Tag: contribution

Linux 6.11 released, Bootlin contributions inside

Linux 6.11 has been released a week ago, the day before Open Source Summit Europe started, but as a large part of the Bootlin team was attending this conference and the immediately following Linux Plumbers conference, we are only posting now our usual blog post about our Linux 6.11 contributions.

As usual, we warmly recommend our readers to look at the articles from LWN.net covering the 6.11 merge window (part 1, part 2) to get a good high-level overview of the major new features and hardware support added in 6.11. CNX-Software also has a useful article on the 6.11 features relevant for embedded platforms.

From a Bootlin perspective, we contributed a total of 120 commits in this release, making us the 19th contributing company by number of commits, worldwide, according to the statistics. In addition to those 120 commits authored by Bootlin engineers, we reviewed and merged 76 patches from other contributors, as part of the Linux kernel maintainer role of several Bootlin engineers (Alexandre Belloni as the RTC and I3C maintainers, Miquèl Raynal as the MTD co-maintainer, and Grégory Clement as the Marvell platform maintainer).

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Linux 6.10 released, Bootlin contributions inside

Linux 6.10 was released last Sunday, following its now well-known release cadence. As usual, head over to LWN.net to have some good summary of the important features merged in this kernel release: part 1 and part 2.

LWN also published an article on statistics of the 6.10 release cycle, and Bootlin shows up in the most active employers by changed lines, with 7746 lines changed by Bootlin engineers. According to ths Kernel Patch Statistics site, we contributed 110 changes, putting us as the 19th contributing company (counting “Unknown” and “Hobbyists” as companies).

Also, in addition to the 110 patches we contributed, some of our engineers are also maintainers of different subsystems, and as such they review/merge patches contributed by others:

  • Alexandre Belloni reviewed/merged 19 patches for the I3C and RTC subsystems which he maintains
  • Grégory Clement reviewed/merged 14 patches for the Marvell ARM and ARM64 platforms that he maintains
  • Miquèl Raynal reviewed/merged 12 patches for the MTD subsystem, which he co-maintains

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Linux 6.9 released, Bootlin contributions inside!

Linux 6.9 was released last Sunday, and as usual we refer our readers to the excellent LWN.net coverage of the Linux 6.9 merge window (part 1 and part 2) to get a good overall picture of the improvements and new features brought by this release.

On our side, we contributed a total of 119 commits authored by Bootlin engineers, but we also merged a total of 95 patches from other contributors, as several Bootlin engineers as also maintainers of various drivers/subsystems in the Linux kernel.

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Yocto 5.0 Scarthgap released, Bootlin contributions inside

Yocto Project SummitThe latest release of the Yocto Project, version 5.0, code named Scarthgap has been published a few days ago. The release notes provide the best summary of what’s new in this release. Being a Long Term Support (LTS) release, it will be maintained during 4 years with bug fixes and security updates, which makes this release particularly important for a large number of embedded Linux projects and products.

At Bootlin, we are using Yocto for a large fraction of the Linux Board Support Packages that we develop, maintain and upgrade for our customers. But we’re not only users of Yocto: we’re also contributors and maintainers. In this blog post, we’ll highlight our contributions to this release, which take various forms.

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Linux 6.8 released, Bootlin contributions

The Linux 6.8 kernel has been released on March 10 by Linus Torvalds. As usual, we definitely recommend the coverage by LWN of the merge window for this release cycle to get a good grasp on the most important new features: first half and second half. Some work from Bootlin is briefly mentioned in those articles, such as the support for Lantiq PEF2256 (FALC56) framers, Lantiq PEF2256 (FALC56) pin controllers, and Techwell TW9900 video decoders.

With a total of 135 commits contributed by Bootlin engineers during this release cycle, we have been much more active than for the previous 6.7 release. This allows Bootlin to show in the recently published Development statistics for 6.8, as the 17th contributing company by number of commits, and 13th contributing company by number of changed lines.

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Linux 6.6 released, Bootlin contributions

Linux 6.6 was released yesterday, so this is the time for our usual blog post about our contributions to this release. Before that, to get an overall idea of what went into Linux 6.6, we recommend reading the articles from LWN.net covering the Linux 6.6 merge window: part 1 and part 2. The KernelNewbies page is perhaps a little bit less rich than it used to be, but still relevant.

On our side, this time around we contributed 68 changes to this release:

  • Alexandre Belloni, as the RTC subsystem maintainer, submitted a few asorted patches touching various drivers in this subsystem
  • Alexis Lothoré pushed some patches extending the rzn1-a5psw Ethernet switch driver with VLAN support and port_bridge_flags support. These patches were initially written by Clément Léger but had not been accepted until now.
  • Hervé Codina got his audio-iio-aux driver merged, which allows the ASoC subsystem (for audio devices) to use IIO devices, such as a potentiometer. This came together with a number of fixes/improvements in the IIO subsystem. Hervé also fixed some reference counting issues in several I2C mux drivers.
  • Miquèl Raynal pushed to the finish line a patch written several years ago by Bootlin engineer Kamel Bouhara, who hadn’t been accepted until now. This patch adds a sysfs interface that allows to retrieve the reset reason on Microchip ARM platforms
  • Luca Ceresoli fixed some issues in two DRM panel drivers and also fixed a regression in the NVidia Tegra camera interface driver
  • Miquèl Raynal did a number of different, unrelated, contributions:
    • support for the EDT ET028013DMA display panel to the existing sitronix-st7789v driver, which required quite a few preparation changes
    • fix a clock polarity issue in the DRM driver for the display controller used in Microchip ARM platforms
    • improve many small aspects of the qcom NAND controller driver
    • improve the handling of nvmem layouts in the nvmem subsystem
    • fix an issue in the SJA1000 CAN controller driver that would cause the HW to stall after an overrun on some platforms
  • Paul Kocialkowski contributed a few small asorted fixes in the media subsystem documentation

Here are the complete details of our contributions:

Linux 6.5 released, Bootlin contributions

Linux 6.5 was released yesterday, with as usual over 10,000 commits from a large number of contributors. We recommend reading LWN.net articles on the merge window (part 1, part 2), but also the CNX Software page that focuses on embedded-related improvements.

Bootlin contributed 76 commits to this kernel release, putting us as the #26 contributing company. This time around, our main contributions have been:

  • The large stack of patches from Luca Ceresoli on the NVidia Tegra camera interface driver finally landed: they add support for the Tegra20 parallel camera interface to the existing driver, which required a lot of changes to the driver that was so far only support Tegra210 CSI. This work allows one of our customers, who was stuck on an old vendor NVidia kernel to an upstream Linux kernel.
  • Hervé Codina contributed a driver for the Renesas X9250 potentiometer, in the IIO subsystem. This will be followed in Linux 6.6 by a glue driver that allows to expose an IIO device as an auxiliary device in the ALSA subsystem, allowing this potentiometer to be used in audio applications
  • Alexis Lothoré contributed support for the Marvell MV88E6361 Ethernet switch into the existing mv88e6xxx DSA driver
  • Maxime Chevallier contributed a new regmap-based MDIO driver, which required some changes in the regmap code. This allows the Altera TSE driver to use the existing Lynx PCS driver, and drop the custom Altera TSE PCS driver. Finally, the stmmac Ethernet driver is modified to be able to use the Lynx PCS driver as well. Quite an adventure to finally get proper PCS support with stmmac
  • Miquèl Raynal contributed improvments in the 802.15.4 stack, especially related to scanning support.
  • Miquèl Raynal contributed fixes to the sja1000 CAN driver (to avoid overrun stalls on Renesas processors), to the SPI subsystem (to avoid false timeouts for long transfers), to the DMA engine driver for Xilinx XDMA IP, and a few more.
  • Miquèl Raynal also continued his effort of improving the Device Tree bindings for MTD NAND controllers
  • Luca Ceresoli added sound card support to the MSC SM2-MB-EP1 carrier board, which runs a i.MX8MP SoM, and he also fixed the timings for one of the panels supported by the simple-panel driver

Here are the details of all our changes that went into Linux 6.5:

Linux 6.4 released, Bootlin contributions inside

Linux 6.4 was released on June 25, just before the start of the Embedded Open Source Summit in Prague. As usual, lots of changes in Linux 6.4, and we recommend reading LWN coverage of the merge window (part 1, part 2). Sadly, the usual KernelNewbies page hasn’t received a lot of attention, contributions are probably welcome to revive this useful resource.

With 59 commits from Bootlin engineers, Bootlin is ranked as the #28 contributing company by number of commits for this 6.4 release, according to contribution statistics. Our main contributions have been:

  • Alexis Lothoré and Clément Léger contributed a few fixes to the Renesas RZ/N1 A5PSW Ethernet switch driver
  • Hervé Codina contributed a number of new drivers needed to support complex audio setups on some relatively old Freescale PowerPC 32-bit platforms: a driver for the Time Slot Assigner (TSA), a driver for the QUICC Multichannel Controller (QMC), and an ALSA driver that provides audio support over QMC. We have more contributions coming in this area, most notably to support HDLC network traffic over QMC.
  • Kamel Bouhara added support for the TI TAS5733 audio codec in the existing tas571x driver
  • Luca Ceresoli improved the fsl-ldb driver, used on NXP i.MX8MP and i.MX93 for the built-in DPI-to-LVDS encoder. Luca’s improvement allows to use LVDS channel 1 only, while the driver initially supported using either LVDS channel 0, or LVDS channel 0 and 1 combined.
  • Maxime Chevallier contributed an improvement to the regmap code, which allows upshifting register addresses before performing operations
  • Maxime Chevallier also contributed some small fixes to the phylink code related to previous work on QUSGMII support
  • Miquèl Raynal contributed the support for Real-While-Write in the MTD SPI-NOR subsystem. This allows to perform read operations while erase/program operations are on-going, which helps to reduce read latencies. This of course only works on SPI NOR chips that support this feature.
  • Miquèl Raynal contributed several improvements to the NVMEM subsystem. First, a brand new NVMEM driver capable of parsing the ONIE TLV information, as defined by the ONIE spec used on network equipment. Second, he contributed changes that allow NVMEM layout drivers to be compiled as kernel modules rather than being built-in

And the full details of our contributions:

Yocto Project 4.2 released – Bootlin contributions inside

The Yocto Project has published its new release: 4.2, also known as “Mickledore”.

It features improved Rust support, BitBake engine improvements, support for Linux 6.1 (the latest Long Term Support kernel), new QEMU features, testing improvements and of course many other new features and package updates. See the release notes for all details.

Bootlin has actively contributed to this release, as seen in the number of commits, in particular through our work maintaining the documentation, improving regression detection and on Autobuilder SWAT.

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Linux 6.2 released, Bootlin contributions inside

Linux 6.2 was released a few days ago, and as usual we point our readers to the LWN coverage of the merge window (part 1 and part 2), or the traditional KernelNewbies page or alternatively the embedded focused CNX Software coverage.

At Bootlin, we contributed a total of 122 patches to this release, making Bootlin the 21st contributing company by number of commits according to statistics. Also Bootlin engineer Paul Kocialkowski appears in the top developers by changed lines in the Linux 6.2 statistics.

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