We are happy to announce a new Embedded Linux training course on July 7-11, in Madrid, Spain.
It is organized by our partners ISEE (the makers of the IGEPv2 board that we are using in this course), and Silica, a well known component is distributor who is welcoming the session in its offices in Madrid.
The course will be instructed in English by our trainer Marcin Bis. 
The registrations are directly handled by ISEE. See details.
We are happy to announce that our engineering team has recently welcomed two new embedded Linux engineers: Boris Brezillon and Antoine Ténart. Boris and Antoine will both be working from the Toulouse office of the company, together with Maxime Ripard and Thomas Petazzoni. They will be helping Bootlin to address the increasing demand for its development and training services.
Antoine started his professional experience with Embedded Linux and Android in 2011. Before joining Bootlin in 2014, he started with low level Android system development at Archos (France), and worked on Embedded Linux and Android projects at Adeneo Embedded (France). He joined Bootlin early March, and has already been involved in kernel contributions on the Marvell Berlin processors and the Atmel AT91 processors, and is also working on our upcoming Yocto training course.
Boris joined Bootlin on April, 1st, and brings a significant embedded Linux experience that he gained while working on home automation devices at Overkiz (France). He was maintaining a custom distribution built with the Yocto. Boris also has already contributed many patches to the mainline Linux kernel sources, in particular for the Atmel AT91 ARM SoCs. Boris is also developing the NAND controller driver for the Allwinner ARM processors and has proposed improvements to the core Linux MTD subsystem (see this thread and this other thread).
One of the most important conference of the Embedded Linux community will take place at the end of this month in California: the Embedded Linux Conference will be held in San Jose from April, 29th to May, 1st, co-located with the Android Builders Summit. The schedule for both of these events has been published, and it is full of interesting talks on a wide range of embedded topics.
As usual, Bootlin will participate to this conference, but this participation will be the most important ever:
If you are interested in embedded Linux, we highly advise you to attend this conference. And if you are interested in business or recruiting opportunities with Bootlin, it will also be the perfect time to meet us!
Linus Torvalds has just released the 3.14 version of the Linux kernel. As usual, it incorporates a large number of changes, for which a good summary is available on the KernelNewbies site.
This time around, Bootlin is the 19th company contributing to this kernel release, by number of patches, right between Cisco and Renesas. Six of our engineers have contributed to this release: Maxime Ripard, Alexandre Belloni, Ezequiel Garcia, Grégory Clement, Michael Opdenacker and Thomas Petazzoni. In total, they have contributed 121 patches to this kernel release.
pxa3xx_nand driver and extend it to cover the specificities of the Armada 370/XP NAND controller. And these specificities were quite complicated, involving a large number of changes to the driver, which all had to also be validated on existing PXA3xx hardware to not introduce any regression.IRQF_DISABLED flag.In detail, our contributions were:
As we discussed in a recent blog post, two of our engineers participated to the FOSDEM conference early February in Brussels, Belgium. For those interested, many videos are available, such as several videos from the Lameere room, where the embedded related talks were given.
Thomas Petazzoni also participated to the two days Buildroot Developers Meeting after the FOSDEM conference. This meeting gathered 10 contributors to the Buildroot project physically present and two additional remote participants. The event was sponsored by Google and Mind, thanks a lot to them! During those two days, the participants were able to discuss a very large number of topics that are often difficult to discuss over mailing lists or IRC, and a significant work to clean up the oldest pending patches was done. In addition to this, these meetings are also very important to allow the contributors to know each other, as it makes future online discussions and collaborations much easier and fruitful. For more details, see the complete report of the event.
Also, if you’re interested in Buildroot, the project has applied to participate to the next edition of the Google Summer of Code. Two project ideas are already listed on the project wiki, feel free to contact Thomas Petazzoni if you are a student interested in these topics, or if you have other proposals to make for Buildroot.
Version 3.13 of the Linux kernel was released by Linus Torvalds on January, 19th 2014. The kernelnewbies.org site has an excellent page that covers the most important improvements and feature additions that this new kernel release brings.
As usual Bootlin contributed to this kernel: with 121 patches merged in 3.13 on a total of 12127 patches contributed, Bootlin is ranked 17th in the list of companies contributing to the Linux kernel. We also appeared on Jonathan Corbet kernel contribution statistics at LWN.net, as a company having contributed 1% of the kernel changes, right between Renesas Electronics and Huawei Technologies.
Amongst the contributions we made for 3.13:
IRQF_DISABLED, as well as other janitorial tasks such as removing unused Kconfig symbols. Work done by Michael Opdenacker.In detail, the patches contributed by Bootlin are:
A French version also exists.
The Bootlin team wishes you a Happy New Year for 2014, with plenty of optimism and energy!
We are taking this opportunity to give some news about Bootlin.
In 2013, Bootlin significantly increased its contribution to open-source projects, especially at the Linux kernel level.
639 patches integrated in the Linux kernel, mainly to improve support for Marvell ARM processors and Allwinner ARM processors. For all kernel releases published in 2013, Bootlin has been in the top 30 contributing companies. We now have a significant experience in integrating support for ARM processors in the Linux kernel, and we expect to work more in this area in 2014.
595 patches integrated in the Buildroot embedded Linux build system, in a large number of areas, making Bootlin the second most important contributor after Buildroot’s maintainer. This effort allows Bootlin to keep an up-to-date expertise in cross-compilation and build systems.
26 patches integrated in the Barebox bootloader:
22 patches to the Yocto Freescale layer, mainly adding support for the Crystalfontz boards. In the process, a new image type was developed and significant improvements were made to the Barebox recipe.
meta-fsl-arm-extra (GitHub)Several of these contributions, and many other activities, were driven by development and consulting activities in 2013, with mainly:
We have also significantly improved and updated our training courses:
Our training materials remain freely available under a Creative Commons license, including their source code, available from a public Git repository.
Bootlin continues to believe that participating to conferences is critical to keep its engineers up to date with the latest Linux developments and create connections with the developers of the Linux community which are essential to make our projects progress faster. For this purpose, we participated to a large number of conferences in 2013:
A very important development of Bootlin in 2013 is the addition of a new engineer to our team: Alexandre Belloni joined us in March 2013. Alexandre has a very significant embedded Linux and kernel experience, see his profile.
Now, let’s talk about our plans for 2014:
See also the full list of public sessions.
As in 2013, we will participate to several key conferences. We have already planned our participation to: Linux Conf Australia (January 2014), FOSDEM (February 2014), Embedded Linux Conference (April 2014) and the Embedded Linux Conference Europe (October 2014).
You can follow Bootlin news by reading our blog and by following our quick news on Twitter. We now have a Google+ page too.
Again, Happy New Year!
The Bootlin team.
We are happy to release new training materials that we have developed in 2013 with funding from Atmel Corporation.
The materials correspond to a 1-day embedded Linux boot time reduction workshop. In addition to boot time reduction theory, consolidating some of our experience from our embedded Linux boot time reduction projects, the workshop allows participants to practice with the most common techniques. This is done on SAMA5D3x Evaluation Kits from Atmel.
The system to optimize is a video demo from Atmel. We reduce the time to start a GStreamer based video player. During the practical labs, you will practice with techniques to:
bootchartdstrace
As usual, our training materials are available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 license. This essentially means that you are free to download, distribute and even modify them, provided you mention us as the original authors and that you share these documents under the same conditions.
Special thanks to Atmel for allowing us to share these new materials under this license!
Here are the documents at last:
The first public session of this workshop will be announced in the next weeks.
Don’t hesitate to contact us if you are interested in organizing a session on your site.
The major improvements and updates are:
And as usual, all the training materials are freely available, under a Creative Commons license, so you can study in detail the contents of the training session. It is also worth mentioning that this training session is taught by Bootlin engineers having practical and visible experience in kernel development, as can be seen in the contributions we made in the latest kernel releases: 3.9, 3.10, 3.11 and 3.12.
For details about cost and registration, see our Training cost and registration page.
If you are an embedded Linux developer too, you have probably been frustrated by the lack of information from the Linux kernel when it failed to start the init process when you’re building a new root filesystem. The only thing you get is No init found, and this could hide many different causes:
init program candidate found at all
init program candidates exist but they can’t be executed, for multiple possible causes (missing execute permissions, failed to load shared libraries, executable compiled for an unknown architecture…)
The good news is that this source of frustration will be gone in Linux 3.13. Thanks to a Bootlin commit merged on Nov. 13, 2013, whenever an attempt to execute an init program candidate fails, there is a message in the console detailing the executable path and the error code. For example:
Starting init: /sbin/init exists but couldn't execute it (error -13)
When you get such a message, all you have to do is lookup the error code in include/uapi/asm-generic/errno-base.h or maybe in uapi/asm-generic/errno.h. In the above example, the -13 code meant permission denied, typically because of missing execution rights.
This had been annoying me for a long time, and I am glad that the Linux kernel community accepted my improvement!
By the way, many more improvements to the Linux kernel from Bootlin are currently getting merged in 3.13. See all our contributions to the Linux kernel.