Tag: conference

Bootlin at ELCE 2009

Grenoble

As usual, we won’t miss this year’s edition of the Embedded Linux Conference Europe, which has always been a great source of information and encounters for embedded Linux developers.

Here are details about our involvement this year.

  • I am part of the organization committee, in particular the coordinator for the Technical Showcase.
  • Taking advantage of his stay in Grenoble, my colleague Thomas Petazzoni will make an embedded Linux presentation on Tuesday, Oct. 13 at 7:30 pm, at GUILDE, the local Linux user group.
  • Thomas and I will be present at the Embedded Systems Exhibition on Wednesday, Oct. 14, sharing a booth with our partner CALAO Systems. The exhibition entry is free of charge, and this will be an excellent opportunity to meet us and have enough time to talk about your topics of interest.
  • Thomas will lead the Buildroot BOF with Peter Korsgaard, Buildroot’s maintainer, at 5:35 pm on Thursday, Oct. 15. This informal session will allow users and developers to meet and exchange ideas.
  • I will be the leader of the Small Business BOF on Thursday 15 at 6:35 pm, an informal session for small embedded Linux companies interested in sharing experience and best practices, and of course to know each other better.
  • I will make a presentation on boot time reduction techniques, at 3:40 on Friday, Oct. 16.
  • Albin Tonnerre, who was an intern at Bootlin this summer, will participate to the Technical Showcase at 12:00 am on Friday, Oct. 16, showing the benefits of LZO decompression on kernel boot time. During his internship, Albin made very nice contributions to boot time reduction, power management on AT91 and to U-boot board support.
  • Thomas Petazzoni will also participate to the Technical Showcase at the same time, showing Buidroot’s new features.
  • We will videotape the conferences we go to and will release the videos later on our website.
  • Thomas organizes a Buildroot developer day on Saturday, Oct. 17, allowing developers to meet and code together. Bootlin will offer lunch to the participants, and the room will be offered by CALAO Systems. There are no more seats left for space reasons.

Hope to see you in Grenoble!

Embedded Linux Conference Europe 2009 program

GrenobleAs we announced a few months ago, Embedded Linux Conference 2009 will take place in Grenoble, France on October 15th and 16th. The list of sessions has just been published online, and as usual, it is a very exciting list of in-depth technical talks.

Because of my involvement in Buildroot, I’m particularly interested in the numerous talks about embedded Linux build systems: Florian Fainelli will talk about OpenWRT (which is not only dedicated to Wifi routers, but is a generic embedded Linux build system, built as a fork of Buildroot), Gordon Hecker on e2factory (a build system I’ve never heard of until now, but conferences are great to discover new tools and projects), Cedric Hombourger on OpenEmbedded (I will be particularly happy to meet Cedric again since I had the chance to work with him six years ago), Marcin Jusziewicz on OpenEmbedded again, Robert Schwebel on PTXdist and finally Alex de Vries on what seems to be a more generic talk about build systems.

Of course, besides build systems, a lot of other topics will be covered. I’ve noted things such as the talk on Canola by Gustavo Barbieri, the boot time presentation by Grégory Clément, the device tree talks by Wolfram Sang and Vitaly Wool, the talk by Alessandro Rubini in order to meet one of the author of Linux Device Drivers, the power management and clock management talks also.

Bootlin will obviously be present during this conference :

  • Michael Opdenacker, my colleague, will give a talk entitled Update on boot time reduction techniques
  • Michael, again, will be the chair of a Small Business BOF, which should allow small companies offering services around embedded Linux to meet and exchange their ideas and experience
  • Finally, I will be the co-chair with Peter Korsgaard of a BOF on Buildroot
  • We will share a booth with our partner Calao Systems during the Minalogic Embedded Systems Exhibition. This will be another opportunity to meet.

I hope to see you in October at ELCE !

ELC 2009 videos

My Colleague Thomas and I had the privilege to participate to the 2009 edition of the Embedded Linux Conference, which took place in San Francisco, on April 6-8. In spite of the weak economy, this event was once again a success. It attracted major developers from the embedded Linux community, as well as participants from all over the word.

Following the tradition, we are proud to release new videos about this event. These videos were shot by Satoru Ueda and Tim Bird (Sony), and by Thomas Petazzoni and Michael Opdenacker (Bootlin). For the first time, we used an HD camcorder to shoot some of the videos. A higher resolution allows to read the slides projected on the screen. As usual, the videos are released with a Creative Commons Attribution – ShareAlike 3.0 license.

Thomas and I found the following talks particularly interesting:

  • Ubiquitous Linux, by Dirk Hohndel
  • Embedded Linux and Mainline Kernel, by David Woodhouse
  • What are Interrupt Threads and How Do They Work?, by Reece Pollack
  • Visualizing Process Memory, by Matt Mackall
  • KProbes and Systemtap Status, by Tim Bird
  • Deploying LTTng on Exotic Embedded Architectures, by Mathieu Desnoyers
  • Embedded Linux on FPGAs for fun and profit, by Dr John Williams (Petalogix)
  • Linux on Embedded PowerPC porting guide, by Grant Likely
  • Understanding and writing an LLVM Compiler Backend, by Bruno Cardoso Lopes

You may be interested in watching the presentations we made and the BOFs we led:

  • Building Embedded Linux Systems with Buildroot, by Thomas Petazzoni. In these last months, Thomas has made big contributions to this build system.
  • Build tools BOF, by Thomas Petazzoni
  • Update on filesystems for flash storage, by Michael Opdenacker
  • System Size BOF, by Michael Opdenacker

Of course, lots of other talks were very interesting. See the whole list by yourself:

ELC Europe in Grenoble

Grenoble

Just a quick note after the announcement that has just been made at the Embedded Linux Conference (ELC) in San Francisco…

Tim Bird has just announced that the next European edition of ELC will be in Grenoble, France, on October 15-16. As the new conference home page says, it will be colocated with ESWEEK.

We are very excited about this news, as Grenoble is a not only a beautiful place, but also a very dynamic city full of universities and high-tech companies. We will do our best to incite people to attend the conference, and of course to speak about their projects and propose demos.

Bootlin at ELC

My colleague Thomas Petazzoni and I will participate to the Embedded Linux Conference on April 6-8 in San Francisco.

This is an exciting conference with a very interesting program, and we are proud to be part of it:Golden Gate Bridge

If participate to this conference too, and if you are interested in the above topics, or in topics we covered in this blog, don’t hesitate to come and chat with us. We will both arrive on Saturday afternoon, so we could even meet before the conference starts.

If you can’t make it to this conference, we will also shoot and share videos as usual, so at least you won’t miss the technical contents. You will just miss the beer together…

FOSDEM 2009 videos

As previously announced, I had the chance to attend the FOSDEM conference again this year. And once again, the famous Bootlin video camera was with me, and I could record a few talks. I’m pleased to make them available today.

FOSDEM, the Free and Open Source Software Developers' European Meeting

Here are the available videos, with my personal comments. Of course, except the talk about CMake, all of them come from the embedded devroom. Thanks to the speakers for sharing their knowledge and presenting their projects !

  • video captureWt, a C++ web toolkit, for rich web interfaces to embedded systems, by Pieter Libin (Noesis Solutions)
    Video (44 minutes, 124M)
    Presentation of a Web application generator, which generates a Web application including a web server from a C++ description. The C++ design is based on many ideas coming from Qt, which eases the creation of the graphical application. Certainly a very interesting tool for embedded systems.
  • Hacking with modular hardware: the BUG, by Ken Gilmer (Bug Labs)
    Video (43 minutes, 129M)
    The BUG is a set of hardware modules that can be combined together. A base module contains the CPU, memory and other basic components, while additional modules can provide GPS, Wifi, webcam, I/O lines and many others. Of course, it comes with a completely free software SDK. Can be an interesting starting point for prototyping or hobbyist embedded hacking, even though the hardware is quite expensive.
  • Building Embedded Linux Systems with PTXdist, by Robert Schwebel (Pengutronix)
    Video (68 minutes, 151M)
    A very good presentation on why system building tools are needed for Embedded Linux systems (cross-compiling issues, etc.), and how PTXdist fits this need. Even though I’m personally quite fan of Buildroot, PTXdist’s competitor, the presentation was very interesting.
  • video captureDevelopment on the OpenMoko with hackable:1, by Pierre Pronchery (Bearstech)
    Video (55 minutes, 189M)
    A hands-on lab on the OpenMoko, which unfortunately was too short to be really interesting, and restricted to only the 10-12 people at the front of the room. Interesting for the people who did it, probably not so interesting to watch afterwards.
  • Development and Certification of Linux-Based Fire Safety & Security Systems, by Baurzhan Ismagulov (Siemens)
    Video (47 minutes, 124M)
    The topic of the talk was really appealing, because the use of free software in environments where human life is in danger has always caused many debates and discussions. Unfortunately, the talk completely misses the point : the speaker spent the whole talk discussing Germany-specific rules and laws for the certification of fire safety and security systems, almost without saying a word on how Linux can match these rules.
  • Maemo on BeagleBoard, by Juha Kallionen (Nokia)
    Video (20 minutes, 51M)
    Good talk, but not a lot of content, outside of « Hey, we run Maemo on BeagleBoard, try it !». A kind of announcement talk, I would say.
  • video captureAdvanced power management for OMAP3, by Peter De Schrijver (Nokia)
    Video (49 minutes, 169M)
    A very interesting, in-depth, technical talk about the power management features of the OMAP3 CPU and how these features can be used by the Linux kernel.
  • Emdebian 1.0 release – small and super small Debian, by Neil Williams (Debian)
    Video (86 minutes, 257M)
    video captureAgain, another interesting talk about the status of Emdebian, which has just reached 1.0. Neil described both Emdebian Crush and Emdebian Grip, that are two different approaches for making Debian more suitable for embedded systems. Very good progress has been made, and Emdebian is certainly something that should now be considered as a distribution for embedded systems.
  • CMake – what can it do for your project, by Alexander Neundorf
    Video (45 minutes, 167M)
    A general introduction to CMake, with lots of examples and demonstrations. Very nice for those who never had the opportunity to look at CMake.

Program for Embedded Linux Conference 2009 announced

CELF penguinThe program for the Embedded Linux Conference 2009 has been announced a few days ago, and the registration is now open. For the record, the Embedded Linux Conference is probably the largest technical conference specifically dedicated to the use of Linux on embedded systems. Organized by the CE Linux Forum every year, this conference gathers a large audience and a wide range of very interesting talks.

The 2009 edition of ELC will take place from April 6th to April 8th, in downtown San Francisco, in the United States.

The program features :

  • Almost 50 talks, tutorials and keynotes. The topics go from multimedia, flash filesystems, system initialization, memory management, instrumentation and debugging tools, real-time, embedded distributions, system building,
  • An opening keynote by Dirk Hohndel from Intel
  • A keynote by David Woodhouse, one of the two embedded Linux maintainers
  • Other famous speakers such as Paul Mundt (maintainer of the Linux port to the SuperH architecture), Kate Alhola (from Maemo/Nokia), Dan Malek (from Embedded Alley), Mike Anderson (the PTR group, famous for his JTAG tutorial), Jake Edge (from LWN), Klaas van Gend (from Montavista), Frank Rowand (from Sony, famous for his real-time adventures talk), Jim Ready, Denis Oliver Kropp (DirectFB main developer)
  • A panel on The Linux Kernel, what’s next with Jonathan Corbet, Greg KH, Andrew Morton, Keith Packard and Ted Ts’o
  • And last but not least, a talk from Michael Opdenacker, Bootlin, on flash filesystems.

Of course, both Michael and I will attend the conference. Hope to meet you there!
Golden Gate Bridge

Call for presentations for the LSM embedded track

The Libre Software Meeting (LSM) is an annual event on free software taking place in july in France since 2000. The LSM meeting is organized this year in Nantes, France from 7th to 11th July. Amongst several tracks, the Libre Software Meeting will feature an « Embedded Systems and Open Hardware » track, for which the call for presentations has been released recently.

The purpose of the “Embedded Systems and Open Hardware” session is to give the state of the art of free software for embedded systems and Open Hardware. Technical topics of this session include but are not limited to:

  • Embedded OS Development kernel architecture, implementation and port for embedded systems
  • Embedded Development Tools: tool chains and project cases (tool chain projects, packaging for cross compilation, portability …)
  • Embedded Linux: µClinux…
  • Real-time extensions for Linux: RTLinux, RTAI…
  • Hard real-time kernels: eCos, RTEMS, ADEOS, Xenomai…
  • Soft Real-time kernels
  • Embedded Java
  • GUI for embedded systems: Gtk, Qt, Nano/X…
  • Linux and System on Chip (SoC)
  • Open Hardware, Open design, free IP modules (Intellectual Property) and softcores: opencores, OpenRISC, NIOS, Microblaze, LEONSparc, FPGA…

The conference will last 30 minutes, questions included. Round tables will be organized. Synthetic presentations are scheduled to last 20 minutes. PDF versions of the presentation are not mandatory but they will be greatly appreciated (with an online web access just after the LSM event, they are a very useful documentation source for the entire community).

If you plan to participate and to propose a presentation, please send a message as soon as possible to the following address: embarque@rmll.info with a summary of your presentation (and if you can, a summary in English too) no later than 15th march 2009. Feel free to forward this Call For Presentation to other places or to everyone you think could be interested.

Embedded Linux Conference Europe 2008 videos

Together with the announcement of our free mainlining offer in our Linux kernel and bsp development services, we are pleased to announce the availability of new conference videos.

The CELF Embedded Linux Conference Europe (ELCE) and the NLUUG Autumn Conference on Mobile Computing took place last November in Ede, in the Netherlands.

For those who don’t know them yet, the Embedded Linux Conference (ELC) and ELCE are in our opinion the most interesting conferences for embedded Linux system developers. They cover only interesting topics, such as power management, boot time, flash storage, security, graphics, mobile applications and many more.

This time, four people shot videos: Ruud Derwig (NXP), Tim Bird (Sony), Thomas Petazzoni and Michael Opdenacker (both from Bootlin). Then, Thomas took care of reading the tapes and DVDs, and encoding them to Ogg/Theora, all this in just a few minutes of manual intervention, thanks to his super automated scripts.

Here are all the videos:

Speakers were supposed to post their slides on the CELF Wiki, but some of them haven’t done it yet.

If you don’t know which video to start with, here are the talks that Thomas Petazzoni and I preferred:

Of course, these are just our personal recommendations, from the talks we managed to attend. We are sure that many other ones are worth recommending.

Bootlin at FOSDEM 2009

The Free and Open Source Developer European Meeting (FOSDEM) is a major event for open source developers in Europe. This two-days event takes place in Brussels since several years and attracts 2000-3000 people around conferences and development rooms. The program for the main tracks has been recently announced, but the program for the development rooms is not available at this time. However, I’ve been at FOSDEM the last two years and always found interesting talks and discussions.

FOSDEM Banner

Of course, I’ll be particularly interested by the Embedded Devroom, and will record videos of the talks that will be posted on Bootlin website after the conference, as usual.

If you happen to come to FOSDEM, I’ll be happy to meet you!