Tag: contribution

Buildroot 2011.08 released!

Buildroot logoAs promised by the time-based release schedule, a new version 2011.08 of Buildroot has just been released. For those just coming in, Buildroot is a utility that automates the process of building an embedded Linux system: generating a cross-compilation toolchain or importing an existing one, cross-compiling multiple user-space libraries or applications, generating a root filesystem image and building the kernel or bootloader images. We use it extensively at Bootlin for various projects and therefore contribute regularly to this project.

The major highlights of this version are :

  • An updated version of udev. For a long time, Buildroot has been stuck with an ancient udev release, due to the slightly more complicated dependencies of newer udev versions. Fortunately, Yegor Yefremov and other contributors have done the work to integrate those dependencies and get a modern version of udev to work in Buildroot.
  • An updated version of util-linux has been integrated. Here as well, updating it wasn’t completely straightforward, due to utility libraries such as libuuid, which is also present and e2fsprogfs, and used by multiple other packages.
  • The conversion of the Linux kernel build process and the bootloaders build process to the GENTARGETS infrastructure of Buildroot. This makes the build process of the kernel and the bootloaders much more similar to regular packages, and allows to provide the capability of fetching kernel sources not only from tarballs over http/ftp, but also from Git or Subversion repositories.
  • The kernel build process has been extended to support Linux 3.x versions and also release candidates versions.
  • Some improvements for using Buildroot to generate systems for non-MMU targets
  • Some new packages have been added: acl, attr, ebtables, gnutls, inotify-tools, ipset, libargtable2, libiqrf, libmnl, libnspr, libnss, libroxml, libyaml, live555, mxml, orc, rsyslog, sredird, statserial, stunnel, ti-utils, uboot-tools, yajl, and many, many packages have been upgraded or fixed.

The amount of patches merged for this release (287) is almost identical to the number of patches for the past release (286), but the number of contributors has increased from 28 to 35. Generally speaking, we are seeing an increasing number of requests and contributions from users :

   143  Peter Korsgaard
    36  Thomas Petazzoni
    21  Sven Neumann
    13  Gustavo Zacarias
    13  Yegor Yefremov
     9  Maxime Ripard
     7  Yann E. MORIN
     4  Baruch Siach
     4  Daniel Mack
     4  Luca Ceresoli
     3  Jean-Christophe PLAGNIOL-VILLARD
     3  Thomas De Schampheleire
     2  Allan W. Nielsen
     2  Mike Williams
     2  Phil Edworthy
     2  Will Newton
     1  Arnout Vandecappelle (Essensium - Mind)
     1  Arnout Vandecappelle (Essensium/Mind)
     1  Benoit Mauduit
     1  Benoît Mauduit
     1  Daniel Hobi
     1  Daniel Nyström
     1  Danomi Mocelopolis
     1  Evgeni Dobrev
     1  Francis Mendes
     1  Frederic Bassaler
     1  Frederik Pasch
     1  H Hartley Sweeten
     1  Heiko Helmle
     1  Marek Belisko
     1  Michael J. Hammel
     1  Milton Soares Filho
     1  Philippe Reynes
     1  Robin Holt
     1  Tristan Lelong

Two developers from Bootlin have contributed patches for this release: my colleague Maxime Ripard has contributed 9 patches (Python build fixes, toolchain configuration fix, new rsyslog package, rework of the logging init scripts, new stunnel package, /dev/shm fix for the initialization scripts, code cleanup) and I (Thomas Petazzoni) have contributed 36 patches (conversion of the kernel and bootloaders to the GENTARGETS infrastructure, support for Linux 3.x and release candidates, improvements for non-MMU targets, the new scons package, upgrade of valgrind, some other code cleanup and fixes).

For the next release, I expect to contribute a set of patches that has already been reviewed on the list, and which adds the possibility of building packages from an existing source directory instead of letting Buildroot handle the download/extract/patch part of the build process. This feature will make it much much easier to use Buildroot during the development of the kernel, an application or a library for the target embedded system. I have also posted patches that convert the documentation over to the asciidoc format and I intend to do various additions to this documentation.

It is also worth mentioning that the Buildroot developers (Peter Korsgaard and myself) and the Crosstool-NG maintainer Yann E. Morin are organizing a Developer Day on October, 29th in Prague, the day after the Embedded Linux Conference Europe. All developers or users interested in Buildroot and/or Crosstool-NG are invited to join. See http://lists.busybox.net/pipermail/buildroot/2011-August/045066.html for more details.

Barebox 2011.03 released, with contributions from Bootlin

BareboxBarebox is a bootloader started about two years ago for embedded systems of various architectures. It plays the same role as U-Boot, which is the best known project in this area, but has several advantages over U-Boot. First, it has a much better configuration and compilation system, based on the one used by the Linux kernel: instead of the rusty include/configs/myboard.h configuration headers in U-Boot, Barebox provides a nice menuconfig/xconfig/defconfig based configuration system, that everyone is familiar with. Second, Barebox has a source code organization very similar to the one of the Linux kernel and has replicated the device/driver model of the kernel. This allows to have a nice separation between device drivers and their instantiation, and a source code that looks familiar to anyone that already does kernel development.

Of course, as Barebox is newer than U-Boot, the number of architectures and platforms is more limited, but it is growing rapidly. It already supports ARM, PPC, Blackfin, x86 and a testing sandbox architecture. On ARM, the supported platforms are AT91, EP93xx, iMX, Nomadik, OMAP, S3C24xx and Versatile. On PPC, a single mpc5xxx platform is supported. Patches to add support for the NIOS architecture have also been posted recently (NIOS is a soft-core architecture from Altera).

As a young but fast-growing project, Barebox has chosen a quick development cycle: new releases are made each month, and Barebox 2011.03 has been released a few days ago. It has many ARM and generic improvements, but is also the first release with contributions from Bootlin :

Gregory CLEMENT (3):
      BMP: Add support for 32bpp video frame buffer
      ARM STM/i.MX: Add possibility to choose the bit per pixel for STM video driver
      fb i.MX23/28: Add the reset control of LCD

My colleague Gregory Clement has contributed several improvements to framebuffer support on the i.MX platform. Those improvements were made in the context of a customer project, for which Barebox was used as a way of showing immediately after the device start-up a nice logo on the screen, while the system continues to boot in the background. Initially, the user had to wait 20+ seconds to see a logo on the screen showing that the system was booting. With our Barebox based solution, a logo is now visible on the screen less than 2 seconds after the power on button is pushed.

Buildroot 2010.08 released!

Buildroot logoOn the last day of August, just in time, the 2010.08 version of Buildroot has been released. For the record, Buildroot is an easy-to-use embedded Linux build system: it can build your toolchain, your root filesystem with all its components (Busybox, libraries, applications, etc.), your kernel and your bootloaders, or any combination of these components.

Amongst the interesting changes in this version :

  • Complete rewrite of the bootloader build code. It contained a lot of legacy, unused and unclear stuff, it is now much easier to use and extend. We’ve removed support for Yaboot and added support for the new Barebox bootloader, and all the code to support AT91Bootstrap, AT91DataFlashBoot, U-Boot, Grub and Grub 2 has been rewritten.
  • Complete rewrite of the Linux kernel build code. It was also complicated to use, with an horribly complicated kernel version selection mechanism, the new code is much easier to configure and use.
  • The configuration file .config is now located in the out-of-tree directory when the O= option is used. So typically, for an out-of-tree build (which are very convenient when using the same Buildroot source tree for different projects/tests), you could do : mkdir ~/myoutput ; make O=~/myoutput menuconfig ; make O=~/myoutput
  • Support for building NPTL toolchains with uClibc, using the latest uClibc snapshots.
  • Support for the gconfig Gtk-based configurator, in addition to the already available menuconfig and xconfig
  • A particular effort has been put on fixing many of the bugs in our Bugzilla, improving robustness thanks to automated random builds, and converting even more packages to the generic and autotools infrastructure
  • Various things have also been deprecated: support for the CRIS, IA64, Sparc64 and Alpha architectures, support for Gtk over DirectFB (which is at the moment not supported upstream), Java support (no maintainer has volunteered to maintain this in Buildroot)
  • Many components have been bumped to newer versions
  • The shared configuration cache, which allowed to speed up the configuration of different packages, has been disabled by default, since it was causing a lot of problems with certain package configurations

I’ve again contributed to a significant portion of this release, being the author of the bootloader build code cleanup, the Linux kernel build code rewrite, leading an effort to reduce the number of outstanding bugs in our Bugzilla and many other little things. The contributors for this release are shown below :

   175  Peter Korsgaard
   168  Thomas Petazzoni
    38  Gustavo Zacarias
    18  cmchao
     8  Luca Ceresoli
     7  Paul Jones
     6  Lionel Landwerlin
     6  Malte Starostik
     5  Yann E. MORIN
     3  Julien Boibessot
     3  Khem Raj
     2  Dmytro Milinevskyy
     2  Francois Perrad
     2  Nick Leverton
     2  Peter Huewe
     2  Stanislav Bogatyrev
     1  Baruch Siach
     1  Bjørn Forsman
     1  Daniel Hobi
     1  Darcy Watkins
     1  Darius Augulis
     1  H Hartley Sweeten
     1  Karl Krach
     1  Kelvin Cheung
     1  Ossy
     1  Sagaert Johan
     1  Simon Pasch
     1  Slava Zanko
     1  Thiago A. Correa
     1  Will Wagner
     1  Yegor Yefremov

For the next release, there are already a few things in the pipeline :

  • Cleanup of all the board support code in Buildroot, in order to cleanly add support for more boards like BeagleBoard, Qemu boards, Calao boards, etc. We’ll use the new minimal defconfig mechanism used by the kernel. I’ve already started working on this
  • Cleanup of the package download process, to support Git and SVN download. The code has already been written by Maxime Petazzoni, reviewed on the list, so I expect it to be included fairly soon
  • Rewrite of libtool handling code, to remove some of our ugly libtool hacks. The code is currently being worked on by Lionel Landwerlin
  • Support for compiling toolchain using Crosstool-NG as a backend. The code is currently being finalized by Yann E. Morin, the author of Crosstool-NG
  • Further work on package uninstallation, clean partial rebuild. Some work has been started by Lionel Landwerlin, but it needs some discussion
  • Continue the conversion of packages to the generic and autotools infrastructures
  • I have also a ton of other things on my TODO-list : rework gdb/gdbserver support with external toolchains, rework the configuration of IPv6/RPC/locale/etc. with external toolchains, set up a Wiki-based Buildroot website with tutorials and better documentation, clean up the toolchain build process, reduce the number of “enhancement” bugs waiting in our Bugzilla, etc.

As Peter Korsgaard, Buildroot maintainer, said in the 2010.08 announcement: The next release is going to be 2010.11. Expect the first release candidate in late October and the final release at the end of November..

It is worth noting that we will be having a Buildroot Developer Day, on Friday 29th October, right after Embedded Linux Conference Europe. At least Peter Korsgaard, Lionel Landwerlin, Yann E. Morin and myself should be there.

Buildroot 2010.05 released: again many Bootlin contributions

Buildroot logoJust one day before the end of May, Buildroot 2010.05 has been released by Peter Korsgaard, as predicted by the fixed release schedule used by the project. It can be downloaded at http://buildroot.org/downloads/buildroot-2010.05.tar.bz2. For the record, Buildroot is a simple and efficient tool to build embedded Linux systems: cross-compiling toolchain, root filesystem, kernel image and bootloader.

Major changes

The major user-visible changes are:

  • Re-organization of the menuconfig layout for packages. All packages are now organized in categories, making them easier to find
  • Our X.org package set has been upgraded to X.org 7.5.
  • Several new packages have been added: cdrkit, cramfs, genext2fs, genromfs, libatomic_ops, librsync, libusb-compat, lmbench, netperf, squashfs, squashfs3, squid. Many of them have been added as the result of a filesystem code generation cleanup
  • On the internal toolchain side (i.e toolchains generated by Buildroot), we have added support for uClibc 0.9.31, GCC 4.4.4, GDB 7.x and binutils 2.20.1.
  • On the external toolchain side (i.e. re-using existing toolchains), we have improved support for multilib toolchains (such as CodeSourcery toolchains)

In addition to these changes, 41 bugs of our bug tracker have been fixed, and dozens of packages have been upgraded or fixed.

Bootlin contributions

Bootlin has again made significant contributions to this release:

git shortlog -s -n 2010.02..
   224  Paulius Zaleckas
   182  Thomas Petazzoni, from Bootlin
   148  Peter Korsgaard
    28  Gustavo Zacarias
    26  Will Wagner
    14  Lionel Landwerlin
     6  Yann E. MORIN
[...]

The things we have contributed include:

  • A big cleanup in the Buildroot code that generates the root filesystem images. It has been moved from various directories in target/ to a single, central location: fs/. The code that handled the compilation of host utilities to generate the filesystem images (genext2fs, cdrkit, mtd-utils, cramfs, squashfs, etc.) has been moved to normal packages, and an infrastructure has been added to factorize the common code of the various filesystem generation makefiles.
  • Better support for multilib external toolchains
  • A new script that generates nice dependency graph (see below)
  • A clarification of the gettext integration, to make it work properly with glibc toolchains.
  • Fixes to bug #75, bug #1789.
  • Dozens of build fixes found by testing random configurations.
  • Various code cleanups, that lead to the removal of several configuration options, which makes the usage of Buildroot a little bit easier.

Dependency graph generation

Thanks to the new package infrastructure that we have included in Buildroot a few releases ago, it is now easier to retrieve the list of dependencies of each package in a generic way. Using this, I recently implemented a dependency graph generation tool. It allows to generate nice graphs of the dependencies for a given package, like libgtk2 in the following example (click for the full sized version):

Note that packages in red are packages that do not use the generic or autotools infrastructure, so we couldn’t determine what their dependencies are.

We can also generate the dependency graph for a complete Buildroot configuration, with all packages:

Using this tool is fairly easy. You must first install the graphviz package on your distribution. For a single package dependency graph:

./scripts/graph-depends libgtk2 > libgtk2.dot
dot -Tpdf libgtk2.dot -o libgtk2.pdf

For a full dependency graph:

./scripts/graph-depends > full.dot
dot -Tpdf full.dot -o full.pdf

Note that the dependency graph always depends on the selected set of packages. It is not the absolute dependency graph, which would contain all existing dependencies. It only show the dependencies as they are in your current configuration.

Plans for the next release

The next release is scheduled for August (2010.08). I have in mind various things:

  • Cleanup of the bootloader compilation code and integration of support for Barebox. This is already implemented in one of my branch, so I should be able to push this fairly soon to Buildroot
  • Cleanup of the Linux kernel compilation code, with a much-wanted simplification of this. Again, this is already implemented on my side, but requires a little bit more work before being able to push this
  • Continue the effort to convert packages to the generic or autotools infrastructure. I have already sent a status update on this topic to the project mailing-list. We have 56 packages to convert to the generic infrastructure and 77 to convert to the autotools infrastructure.
  • Integration with Crosstool-NG, which is a job that Yann Morin, developer of Crosstool-NG has already started.
  • More improvements of the external toolchain integration
  • If some time is left, a cleanup and reorganization of the board support mechanism, so that we can add more boards in a sane way

Crosstool-NG 1.7.0, Bootlin contributed basic Blackfin support

Yann E. Morin, maintainer of Crosstool-NG, has just announced version 1.7.0 of his toolchain building tool we like so much at Bootlin. For the record, Crosstool-NG allows to build cross-compiling toolchains for a wide-range of architectures, using either glibc, uClibc, eglibc or newlib, and everything is configured through a menuconfig interface, familiar to all embedded Linux developers.

Blackfin architectureBootlin has contributed to this release, by adding some support for the Blackfin architecture, on which we have been working recently. Crosstool-NG is now capable of generating a FDPIC cross-compiling toolchain for Blackfin. FDPIC allows to use shared libraries even on no-MMU architectures like the Blackfin. This support of Blackfin in Crosstool-NG is only the beginning, a lot of work remains to be done to make sure that the toolchain works really well, and to support FLAT binaries and bare-metal as well.

Here are the patches that Bootlin has contributed for this release :

The other major changes for this release are :

  • two new architectures have been added: Blackfin and mips64
  • building canadian-crosses has been enhanced
  • experimental support for gcc-4.5 has been added
  • eglibc can be optimized for size (instead of speed)
  • companion libraries can be built statically, removing the need for a wrapper
  • many components versions have been added, and associated patchsets updated
  • some less important new features, or enhancements for stability and usability
  • a lot of bug-fixes, of which some to help on Darwin & *BSD

The 1.7.0 release can be downloaded at http://ymorin.is-a-geek.org/download/crosstool-ng/crosstool-ng-1.7.0.tar.bz2 and the homepage of the Crosstool-NG project is http://ymorin.is-a-geek.org/projects/crosstool. Enjoy !

Buildroot 2010.02 released, contributions from Bootlin!

Buildroot logoBuildroot is a embedded Linux system build system. It automates the process of downloading, configuring, compiling and installating all the components of an embedded Linux system, from Busybox to more complicated software stacks using Gtk, Qt, X.org, Gstreamer, etc. Buildroot is easy to use and extend, making it a nice choice for small to medium-sized embedded Linux systems.

As promised by the fixed-release schedule, a 2010.02 release has been published on Friday, with numerous improvements over the previous version 2009.11, many of which are part of the general cleanup process that the project is doing since the beginning of 2009. These improvements are detailed in the project CHANGES file.

Thomas Petazzoni, from Bootlin, implemented several of these improvements :

  • Creation of a package infrastructure for non-autotools packages. Buildroot had for a long time an infrastructure to factorize the code needed to build packages based on the autotools build systems. But all other packages were using hand-made Makefiles, which were hard to write and generated a lot of code duplication. Therefore, we have introduced an infrastructure that makes adding new packages much easier, and which allows us to cleanup the existing codebase significantly by factorizing a lot of common code. The autotools infrastructure has also been reworked on top of the generic infrastructure to avoid code duplication as well. At the same time, we have significantly improved the documentation on how to add new packages. This infrastructure is a building block that will allow us to easily add more features to all packages in Buildroot (such as package generation).
  • Removal of the external toolchain source mechanism, which was merged with the normal toolchain building procedure. This special casing was implemented to allow the compilation of AVR32 toolchains, but such an additional complexity wasn’t needed. Now, Buildroot continues to build AVR32 toolchains as it used to do, but the code is much cleaner. Another illustration of our large cleanup effort.
  • Many, many, many fixes to different packages, many of them to ensure that we do not depend on development packages being installed on the host. This is very important to ensure that our build procedure is as independent as possible from the development machine configuration.

From the list of contributors, ordered by the number of patches, Thomas Petazzoni of Bootlin has been the first Buildroot contributor for this last release :

$ git shortlog -e -n -s 2009.11..2010.02  (removed e-mail addresses)
139 Thomas Petazzoni
124 Peter Korsgaard
26  Lionel Landwerlin
23  Gustavo Zacarias
7   Julien Boibessot
4   Nigel Kukard
4   Sven Neumann
2   Anders Darander
2   Chris Packham
2   Daniel Mack
2   H Hartley Sweeten
2   Richard van Paasen
2   Will Wagner
2   William Wagner
2   Yann E. MORIN
1   Cameron Hutchison
1   Clark Rawlins
1   Francisco Gonzalez
1   Francisco Gonzalez Morell
1   Hans-Christian Egtvedt
1   Lionel Landwerlin
1   Ormund Williams
1   Rob Alley
1   Sagaert Johan
1   grante

For the next release, we will work on additional cleanup of Buildroot and particularly the target/ directory, which contains the code to build the Linux kernel, different bootloaders, and to generate the final root filesystem image in various formats. Improving support for external toolchains is also on our TODO list : supporting multilib toolchains such as the CodeSoucery toolchain, and fixing a long-standing issue with libtool.

Don’t hesitate to try Buildroot, and to report your successes and failures on the mailing-list, in our bug tracker, or on our IRC channel, #uclibc on Freenode.

On the road to Buildroot 2009.08

Buildroot logoAs I posted back in March, the Buildroot project has begun a new life since January. One of the aspects this new life is the fact that stable releases are delivered every three months. So we had one in February (2009.02), one in May (2009.05) and therefore we’re going to have one release soon in August (2009.08).

Peter Korsgaard, Buildroot’s maintainer, has just released 2009.08-rc1, a good opportunity to look at what’s new in Buildroot since the last release. To highlight Bootlin’sparticipation in the free software community, it is worth noting that in number of patches, I’m the second most important contributor to Buildroot, right after Peter, the maintainer. It’s really nice that I’ve been able to find enough time to contribute at such a level to Buildroot, and hope to be able to dedicate more time in the future to Buildroot, since we have lots of ideas to improve the project.

Back to the 2009.08 release specifically, in the notable features or improvements, we have :

  • Improvement of external toolchain support. I’ve already posted about this specific feature, that I find very important. Several reports from people using this feature have been received since then, which means that it is a useful feature for some of the Buildroot users. So, we have now support for glibc toolchains, the configuration provided to Buildroot is verified against the real toolchain configuration, the copy of the toolchain libraries to the target has been improved (including the C++ standard library) and other minor improvements have been. I’ve been the major contributor of these improvements, together with the reports provided by Buildroot users
  • Integration of the QT-based configurator. Buildroot uses the kconfig system from the kernel to allow its users to configure the different elements of the system to be built. Until now, only the ncurses interface (make menuconfig) was supported. In the 2009.08, the QT interface (make xconfig) will also be supported, adding a little more userfriendliness to Buildroot. This feature was contributed by Alper Yildirim, and I helped in polishing the remaining issues.
  • Support for the Xtensa architecture has been contribued by Maxim Grigoriev, from Tensilica, the company designing the Xtensa architecture.
  • Cleanup of X.org support. the configuration options were clarified, and mandatory dependencies on useless libraries such as libXt or libXaw were removed, some components were upgraded to fix build issues. It’s also a task I contributed to.
  • Of course, toolchain components have been upgraded (GCC 4.4.1, 2.6.30 kernel headers), new packages have been added (bmon, ctorrent, dosfstools, enchant, gst-plugins-bad, iw, libmms, libnl, netstat-nat, ntfsprogs, sdl_gfx, spawn-fcgi), and many more packages have been upgraded (bind, busybox, coreutils, sqlite, directfb, expat, gamin, gnuconfig, haserl, ipsec-tools, classpath, libcurl, libglib2, liblockfile, libpng, libsoup, libxml2, lighttpd, ltp-testsuite, lvm2, matchbox, memstat, gst-plugins-good, gstreamer, libogg, libvorbis, mplayer, neon, openssl, pciutils, php, qt, ruby, sawman, webkit, wpa-supplicant, xdriver_xf86-input-synaptics, xdriver_xf86-video-intel, xlib_libXfont, xlib_libXft, xlib_libXt, xproto_xproto, xserver-xorg, xutil_makedepend, xutil_util-macros)
  • We’re also paying a lot more attention to the bugs reported in our bugtracker than we used to do in the past. Since 2009.05, 43 reported issues have been fixed, and I except that we will fix some more before the 2009.08 release

Shortly after the 2009.08, we will set the goals for the next 2009.11 release, and I’d like to do a lot of cleanup to make Buildroot easier to use and to understand. We’ll see how things go.

In the mean time, if you’re interested in testing and improving Buildroot, don’t hesitate to grab 2009.08-rc1, try it in your conditions with your package set, and report your issues!

2008 contributions

Here are the contributions that we made to the user and developer community in 2008, thanks to the customers who ordered our engineering and training services.

As you can see, we do our best to have all our contributions merged into mainline sources. So, if you need a new feature in the Linux kernel (supporting your new boards, for example), in development tools and libraries (Buildroot, QEMU…), and want to enjoy this feature in all future updates and releases, don’t hesitate to ask us. We will be glad to work with the community and find a long lasting solution.

Linux kernel

  • [x86] use ELF section to list CPU vendor specific code (commit)
  • [MTD] fix minor typo in the MTD map driver for SHARP SL series (commit)
  • [x86] configurable DMI scanning code (commit)
  • [mm] directly use kmalloc() and kfree() in init/initramfs.c (commit)
  • [x86] consolidate the definition of the force_mwait variable (commit)
  • inflate: refactor inflate malloc code (commit)
  • fs/buffer.c: uninline __remove_assoc_queue() (commit)
  • [x86] make movsl_mask definition non-CPU specific (commit).
  • [x86] move cmpxchg fallbacks to a generic place (commit)
  • [x86] configuration options to compile out x86 CPU support code (commit)
  • Configure out file locking features (commit)
  • Fix comment in include/linux/mmc/host.h (commit)
  • Configure out AIO support (commit)
  • [PCI] allow quirks to be compiled out (commit)
  • [x86] remove PC speaker code (commit)
  • [Doc] improvement to Documentation/SubmittingPatches (commit)
  • Work on multicast and ethtool configurability. Not merged yet.
  • 65 e-mails sent to the kernel newbies mailing list to help new kernel developers.

Buildroot

Thomas Petazzoni became official committer in November 2008. In addition to contributions, patch review and integration of patches into the official Buildroot repository, and discussions on the mailing list.

  • Thumb support, not integrated yet (post)
  • Fixed URL for fakeroot sources, integrated (post)
  • Bumped libpng version, integrated (post)
  • Added the DirectFB examples package, integrated (post)
  • Bumped up libgtk2 version, integrated (post)
  • Work on external toolchain support, integrated. Several iterations, patches and discussions.
  • External toolchain support improvements, integrated (post)
  • More external toolchain fixes, integrated (post)
  • External toolchain C++ cross-compiler fix, integrated (post)
  • Kernel build fix related to external toolchain use, integrated (post)
  • Fixed external toolchain build, integrated, and replaced later with an improved version (post)
  • Fix Qtopia build issues, integrated and then replaced by an improved version (post)
  • Another external toolchain support solution, integrated (post)
  • Fixed TARGET_PATH for external toolchain builds, integrated (post)
  • Fixed strange problems in pango configure target, integrated (post)
  • Strip libgtk2 in the target, integrated (post)
  • Strip pango libraries on the target, integrated (post)
  • Strip gettext libraries on the target, integrated (post)
  • Fix matchbox build, integrated (post)
  • Create zlib installation directory in the staging dir, integrated (post)
  • Bump up lite version, integrated (post)
  • Added a parallel compilation fix for fontconfig, integrated (post)
  • Documentation fixes (post, post)

QEMU

  • Increased write buffer size in pflash emulation, integrated (post)
  • Reset wcycle after erase confirm, integrated (post)
  • Improved pflash cfi01 debug messages, integrated (post)
  • Added missing parenthesis in qemu_ram_alloc(), integrated (post)
  • Add Flash support to the Versatile PB platform (post)

Conferences

New training materials

All our training materials can now be found on our docs page. Some of them are not new, but have undergone substantial updates.

See our recent post for details.

Financial support

We support organizations promoting Free Software:

You may also count our subscriptions to the most useful LWN.net resource.

Miscellaneous

Kernel 2.6.28 is out with a few Bootlin contributions

A few hours before Christmas, Linus Torvalds released the latest stable version of the Linux kernel, 2.6.28. Jake Edge from LWN sums up the major highlights of this new release: « Some of the highlights of this kernel are the addition of the GEM GPU memory manager, the ext4 filesystem is no longer “experimental”, scalability improvements in memory management via the reworked vmap() and pageout scalability patches, moving the -staging drivers into the mainline, and much more ». As usual, the Kernel Newbies website offers an excellent human-readable summary of the changes.

Of particular interest to embedded developers will be the new boot tracer facility, which allows to draw SVG graphs of the kernel initialization procedures execution time, in order to analyze the boot time and possibly reduce it. Of course, a lot of architecture-dependent improvements have also been made (for example OProfile support for ARMv7 CPUs but also new supported boards) and a lot of drivers have been merged or improved, as usual.

Bootlin has contributed a few patches that have been merged and released in 2.6.28. While being a small contribution compared to the 9.000+ patches added to the kernel between 2.6.27 and 2.6.28, they still slightly improve the kernel for embedded users. Part of the Linux-Tiny efforts, these patches allow to reduce the size of the kernel by disabling features that may not be necessary on embedded systems. More specifically, these patches allow :

From the existing Linux Tiny patch ideas, the only one left in the feature removal area are the multicast support removal and ethtool removal. They have already been submitted a few months ago, but got rejected by the network maintainers. I will work on them again to fix the issues and try to re-submit them later.

Finally, Jonathan Corbet has published an analysis of the 2.6.28 developement cycle in terms of contributors and changes. An interesting reading.