Category: training

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.
  • CALAO USB 92632 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.

Many new training materials

12 pages with new training materials!

We are happy to release many new training materials that we created along the course of 2008, for our embedded Linux and kernel training sessions:

Many thanks to customers who asked us to cover new topics!

This is actually the tip of the iceberg (with penguins standing on top of it, of course). The documents that have been around for a long time have also undergone significant improvements and have been updated every time new versions with interesting features were released. We are doing our best to keep our training sessions up to date, and this keeps us pretty busy! So, if you haven’t had a look at these documents for a while, you will probably learn new things if you open them again.

Why so many documents at once? Well, we usually try to release the new documents that we create as early as possible. Here are a few excuses for doing this late this time:

  • We’ve had a very busy year (new training sessions, development and service work), preventing us from polishing our new documents and creating new pages describing them.
  • The switch to our new website took more time than expected. We were reluctant to add more pages that would have caused more migration work, and we were also busy deploying the KVM virtualization technology on our new server.
  • We are also switching the documents to a new template, which leaves more space for real content and less space for logos and for information repeated on every page. This work is far from being over yet!
  • We couldn’t release them for National Security reasons Winking smiley.

Now that there’s no infrastructure work left, and that we have run out of excuses (except the one about being busy, we still are), we should be able to release our new documents much earlier.

So, stay tuned on our RSS feed, more will come soon!

Linux USB drivers

Learning how to write USB device drivers for Linux

Bootlin is proud to release a new set of training slides from its embedded Linux training materials. These new ones cover writing USB device drivers for Linux.

Like everything we create, these new materials are released to the user and developer community under a free license. They can be freely downloaded, copied, distributed or even modified according to the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 license.

Free embedded Linux training materials

Bootlin embedded Linux training materials freely available

This was our first, initial annoucement in 2004. Since then, we have made huge improvements to our embedded Linux and Linux kernel and device driver development training courses. See all our training materials.

The 500 page materials of Bootlin’sembedded Linux training have just been published.

They are all released under the terms of the “GNU Free Documentation License (with no invariant sections).

Full training materials

Presentations