such issues, and so kernel developers need some dedicated tooling to catch those issues early. As many problems have their roots in memory management, one tool that can legitimately sit in any kernel hacker toolbox is the Kernel Address Sanitizer, or KASAN for short. This blog does not aim to teach readers how to use KASAN: the kernel documentation is pretty explicit on this matter. We are rather going to explore KASAN internals, mostly to understand its impact (both at build time and at runtime), but up to some extent, to appreciate the elegant engineering involved in its implementation!
Continue reading “Poison, redzones and shadows: inside KASAN”
For the fifth time, the Bootlin team attended the Embedded Recipes conference to meet and share with the embedded community. This year, like last year, it was in the beautiful city of Nice. We were also proud to be a Chef Sponsor of the event.
Participation from Bootlin was again strong, with no less than 19 engineers attending: Alexandre Belloni, Antonin Godard, Benjamin Robin, Benoit Monin, Hervé Codina, Jérémie Dautheribes, João Marcos Costa, Köry Maincent, Louis Chauvet, Luca Ceresoli, Mathieu Dubois-Briand, Miguel Gazquez, Paul Louvel, Richard Genoud, Romain Gantois, Théo Lebrun, Thomas Bonnefille, Thomas Petazzoni, Thomas Richard.
As usual, here is a blog post with summaries of a few talks. You can find the full schedule here, and video recordings are now available for day 1 and day 2.
We’re excited to share some significant updates to our yocto-kiss project, our example of the simplest but realistic Yocto/OpenEmbedded setup. These changes improve the project’s organization, make it more scalable, and add support for a new ZynqMP-based platform.
Continue reading “yocto-kiss: new name, cleaner architecture, and ZynqMP support”
As part of a project I am currently working on at Bootlin, I had the opportunity to attend the Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory Management and BPF conference (enough of a mouthful to shorten to LSFMMBPF !) earlier in May. The conference took place this year in Zagreb from May 4th to May 6th, and was a fantastic opportunity to meet people working in deep technical topics in the Linux kernel.
Linux 7.1 was released 
earlier this week. As usual, the best source of information about the content of this new version will be LWN, see merge windows posts, part 1 and part 2 . This release is a bit outstanding, as it is one of the largest in kernel history, considering commits count. It also highlights a trend that has been visible since 7.0: the number of first-time contributors is increasing a lot. You can find some comments about this tendency in the 7.1 coverage from LWN.
This time again, Bootlin has been very active, as no less than 116 commits were contributed by Bootlin engineers, making the company rank at 21th according to the Linux Kernel Patch Statistics.
Continue reading “Linux 7.1 released, Bootlin contributions inside”
The buildroot-external-st project is an extension of the Buildroot build system with ready-to-use configurations for the STMicroelectronics STM32MP1 and STM32MP2 platforms.
More specifically, this project is a BR2_EXTERNAL repository for Buildroot, with a number of defconfigs that allow to quickly build embedded Linux systems for the STM32MPU Discovery Kit platforms and Evaluation board. It’s a great way to get started with Buildroot on those platforms.
Today, we are happy to announce an updated version of this project, published under the branch st/2025.02.12 at https://github.com/bootlin/buildroot-external-st.
Continue reading “Updated Buildroot support for STM32MPU platforms, ST BSP v6.2”
