Tag: contribution

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.