The schedule for the upcoming Embedded Linux Conference Europe 2022 has been published recently.
Bootlin CEO Thomas Petazzoni is again a member of the program committee for this edition of ELCE, and has helped with other members of this committee in reviewing and selecting the numerous talk submissions that have been received.
Bootlin will obviously be present at this conference. With 13 engineers from Bootlin participating, almost the entire company will be in Dublin for this major event of the embedded Linux community. Also, 4 of the talks that we had submitted have been accepted:
- Luca Ceresoli on Basics of I2C on Linux
This talk is an introduction to using I²C on embedded Linux devices. I²C (or I2C) is a simple but flexible electronic bus to allow low-speed communication between the CPU and all sorts of chips: PMICs, ADC/DACs, GPIO expanders, video sensors, audio codecs, EEPROMS, RTCs and many more. It is so popular that knowing it is a must for any embedded system engineer. Luca will first give an introduction to what I2C is at the electrical level. He will then describe how I2C is implemented in the Linux kernel driver model and how that appears in sysfs, how to describe I2C devices using device tree and how to write a driver for an I2C device. Finally he will present the tools to communicate with the chips from userspace and share some debugging techniques, including inspection of the physical bus and software-level debugging. - Miquèl Raynal on Improving Wireless PAN Support
Anybody eager to learn about IoT devices has at least once tried to play with Zigbee or 6lowpan sensors. These two protocols are built on top of a well common MAC/PHY specification: IEEE 802.15.4, also known as Wireless Personal Area Networks: WPAN, designed to be low-rate/low-range wireless networks. There is already substantial support for this protocol in the Linux kernel but when my journey started, several of the MAC-related operations well described in the specification were not implemented, making the subsystem mainly useful for very simple use cases: peer-to-peer transmissions. This is unfortunate as a significant part of the idea behind WPAN is to make these networks quite adaptive and resilient, which requires a minimal subset of the peer management procedure to be supported. Besides a number of preparation changes, the main idea behind the continuous flow of patches was to bring support for the scanning procedure which allows a PAN controller to detect all the compatible devices around it in different ways. Discovering these devices is the first step in order to associate them together and build up starred networks. This talk will be an opportunity to explain the new APIs allowing such discoveries and provide a state of the art of the support in the mainline kernel. - Michael Opdenacker on Implementing A/B System Updates with U-Boot
A popular way to implement system updates is through the A/B scheme, in which you have two copies of the root filesystem, one which is active, and one that is meant to contain the next update. When a new update is successfully applied, you need to make the corresponding partition become the new active one. That’s when a number of practical questions arise, such as how to identify the active partition, how to detect when the new system fails to boot properly, and how to fall back to the previous version? It was hard to find documentation about how U-Boot could address such needs to implement a functional and failsafe A/B system update mechanism. This presentation proposes to address this need by sharing the practical solutions we found, using lesser known commands and capabilities in U-Boot. We will also explain how the Linux side can cooperate with the U-Boot side. Fortunately, you won’t need to erase half of your brain to get updated on this topic. - Paul Kocialkowski on Walking Through the Linux-Based Graphics Stack
The graphics stack used with the Linux kernel is a notoriously complex beast. From userspace down to the kernel level, a number of components are involved and interact with eachother. It is also an area that is constantly evolving to meet new use cases, refresh legacy implementations and achieve better performance. This makes it difficult to have a clear idea of the big picture and what is actually happening when using graphics-related components. This presentation will detail a walk through the graphics stack, with actual examples of displaying a buffer and rendering using the GPU. Going from the application level through the system libraries, down to the kernel and ending with actual hardware configuration. State-of-the-art technologies such as Wayland and DRM will be highlighted with relevant excerpts from the source code of related free software projects that are widely used today.
We look forward to meeting again the embedded Linux community, its developers, users and maintainers, at Dublin during this conference!
