Training – Page 4

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!

New training materials: boot time reduction workshop

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:

Measure the various steps of the boot process
Analyze time spent starting system services, using bootchartd
Simplify your init scripts
Trace application startup with strace
Find kernel functions taking the most time during the boot process
Reduce kernel size and boot time
Replace U-Boot by the Barebox bootloader, and save a lot of time
thanks to the activation of the data cache.

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.

Updated version of our kernel driver development course: Device Tree, BeagleBone Black, Wii Nunchuk, and more!

BeagleBone Black connected to the Wii Nunchuk over I2C

In the last few years, the practical labs of our Embedded Linux kernel and driver development training were based on the ARMv5 Calao USB-A9263 platform, and covering the ARM kernel support as it was a few years ago. While we do regularly update our training session materials, with all the changes that occurred in the ARM kernel world over the last two years, it was time to make more radical changes to this training course. This update is now available since last month, and we’ve already successfully given several sessions of this updated course.

The major improvements and updates are:

All the practical labs are now done on the highly popular ARMv7 based BeagleBone Black, which offers much more expansion capabilities than the Calao USB-A9263 platform we were using. This also means that participants to our public training sessions keep the BeagleBone Black with them after the session!
All the course materials and practical labs were updated to cover and use the Device Tree mechanism. We also for example cover how to configure pin muxing on the BeagleBone Black through the Device Tree.
The training course is now centered around the development of two device drivers:
1. A driver for the Wii Nunchuk. This device is connected over I2C to the BeagleBone Black, and we detail, step by step, how to write a driver that communicates over I2C with the device and then exposes the device functionalities to userspace through the input kernel subsystem.
2. A minimal driver for the OMAP UART, which we use to illustrate how to interface with memory-mapped devices: mapping I/O registers, accessing them, handling interrupts, putting processes to sleep and waking them up, etc. We expose some minimal functionality of the device to userspace through the misc kernel subsystem. This subsystem is useful to expose the functionalities of non-standard types of devices, such as custom devices implemented inside FPGAs.

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.

Announcing our “Android System Development” training

Android Robot For multiple years, Bootlin has provided two typical training courses for embedded Linux developers: an Embedded Linux system development course that focuses on the basics for embedded Linux development (bootloader and kernel configuration, compiling and usage, system integration and build systems, cross-compiling, filesystems, application development and debugging, etc.) and an embedded Linux kernel and driver development course that focuses on kernel and driver development (kernel APIs for drivers, character drivers, device model, power management, kernel porting, etc.). In total, we have given dozens of editions of these sessions in multiple locations all around the world. We have kept our commitment to release all the training materials under a free license (the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA license), and they are therefore freely accessible for anyone at /docs/.

We are now announcing a new course, called Android System Development. It is a four day training session that targets engineers who need to develop embedded systems with Google Android.

Through theory and practical labs, the course makes you familiar with compiling and booting Android, with adapting Android to support a new embedded board (assuming that it is already supported by the Linux kernel), and with building a real system through accessing specific hardware, customizing the filesystem and using debugging techniques. See the complete agenda. The training materials for this session will also be made available under the same Creative Commons CC-BY-SA license.

If you are interested in this training session, you can:

Join the public session organized in Toulouse, France, on June 11-14, 2012.
Order an on-site training session to be held at your location. See registration details.

This training course will be given by our engineer Maxime Ripard who has gained Android experience by working at Archos on Android tablets, by making Android work on multiple TI OMAP3 based platforms and also by participating to the Android Builders Summit conference.

Do not hesitate to contact us for further details about this new training course.

Embedded Linux Opportunities – Keynote in Eindhoven

If you live near Eindhoven in the Netherlands, or if you can easily get there, you may be interested in the seminar organized by Fontys University on June 25, 2010.

I will be in Eindhoven on that week to give our Embedded Linux System Development course. The session is organized by Fontys University and Alten PTS, and Fontys invited me to give a keynote at their seminar on Friday.

The seminar topic is: “Embedded Linux for SMEs” – A guide to professional development:

Ruud Ermers (Fontys) – A Guide to professional development
Gerben Blom (Alten PTS) – Android for SMEs
Michael Opdenacker (Bootlin) – Embedded Linux Opportunities. Ideas and advise for the Open Minded.
The grand race, between arm9 controlled vehicles.
Technical demos

Here is the abstract for my speech:

Michael Opdenacker created Bootlin in 2004, a company that is best known worldwide for the technical resources it shares with the embedded Linux community. The more this company shares (in the true sense of sharing: giving and receiving), the more successful it gets.

That’s why Michael will come to exchange ideas and experience on building successful embeddded Linux systems and businesses. Just make sure you send him a SIGSTOP signal at the end of his timeslot.

To water your mouth, this talk will show a few things which are possible with embedded Linux and free software building blocks. You will see how you can turn an idea into something that could keep you busy during your whole life if you are not careful.

So, if you are in the Eindhoven area, this could be a nice opportunity to meet. I hope to see you there!

Embedded Linux practical labs with the Beagle Board

Note: the materials for training with the Beagle Board are no longer available, and would be significantly out of date anyway. We advise you to check our Embedded Linux System Development and Linux Kernel and Driver Development training courses for up-to-date instructions that work on cheaper boards, which are still available on the market today. And if you still have an old Beagle board, it will be an interesting exercise to adapt our current labs to run them on such hardware.

We were asked to customize our embedded Linux training session with specific labs on OMAP 3530 hardware. After a successful delivery on the customer site, using Beagle boards, here are our training materials, released as usual under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 license:

If you are the happy owner of such a board (both attractive and cheap), or are interested in getting one, you can get valuable embedded Linux experience by reading our lecture materials and by taking our practical labs.

Here’s what you would practise with if you decide to take our labs:

Build a cross-compiling toolchain with crosstool-NG
Compile U-boot and the X-loader and install it on MMC and flash storage.
Manipulate Linux kernel sources and apply source patches
Configure, compile and boot a Linux kernel for an emulated PC target
Configure, cross-compile and boot a Linux kernel on your Beagle Board
Build a tiny filesystem from scratch, based on BusyBox, and with a web server interface. Practice with NFS booting.
Put your filesystem on MMC storage, replacing NFS. Practice with SquashFS.
Put your filesystem on internal NAND flash storage. Practice with JFFS2 too.
Manually cross-compile libraries (zlib, libpng, libjpeg, FreeType and DirectFB) and a DirectFB examples, getting familiar with the tricks required to cross-compile components provided by the community.
Build the same kind of graphical system automatically with Buildroot.
Compile your own application against existing libraries. Debug a target application with strace, ltrace and gdbserver running on the target.
Do experiments with the rt-preempt patches. Measure scheduling latency improvements.
Implement hotplugging with mdev, BusyBox’s lightweight alternative to udev.

Note that the labs were tested with Rev. C boards, but are also supposed to work fine with Rev. B ones. You may also be able to reuse some of our instructions with other boards with a TI OMAP3 processor.

Of course, if you like the materials, you can also ask your company to order such a training session from us. We will be delighted to come to your place and spend time with you and your colleagues.

USB-Ethernet device for Linux

Useful device when you work with an embedded development board

For our Embedded Linux training sessions, I was looking for a USB to Ethernet device. Since Linux supported devices are often difficult to find, I’m glad to share my investigations here.

When you use an embedded development board, you must connect it to your computer with an Ethernet cable, for example to transfer a new kernel image to U-boot through tftp, or to make your board boot on a directory on your workstation, exported with NFS.

You could connect both the board and computer to your local network, which would still allow your computer to connect to the Internet while you work with the board. However, you may create conflicts on your local network if you don’t use DHCP to assign an IP address to your board (if your DHCP server even accepts this new device on the network). In a training environment, you are also likely to run out of Ethernet outlets in the training room if you have to connect 8 such boards. Hence, a direct connection between the board and your workstation’s Ethernet port is often the most convenient solution.

If you can’t use WIFI to keep your computer connected to the outside world, a good solution is to add an extra Ethernet port to your computer by using an USB-to-Ethernet device.

My colleague Thomas and I started looking for such devices that would be supported by Linux. Here are a few that we found:

D-Link DUB-E100. Supported by the USB_NET_AX8817X driver. However, this product is bulky and quite heavy (at least 100 grams).
TRENDnet TU2-E100. Supported by the same driver, but still bulk (August 2015 update: now replaced by a more recent version, now almost as small as the Apple one, and supported out of the box in Linux. See the comment about this device.)
Linksys USB 200m. Supported by the same Linux driver and has a much more acceptable size, but customer reviews complain that its connector can break easily.
Apple USB Ethernet Adapter. This should be working out of the box in Linux. At least the MB442Z/A or MC704ZM/A references did, but Apple now sells a new reference that might have a different chipset. It is beautiful, small and light. Support for this device (at least the references I mentioned) was added to Linux 2.6.26 through the same driver. You should be able to use it in recent distros.

So, I recommend the Apple device. I event posted a comment on the Apple Store, titled “Perfect for Linux”! I hope the Apple droids won’t censor it. Don’t hesitate to buy it, so that we can confirm that the latest reference is supported too.

I can’t tell whether this could happen with Apple. This was the first Apple device I ever bought…

Public session changes

New agenda, sessions in Grenoble, and walking away with an embedded board

Did you notice? We’ve made significant changes to our next public training sessions.

First of all, partnering with CALAO Systems, we are opening new public sessions in Grenoble.

In the upcoming sessions, we also offer a new training agenda, covering embedded Linux system development in full detail. Until recently, our public trainings dedicated approximately 3 days to kernel integration and device driver development, and only 2 days to real-time and to developing the system itself. The new sessions will still cover kernel configuration, (cross)compiling and usage, but will leave Linux kernel and driver development to dedicated sessions.

The new training sessions will thus cover the below topics:

Introduction to embedded Linux
Bootloaders
Configuring, (cross)compiling and booting a Linux kernel
Block filesystems
Flash filesystems – Manipulating flash partitions
C library and cross-compiling toolchains
Embedded system development tools
BusyBox and other lightweight tools for embedded systems. Graphical toolkits
Debugging and profiling tools
Implementing realtime requirements
Udev and hotplugging
System optimizations
Practical lab: implementing a multimedia system

For the first time too, each participant will walk away with an embedded board from CALAO systems. After the training sessions, you will then be able to go on practicing with the new technologies that you discovered, and to build your own system prototypes.

You will find more details in the description of our public training sessions.

If there is enough demand, we will propose other public sessions in September 2009, this time on Linux kernel and device driver development. Don’t hesitate to contact us if you are interested in such a session. We could even make it earlier if enough people are interested.

Real hardware in our training sessions

At last, real hardware in our training sessions

If you haven’t had a look at our new training agendas, you may not have noticed that we now use real hardware in our embedded Linux and kernel training sessions. For 4 years, we had been using the QEMU emulator on the x86, arm and mips platforms. While this simplified training session logistics, and avoided any trouble due to hardware failures, this was not close enough to the real world situations that our customers face.

We chose the nifty boards from Calao Systems. They have great features that make them very attractive for training and prototyping purposes

AT91SAM9263 ARM CPU from ATMEL, running at 200 MHz
64 MB of RAM and 256 MB of flash, which are more than enough for any embedded system we can think of.
Small and light (30 g), with a USB connector replacing power, serial and JTAG connectors, making it easy to travel with several of these devices without having to carry many heavy accessories. Carrying convenience was a key decision factor.
100 Mbit Ethernet port, allowing to practice with root filesystems on NFS, and with tftp from the U-boot command line.
2 USB 2.0 host ports, allowing to connect any type of device. In particular, we are thinking about USB mass storage and webcam devices.
1 USB device port, allowing to experiment with Linux USB gadget drivers.
Very affordable price (less than 160 €).

On the software side, this board is also very attractive:

It is supported by the mainline Linux kernel, since version 2.6.27.
A bricked board can be reflashed without ever needing to use Windows, thanks the Linux version of Atmel’s SAM-BA utility.
It will soon be supported by the mainline version of U-boot. We are contributing to this.
It should also be directly supported in the mainline version of Buildroot in the next months, making it easy to build complete root filesystems for it. We will also work on this.

We will also soon offer training cost options that include these boards. This way, customers can walk away with their own device and easily continue to practice with the training hardware and make prototypes, without having to go through an extra purchasing process.