Tag: conference

Bootlin at the X Developer Conference

The next X.org Developer Conference will take place on September 21 to September 23 in Helsinki, Finland. This is a major event for Linux developers working in the graphics/display areas, not only at the X.org level, but also at the kernel level, in Mesa, and other related projects.

Bootlin engineer Maxime Ripard will be attending this conference, with 80+ other engineers from Intel, Google, NVidia, Texas Instruments, AMD, RedHat, etc.

Maxime is the author of the DRM/KMS driver in the upstream Linux kernel for the Allwinner SoCs, which provides display support for numerous Allwinner platforms, especially Nextthing’s CHIP (with parallel LCD support, HDMI support, VGA support and composite video support). Maxime has also worked on making the 3D acceleration work on this platform with a mainline kernel, by adapting the Mali kernel driver. Most recently, Maxime has been involved in Video4Linux development, writing a driver for the camera interface of Allwinner SoCs, and supervising Florent Revest work on the Allwinner VPU that we published a few days ago.

Bootlin at the Embedded Linux Conference Europe

The next Embedded Linux Conference Europe will take place from October 11 to October 13 in Berlin, Germany. As usual, the entire Bootlin engineering team will participate, which means this time 10 participants from Bootlin!

Embedded Linux Conference Europe 2016

The schedule for the conference has been published recently, and a number of our talk proposals have been accepted, so we will present on the following topics:

Like every year, we’re looking forward to attending this conference, and meeting all the nice folks of the Embedded Linux community!

“Understanding D-Bus” talk at the Toulouse Embedded Linux Meetup

A few months ago, in May, Bootlin engineer Mylène Josserand presented a talk titled Understanding D-Bus at the Toulouse Embedded Linux and Android meetup.

In this talk, Mylène shared her experience working with D-Bus, especially in conjunction with the OFono and Connman projects, to support modem and 3G connections on embedded Linux systems.

Understanding D-Bus

We are now publishing the slides of Mylène’s talk, they are available in PDF format.

Slides from Collaboration Summit talk on Linux kernel upstreaming

As we announced in a previous blog post, Bootlin CTO Thomas Petazzoni gave a talk at the Collaboration Summit 2016 covering the topic of “Upstreaming hardware support in the Linux kernel: why and how?“.

The slides of the talk are now available in PDF format.

Upstreaming hardware support in the Linux kernel: why and how?

Upstreaming hardware support in the Linux kernel: why and how?

Upstreaming hardware support in the Linux kernel: why and how?

Through this talk, we identified a number of major reasons that should encourage hardware vendors to contribute the support for their hardware to the upstream Linux kernel, and some hints on how to achieve that. Of course, within a 25 minutes time slot, it was not possible to get into the details, but hopefully the general hints we have shared, based on our significant Linux kernel upstreaming experience, have been useful for the audience.

Unfortunately, none of the talks at the Collaboration Summit were recorded, so no video will be available for this talk.

Bootlin at the Embedded Linux Conference 2016

Like every year for about 10 years, the entire Bootlin engineering team will participate to the next Embedded Linux Conference, taking place on April 4-6 in San Diego, California. For us, participating to such conferences is very important, as it allows to remain up to date with the latest developments in the embedded Linux world, create contacts with other members of the embedded Linux community, and meet the community members we already know and work with on a daily basis via the mailing lists or IRC.

Embedded Linux Conference 2016

Over the years, our engineering team has grown, and with the arrival of two more engineers on March 14, our engineering team now gathers 9 persons, all of whom are going to participate to the Embedded Linux Conference.

As usual, in addition to attending, we also proposed a number of talks, and some of them have been accepted and are visible in the conference schedule:

As usual, our talks are centered around our areas of expertise: hardware support in the Linux kernel, especially for ARM platforms, and build system related topics (Buildroot, Yocto, autotools).

We are looking forward to attending this event, and see many other talks from various speakers: the proposed schedule contains a wide range of topics, many of which look really interesting!

Bootlin speaking at the Linux Collaboration Summit

Bootlin engineers are regular speakers at the Embedded Linux Conference and Embedded Linux Conference Europe events from the Linux Foundation, to which our entire engineering team participates each year.

In 2016, for the first time, we will also be speaking at the Collaboration Summit, an invitation-only event where, as the Linux Foundation presents it, “the world’s thought leaders in open source software and collaborative development convene to share best practices and learn how to manage the largest shared technology investments of our time”.

Collaboration Summit 2016

This event will take place on March 29-31 in Lake Tahoe, California, and the event schedule has been published recently. Bootlin CTO Thomas Petazzoni will be giving a talk Upstreaming hardware support in the Linux kernel: why and how?, during which we will share our experience working with HW manufacturers to bring the support for their hardware to the upstream Linux kernel, discuss the benefits of upstreaming, and best practices to work with upstream.

With a small team of engineers, Bootlin has merged over the last few years thousands of patches in the official Linux kernel, and has several of its engineers having maintainer positions in the Linux kernel community. We are happy to take the opportunity of the Collaboration Summit to share some of our experience, and hopefully encourage and help other companies to participate upstream.

2016 Q1 newsletter

Newsletter iconThe Bootlin team wishes you a Happy New Year for 2016, with many new bits to enjoy in your life!

Bootlin is happy to take this opportunity to share some news about the latest training and contribution activities of the company.

Bootlin work on the $9 computer

As announced in our previous newsletter, Bootlin has been working intensively on developing the low-level software support for the first $9 computer, the C.H.I.P by Next Thing Co.

Next Thing Co. has successfully delivered an initial batch of platforms in September to the early adopters, and has started shipping the final products in December to thousands of Kickstarter supporters.

Those products are using the U-Boot and Linux kernel ported by Bootlin engineers, with numerous patches submitted to the official projects and more to be submitted in the coming weeks and months:

  • Support for the C.H.I.P platform itself, in U-Boot and in the Linux kernel;
  • Support for audio on Allwinner platforms added to the Linux kernel;
  • Development of a DRM/KMS driver for the graphics controller found on Allwinner platforms;
  • Significant research effort on finding appropriate solutions to support Multi-Level Cell NANDs in the Linux kernel;
  • Enabling of the NAND storage in Single-Level Cell mode, until the Multi-Level Cell mode can be enabled reliably;
  • Addition of NAND support in the fastboot implementation of U-Boot, which is used to reflash the C.H.I.P.

We will continue to work on the C.H.I.P over the next months, with among other things more work on the graphics side and the NAND side.

Kernel contributions

The primary focus of the majority of our customer projects remain the Linux kernel, to which we continue to contribute very significantly.

Linux 4.2

We contributed 203 patches to this release, with a new IIO driver for the ADC found on Marvell Berlin platforms, a big cleanup to the support of Atmel platforms, improvements to the DMA controller driver for Atmel platforms, a completely new driver for the cryptographic accelerator found on Marvell EBU platforms.

In this cycle, our engineer Alexandre Belloni became the official maintainer of the RTC subsystem.

See details on our contributions to Linux 4.2

Linux 4.3

We contributed 110 patches to this release, with mainly improvements to the DRM/KMS driver and DMA controller driver for Atmel platforms and power management improvements for Marvell platforms.

See details on our contributions to Linux 4.3

Linux 4.4

We contributed 112 patches to this release, the main highlights being an additional RTC driver, a PWM driver, support for the C.H.I.P platform, and improvements to the NAND support.

See details on our contributions to Linux 4.4

Work on ARM 64-bit platform

We have started to work on supporting the Linux kernel on several ARM 64 bits platforms from different vendors. We will be submitting the initial patches in the coming weeks and will progressively improve the support for those platforms throughout 2016 where a major part of our Linux kernel contribution effort will shift to ARM 64-bit.

Growing engineering team

Our engineering team, currently composed of six engineers, will be significantly expanded in 2016:

  • Two additional embedded Linux engineers will join us in March 2016 and will be working with our engineering team in Toulouse, France. They will help us on our numerous Linux kernel and Linux BSP projects.
  • An engineering intern will join us starting early February, and will work on setting up a board farm to contribute to the kernelci.org automated testing effort. This will help us do more automated testing on the ARM platforms we work on.

Upcoming training sessions

We have public training sessions scheduled for the beginning of 2016:

Embedded Linux development training
February 29 – March 4, in English, in Avignon (France)
Embedded Linux kernel and driver development training
March 14-18, in English, in Avignon (France)
Android system development training
March 7-10, in English, in Toulouse (France)

We also offer the following training courses, on-site, anywhere in the world, upon request:

Contact us at training@bootlin.com for details.

Conferences

We participated to the Embedded Linux Conference Europe in Dublin in October 2015, and gave a number of talks:

In addition, our engineer Thomas Petazzoni was invited to the Linux Kernel Summit, an invitation-only conference for the kernel maintainers and developers. He participated to the three days event in Seoul, South Korea. See Bootlin at the Linux Kernel Summit 2015.

At the beginning of 2016, our entire engineering team will be attending the Embedded Linux Conference in San Diego (US), which means that no less than 9 engineers from Bootlin will be present at the conference!

Porting Linux on ARM seminar

In December 2015, we gave a half-day seminar entitled “Porting Linux on ARM” in Toulouse (France). The materials, in English, are now freely available on our web site.

ELCE 2015 conference videos available

ELC Europe 2015 logoAs often in the recent years, the Linux Foundation has shot videos of most of the talks at the Embedded Linux Conference Europe 2015, in Dublin last October.

These videos are now available on YouTube, and individual links are provided on the elinux.org wiki page that keeps track of presentation materials as well. You can also find them all through the Embedded Linux Conference Europe 2015 playlist on YouTube.

All this is of course a priceless addition to the on-line slides. We hope these talks will incite you to participate to the next editions of the Embedded Linux Conference, like in San Diego in April, or in Berlin in October this year.

In particular, here are the videos from the presentations from Bootlin engineers.

Alexandre Belloni, Supporting multi-function devices in the Linux kernel

Kernel maintainership: an oral tradition

Tutorial: learning the basics of Buildroot

Our CTO Thomas Petazzoni also gave a keynote (Linux kernel SoC mainlining: Some success factors), which was well attended. Unfortunately, like for some of the other keynotes, no video is available.

Seminar “Porting Linux on an ARM board”, materials available

Porting Linux on an ARM boardOn December 10th 2015, Bootlin engineer Alexandre Belloni gave a half-day seminar on the topic of Porting Linux on an ARM board in Toulouse, France. This seminar covers topics like porting the bootloader, understanding the concept of the Device Tree, writing Linux device drivers and more. With ~50 persons from various companies attending and lots of questions from the audience, this first edition has been very successful, which shows an increasing interest for using Linux on ARM platforms in the industry.

We are now publishing the 220 slides materials from this seminar, available in PDF format. Like all our training materials, this material is published under the Creative Commons BY-SA 3.0 license, which allows everyone to re-use it for free, provided the derivative works are released under the same license. We indeed re-used quite extensively parts of our existing training materials for this half-day seminar.

We plan to give this half-day seminar in other locations in France in 2016. Contact us if you are interested in organizing a similar seminar in your area (we are happy to travel!).

Bootlin at FOSDEM and the Buildroot Developers Meeting

FOSDEM 2016The FOSDEM conference will take place on January 30-31 in Brussels, Belgium. Like every year, there are lots of interesting talks for embedded developers, starting from the Embedded, Mobile and Automotive Devroom, but also the Hardware track, the Graphics track. Some talks of the IoT and Security devrooms may also be interesting to embedded developers.

Thomas Petazzoni, embedded Linux engineer and CTO at Bootlin, will be present during the FOSDEM conference. Thomas will also participate to the Buildroot Developers Meeting that will take place on February 1-2 in Brussels, hosted by Google.