Training – Page 3

Online training courses in September/October 2020

Following the success of our online training courses in Spring/Summer, we now have scheduled additional online training courses in September/October, for all our 5 training courses.

Those courses are delivered live, online, by a Bootlin instructor: the entire contents of our training lectures are covered, and the training practical labs are demonstrated live by the instructor. All you need to register is a Chrome-based web browser, an audio headset, and you’re all set to learn about embedded Linux, Linux kernel driver development, Yocto, Buildroot or Linux graphics!

Registration is open for the following 5 sessions, make sure to book your seat before the sessions fill up!

Type	Dates	Time	Duration	Expected trainer	Cost and registration
Linux kernel (agenda)	Sep. 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 21 and 22, 2020	13:30 – 17:30 (Paris time)	28 h	Gregory Clement	829 EUR + VAT^* (register)
Linux Graphics (agenda)	Sep. 22, 23, 24 and 25, 2020	14:00 – 18:00 (Paris time)	16 h	Paul Kocialkowski	519 EUR + VAT^* (register)
Yocto Project (agenda)	Sep. 28, 29, 30, Oct. 1, 2, 2020	14:00 – 18:00 (Paris time)	20 h	Maxime Chevallier	625 EUR + VAT^* (register)
Embedded Linux (agenda)	Sep. 28, 29, 30, Oct. 1, 2, 5, 6 2020.	17:00 – 21:00 (Paris), 8:00 – 12:00 (San Francisco)	28 h	Michael Opdenacker	829 EUR + VAT^* (register)
Buildroot (agenda)	Oct. 1, 2, 5, 6, and 8, 2020	14:00 – 18:00 (Paris time)	16 h	Thomas Petazzoni	519 EUR + VAT^* (register)

Yocto Project training course available on STM32MP1 platform

Back in May 2019, we announced the availability of our Embedded Linux system development course on the STMicroelectronics STM32MP1 platform, in addition to the already supported Microchip SAMA5D3 Xplained board.

In the context of our partnership with STMicroelectronics, we are now happy to announce the availability of our Yocto Project and OpenEmbedded development training also on the STM32MP1 platform for the practical labs. We now support either the BeagleBoneBlack Wireless or the STMicroelectronics STM32MP1 platforms for this training course.

The complete training materials are available: detailed agenda, slides and practical labs. The complete source code of the training materials is also available in our Github repository.

Bootlin Yocto course on STM32MP1 — Slides of Bootlin’s Yocto course for the STM32MP1

This will hopefully help customers around the world to get started with using Yocto on the STM32MP1 system-on-chip. The Yocto experts at Bootlin are available to deliver this 3-day course anywhere in the world, at your location. The first edition of this new variant of the course is going to be given this week to one of our customers in Spain. Contact us if you’re interested by having this course organized at your location!

Publication of Linux graphics training materials

Back in June 2019, we announced the availability of a new training course, Displaying and rendering graphics with Linux. At the time of this announcement, the training materials were not available though.

Since then, Bootlin engineer Paul Kocialkowski has been very busy preparing those training materials, and has successfully delivered the first edition of this course to one of our customers in Spain early September. After taking the time to polish those training materials following this first course, we are now very happy to publish and share this 200+ slides deck, covering a wide range of graphics related topics:

Image and color representation
Basic drawing
Basic and advanced operations
Hardware aspects overview
Hardware for display
Hardware for rendering
Memory aspects
Performance aspects
Software aspects overview
Kernel components in Linux
Userspace components with Linux

See also the detailed agenda of this training course. The LaTeX source code for all our training materials, including this graphics training, is available in a Git repository. It is worth mentioning that this training only consists of slides and demos, and does not include practical labs done by the participants, in order to keep the training logistics manageable and the duration reasonably short (2 days).

Here are a few slides showing various aspects of this training course:

By publishing this training materials right after our first course, and under the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA license, Bootlin sticks to its commitment of publishing all its training materials under a free documentation license, to better spread the knowledge in the entire embedded Linux community.

We are available to deliver this Displaying and rendering graphics with Linux course anywhere in the world, at your location. Contact us for more details.

Embedded Linux system development course on STM32MP1 Discovery

For many years, Bootlin has been offering an Embedded Linux system development training course, which has been delivered world-wide to hundreds of engineers by Bootlin trainers. This course is the most appropriate one for engineers getting started with embedded Linux: it goes through all the software layers of an embedded Linux system, from the toolchain to the application, through the bootloader, Linux kernel and basic user-space. With numerous hands-on labs, attendees get practical experience during this training, and learn how to build their embedded Linux system from the ground-up.

This course has been available for a while in two variants:

A 5-day variant, which covers all topics, including flash storage and filesystems as well as-real time
A 4-day variant, which is identical to the 5-day variant, except that flash storage and filesystem and real-time are not covered

Embedded Linux system development Today, we are happy to announce that all the practical labs of our 4-day variant are now done on the recently announced STM32MP157 Discovery board, which uses the STM32MP157 processor from STMicroelectronics. This processor has a number of interesting features for a large number of embedded applications, as we discussed in a previous blog post.

Just like for all our training courses, the training materials for this course are publicly and freely available:

Detailed agenda
Slides
Practical labs
Github repository with the training materials source code

Bootlin trainers are available to deliver this course on-site anywhere in the world. See this page for more details.

Buildroot training course updated to Buildroot 2017.08

Back in June 2015, we announced the availability of a training course on Buildroot, a popular and easy to use embedded Linux build system. A year later, we updated it to cover Buildroot 2016.05. We are happy to announce a new update: we now cover Buildroot 2017.08.

The most significant updates are:

Presentation of the Long Term Supported releases of Buildroot, a topic we also presented in a previous blog post
Appearance of the new top-level utils/ directory, containing various utilities directly useful for the Buildroot user, such as test-pkg, check-package, get-developers or scanpypi
Removal of $(HOST_DIR)/usr/, as everything has been moved up one level to $(HOST_DIR), to make the Buildroot SDK/toolchain more conventional
Document the new organization of the skeleton package, now split into several packages, to properly support various init systems. A new diagram has been added to clarify this topic.
List all package infrastructures that are available in Buildroot, since their number is growing!
Use SPDX license codes for licensing information in packages, which is now mandatory in Buildroot
Remove the indication that dependencies of host (i.e native) packages are derived from the dependencies of the corresponding package, since it’s no longer the case
Indicate that the check for hashes has been extended to also allow checking the hash of license files. This allows to detect changes in the license text.
Update the BR2_EXTERNAL presentation to cover the fact that multiples BR2_EXTERNAL trees are supported now.
Use the new relocatable SDK functionality that appeared in Buildroot 2017.08.

The practical labs have of course been updated to use Buildroot 2017.08, but also Linux 4.13 and U-Boot 2017.07, to remain current with upstream versions. In addition, they have been extended with two additional steps:

Booting the Buildroot generated system using TFTP and NFS, as an alternative to the SD card we normally use
Using genimage to generate a complete and ready to flash SD card image

We will be delivering this course to one of our customers in Germany next month, and are of course available to deliver it on-site anywhere in the world if you’re interested! And of course, we continue to publish, for free, all the materials used in this training session: slides and labs.

Yocto project and OpenEmbedded training updated to Krogoth

Continuing our efforts to keep our training materials up-to-date we just refreshed our Yocto project and OpenEmbedded training course to the latest Yocto project release, Krogoth (2.1.1). In addition to adapting our training labs to the Krogoth release, we improved our training materials to cover more aspects and new features.

The most important changes are:

New chapter about devtool, the new utility from the Yocto project to improve the developers’ workflow to integrate a package into the build system or to make patches to existing packages.
Improve the distro layers slides to add configuration samples and give advice on how to use these layers.
Add a part about quilt to easily patch already supported packages.
Explain in depth how file inclusions are handled by BitBake.
Improve the description about tasks by adding slides on how to write them in Python.

The updated training materials are available on our training page: agenda (PDF), slides (PDF) and labs (PDF).

Join our Yocto specialist Alexandre Belloni for the first public session of this improved training in Lyon (France) on October 19-21, 2016. We are also available to deliver this training worldwide at your site, contact us!

Free seat in Android training session

Student penguins At Bootlin, we owe a lot to the Free Software community, and we’re doing our best to give back as much as we can.

One way of doing that is welcoming community contributors in our public training sessions about embedded Linux, Linux kernel and Android system development organized in France. We’ve done that multiple times in the past, and this allowed us to meet very interesting people (who even had very valuable experience and points of view to share with the other course participants), while of course giving them extra knowledge that they can use for further contributions.

The next session in which we can offer a free seat is about Android system development, and will take place on June 20-23 in Toulouse, France. The session has a value of 1890 EUR (without V.A.T.) and includes lunch and breaks, as well as a free Beaglebone Black board with its 4.3″ LCD touchscreen cape.

This course will teach you how to modify Android to support a new embedded board (assuming that it is already supported by the Linux kernel), and how to build a real system through accessing specific hardware, customizing the filesystem and using debugging techniques.

How to apply?

You need to be a student or a contributor to a free software project, which doesn’t have to be related to the embedded field, and even if your contributions are modest.
Write to award@bootlin.com before May. 30 and tell us about your contributions and your interest in the session.
Thomas Petazzoni and Michael Opdenacker will review all the proposals and will select the candidate who best stands out in terms of past contributions and/or in potential for further ones after taking the course. Bootlin reserves the right not to select any candidate if nobody actually makes a sufficiently interesting application.
The winner will be notified by June 2, and will have to be ready to travel to Toulouse and stay there the whole 4 days at her/his own expense.

Don’t hesitate to apply to this free seat. In past editions, we didn’t have so many people applying, and therefore you have a real chance to get selected!

Embedded Linux Development with Yocto Project

We were kindly provided a copy of Embedded Linux Development with Yocto Project, written by Otavio Salvador and Daiane Angolini. It is available at Packt Publishing, either in an electronic format (DRM free) or printed.

This book will help you start with your embedded system development and integration using the Yocto Project or OpenEmbedded.

The first chapter sheds some light on the meaning of commonly misused names: Yocto Project, Poky, OpenEmbedded, BitBake. Then, it doesn’t waste time and explains how to install and use Poky to build and then run an image. The entire book is full of examples that can easily be tested, providing useful hands-on experience, using Yocto Project 1.6 (Poky 11).

The following chapters cover:

Hob: a user friendly interface, however, it will soon be deprecated and replaced by Toaster.
BitBake and Metadata: how to use BitBake, how to write recipes for packages or images, how to extend existing recipes, how to write new classes, how to create a layer, where to find existing layers and use them.
The build directory layout: what the generated files are, and what their use is.
Packaging: how to generate different package formats, how to handle a package feed and the package versions.
The various SDKs that can be generated and their integration in Eclipse.
Debugging the metadata: what the common issues are, how to find what is going wrong, and solving these issues.
Debugging the applications on the target: how to generate an image with debugging tools installed.
Available tools to help achieve copyleft compliance: in particular, how to cope with the GPL requirements.

Finally, there is a chapter dedicated to explaining how to generate and run an image on the Wandboard, an i.MX6 based community board.

The book is easy to read, with plenty of examples and useful tips. It requires some knowledge about generic embedded Linux system development (see our training) as only the Yocto Project specifics are covered. I would recommend it both for beginners wanting to learn about the Yocto Project and for developers wanting to improve their current knowledge and their recipes and also understand the BitBake internals.

Speaking of the Yocto Project, it is worth noting that Bootlin is now offering a Yocto Project and OpenEmbedded training course (detailed agenda). If you’re interested, join one of the upcoming public training sessions, or order a session at your location!

Embedded Linux training update: Atmel Xplained, and more!

We are happy to announce that we have published a significant update of our Embedded Linux training course. As all our training materials, this update is freely available for everyone, under a Creative Commons (CC-BY-SA) license.

This update brings the following major improvements to the training session:

The hardware platform used for all the practical labs is the Atmel SAMA5D3 Xplained platform, a popular platform that features the ARMv7 compatible Atmel SAMA5D3 processor on a board with expansion headers compatible with Arduino shields. The fact that the platform is very well supported by the mainline Linux kernel, and the easy access to a wide range of Arduino shields makes it a very useful prototyping platform for many projects. Of course, as usual, participants to our public training sessions keep their board after the end of the course! Note we continue to support the IGEPv2 board from ISEE for customers who prefer this option.
The practical labs that consist in Cross-compiling third party libraries and applications and Working with Buildroot now use a USB audio device connected to the Xplained board on the hardware side, and various audio libraries/applications on the software side. This replaces our previous labs which were using DirectFB as an example of a graphical library used in a system emulated under QEMU. We indeed believe that practical labs on real hardware are much more interesting and exciting.
Many updates were made to various software components used in the training session: the toolchain components were all updated and we now use a hard float toolchain, more recent U-Boot and Linux kernel versions are used, etc.

The training materials are available as pre-compiled PDF (slides, labs, agenda), but their source code in also available in our Git repository.

If you are interested in this training session, see the dates of our public training sessions, or order one to be held at your location. Do not hesitate to contact us at training@bootlin.com for further details!

It is worth mentioning that for the purpose of the development of this training session, we did a few contributions to open-source projects:

In Crosstool-NG, we updated the existing arm-unknown-linux-uclibcgnueabi example configuration, and we added a new arm-cortexa5-linux-uclibcgnueabihf example configuration, specifically tuned for the Cortex-A5 processors such as the one used in the Xplained board.
We worked with the Xenomai developers, especially Gilles Chanteperdrix, to test and debug Xenomai on the Atmel Xplained platform. This effort lead to the addition of the support for the AIC5 interrupt controller found on the SAMA5D3 processor.

Thanks a lot to our engineers Maxime Ripard and Alexandre Belloni, who worked on this major update of our training session.

Android training sessions in the UK

Bootlin is happy to announce its first public training session outside of France.

Of course, we deliver training courses on customer sites all around the world, but this will be the first one open to individual registration that we organize outside of France.

We are starting with an Android system development session in Southampton, UK.

You will enjoy the newest version of our Android course, based on Android 4.x, and using the BeagleBone Black as the development platform for the practical labs. As always in our training sessions, participants walk away with the board used during the practical labs (in this case the BeagleBone Black and its LCD cape), allowing them to continue their learning and experiments well after the end of the course.

Being a popular cruising destination, Southampton is easy to reach from other cities in the UK and in the world.

The Android robot picture is copyrighted by Google. It is licensed under the Creative Commons 3.0 Attribution Unported license. The British robot version has been derived by Bootlin, and is available under the same license. Feel free to reuse it and improve it as long as you keep the original author!