Category: Technical

Updated Yocto support for SiFive RISC-V platforms

SiFive logoBootlin 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:

  1. meta-sifive, a BSP layer providing
    machine-specific support
  2. freedom-u-sdk, a demo and SDK layer that builds images for the HiFive Unmatched board and QEMU RISC-V 64-bit targets

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.

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Recovery boot on Rockchip SoCs

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.

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Updated OpenWrt support for STM32 platforms, OpenWrt 24.10.6 with ST BSP v6.2


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.

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Poison, redzones and shadows: inside KASAN

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!

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Feedback from Embedded Recipes 2026

Group picture of all Bootlin attendeesFor 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.

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yocto-kiss: new name, cleaner architecture, and ZynqMP support

meta-kiss
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.

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eBPF at LSFMMBPF 2026

LSFMMBPFAs 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.

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Linux 7.1 released, Bootlin contributions inside

Linux 7.1 was released Tuxearlier 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.

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Updated Buildroot support for STM32MPU platforms, ST BSP v6.2

Bootlin is an authorized partner of STThe 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.

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Display Next Hackfest 2026

From May 29 to May 31, 2026, the Linux Display Next Hackfest convened in the vibrant city of Nice, France, just after Embedded Recipes 2026. This time the event was hosted by Collabora. This annual gathering has established itself as a cornerstone event for the Linux Graphics community, bringing together a dynamic mix of kernel developers, compositor maintainers and hardware vendor to push the boundaries of Linux Graphics innovation.

For the third consecutive year, Bootlin was proud to participate, this time with a team of three: Köry Maincent, Luca Ceresoli, and Louis Chauvet. Our involvement in this event is more than just attendance, that’s a way to build a bridge between our customers needs and the Linux community.

This year’s Hackfest was particularly rich in discussions, covering a broad spectrum of topics such as MST bandwidth allocation, Native DisplayID, tiled monitors, color operations, Variable Refresh Rate, and High Dynamic Range. We presented four critical areas for which we aim at bringing improved upstream support, to meet the needs of our customers:

  • Link training and firmware update issues on DisplayPort
  • DRM bridge hotplug support
  • Backlight configuration
  • DisplayPort status properties
Group picture of all the participants in front of the sea
Everyone ready to dive in display hackfest

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