Tag: elc

Back from ELC North-America: selection of talks from the Bootlin team

As discussed in our previous blog post, Bootlin had again a strong presence at the Embedded Linux Conference North-America, with 8 attendees, 5 talks, one BoF and two E-ALE tutorial sessions.

In this blog post, we would like to highlight a number of talks from the conference that we found interesting. Each Bootlin engineer who attended the conference has selected one talk, and gives his/her feedback about this talk.

Device Tree BoF – Frank Rowand

Talk selected by Michael Opdenacker

The Device Tree BoF (Birds of a Feather session, which means an informal session about a technical topic, allowing participants to openly share questions and information) has been part of Embedded Linux Conferences for at least 2 or 3 years. For me, it has always been a good source of updates about the topic.

Frank started by sharing details about the Device Tree Workshop held in October in Prague, a one day meet-up and workshop for Device Tree contributors (like Maxime Ripard and Thomas Petazzoni from Bootlin who were invited), to address issues and plan for the next months. Slides and notes can be found on elinux.org.

Frank then went on by mentioning utilities, such as:

  • scripts/dtc/dt_to_config. It is not very new in the mainline kernel, but useful to generate a kernel configuration suitable for the devices present on your platform, in case you didn’t know this tool exists.
  • There’s an upcoming patch adding options to dtc (--annotate --full) to keep track of the line numbers in the device tree sources. This helps to locate in which DT source file a given property value comes from. The patch was idle for some time but Julia Lawall volunteered to take care of it. Thanks to her updates, this feature should be accepted in mainline soon.
  • The device tree compiler in mainline has also been augmented with further build checks. You can now use them by adding W=1 to make dtb. Here is an example for the Beagle Bone Black dtb:
make W=1 am335x-boneblack.dtb
  CHK     scripts/mod/devicetable-offsets.h
  DTC     arch/arm/boot/dts/am335x-boneblack.dtb
arch/arm/boot/dts/am335x-boneblack.dtb: Warning (unit_address_vs_reg): Node /ocp/i2c@44e0b000/tda19988 has a reg or ranges property, but no unit name
arch/arm/boot/dts/am335x-boneblack.dtb: Warning (unit_address_vs_reg): Node /ocp/i2c@44e0b000/tda19988/ports/port@0 has a unit name, but no reg property
arch/arm/boot/dts/am335x-boneblack.dtb: Warning (unit_address_vs_reg): Node /ocp/i2c@44e0b000/tda19988/ports/port@0/endpoint@0 has a unit name, but no reg property
arch/arm/boot/dts/am335x-boneblack.dtb: Warning (unit_address_vs_reg): Node /ocp/ethernet@4a100000/slave@4a100200 has a unit name, but no reg property
arch/arm/boot/dts/am335x-boneblack.dtb: Warning (unit_address_vs_reg): Node /ocp/ethernet@4a100000/slave@4a100300 has a unit name, but no reg property
arch/arm/boot/dts/am335x-boneblack.dtb: Warning (unit_address_vs_reg): Node /ocp/lcdc@4830e000/port/endpoint@0 has a unit name, but no reg property
arch/arm/boot/dts/am335x-boneblack.dtb: Warning (simple_bus_reg): Node /ocp/l4_wkup@44c00000/prcm@200000/clocks missing or empty reg/ranges property
arch/arm/boot/dts/am335x-boneblack.dtb: Warning (simple_bus_reg): Node /ocp/l4_wkup@44c00000/prcm@200000/clockdomains missing or empty reg/ranges property
arch/arm/boot/dts/am335x-boneblack.dtb: Warning (simple_bus_reg): Node /ocp/l4_wkup@44c00000/scm@210000/scm_conf@0/clocks missing or empty reg/ranges property
arch/arm/boot/dts/am335x-boneblack.dtb: Warning (simple_bus_reg): Node /ocp/l4_wkup@44c00000/scm@210000/clockdomains missing or empty reg/ranges property

As far as I am concerned, the most interesting news remained the one that since Linux 4.15, device tree overlays are now easier to code. You no longer have to define weird “fragment” elements. You can now directly write normal nodes and use labels. The syntax is now exactly the same as for regular device tree sources!

For more details, grab the slides and if you event want to follow the discussions that happened that day, watch the video.

Tutorial: Introduction to Reverse Engineering – Mike Anderson

Talk selected by Quentin Schulz

Mike presented in an unusual 2-hour-long slot the different techniques to reverse-engineer things and the different reasons why you’d do so. After a mandatory disclaimer that reverse engineering may be illegal in some regions of the world, he introduced the different tools that anyone aspiring to reverse engineer should possess: from the obvious logic analyzer, multimeter, screwdrivers to the surprising heat gun. He then gave the first and very important step of the reverse engineering process: gathering information about the product by looking for patents, the FCC registration, manufacturer as well as carefully opening its case to examine the different components (maybe with the help of a microscope).

Later, Mike gave the multiple ways to retrieve the firmwares from the product, from the soldering of a JTAG interface to the downloading from the official website. He then offered some tools that can be used to dive into binaries and start the guessing game, and he finished his talk with an example of a reverse engineering of a protocol which required a lot of guessing and social reverse engineering.

Mike’s talk was pleasant to attend because of the high-level presentation of how to do reverse engineering while giving a quick real-life example.

For more details, watch the video and grab the slides.

Graphics Performance Analysis with FrameRetrace: A Responsive UI for ApiTrace – Mark Janes, Intel

Talk selected by Boris Brezillon

I first heard of FrameRetrace when Eric Anholt asked us to add support for the VC4 GPU to this tool, and my experience with it had been rather frustrating in that I was mainly struggling to make it work on a not yet supported architecture instead of being a simple user. So, when I saw that Mark was giving a talk on FrameRetrace usefulness and how to use it, I figured I couldn’t miss it. Well, those who looked carefuly at the schedule know I couldn’t attend it because I was giving my talk at the same time, but I did see it at FOSDEM a month before, and I’m pretty sure not much has changed since then.

Mark first described the GPU debugging/perf-anlysis tools ecosystem, saying that each GPU vendor has its own proprietary tools which most of the time are only supported on Windows. FrameRetrace is an attempt at providing a tool that exposes similar features while being open-source, cross-platform, and easily extensible to new hardware. This project is actually based on an exisiting project called ApiTrace, which it uses to capture OpenGL traces. The new feature that is interesting in FrameRetrace is that you can select the frame you want to replay, get all the hardware perf counters exposed by the GPU for this specific rendering job in order to figure out what is going wrong and then play with the OpenGL code to see how you can make things better and replay the rendering job with your local modification to see if it actually solves the problem.

I must admit I was really impressed by the demo, and now I understand why Eric (and others in the community) would like to have their GPU properly supported in FrameRetrace. It really looks like the kind of tool you don’t know you need until you’ve tested it, but once you do, you can’t do without it.

For more details, watch the video and grab the slides.

The Salmon Diet: Up-Streaming Drivers as a Form of Optimization – Gilad Ben-Yossef

Talk selected by Miquèl Raynal

Gilad was hired about a year ago to become the maintainer of the ARM® TrustZone® CryptoCell® device driver. Until now this driver was out of tree until it has been decided to upstream it. Here starts Gilad’s story.

It appeared that the right way to make it upstream was to go through the staging tree and the whole process around it. It was the first time for him to do it that way, that is why he felt it was interesting to share his experience.

At the beginning of his talk, he recalls that the driver was actually working, people already relied on it. Plus, it was released under the GPL. While all of this could make you think it was clean enough, Gilad realized that people who wrote it actually did not think about upstreaming and almost every patch to clean that driver removed more lines than it added, shrinking step by step the driver until 30% of the lines were removed!

Of course, removing the existing hardware abstraction macros was something to do, as well as running and correcting the whole checkpatch.pl output, but there are plenty of other good habits that one can adapt to his own situation, explained and well illustrated all along this talk.

For more details, watch the video and grab the slides.

Measuring and Summarizing Latencies using the Trace Event Subsystem – Tom Zanussi

Talk selected by Maxime Chevallier

Having some experience dealing with RT topics on Linux, I was looking forward to seeing Tom’s talk about these tracing features.

He gave really good examples on how to use the existing ‘latency histogram’ traces to get a cyclictest-like metric of wakeup latencies by measuring the time between sched_waking and sched_switch, and explaining how this could be re-used for other measurements such as network latencies.

What he presented was more than just having a trace in a buffer when a function is called. The tracing subsystem allows the use of handlers to perform actions when an event occurs. As an example, he demonstrated how to use the onmax handler to accumulate the maximum wakeup latency observed, each time saving crucial pieces of information on the execution context.

He then went on to describe the next-level features that are being merged, namely function events by Steven Rostedt, and Inter events by Tom himself. They allow the user to use any of the kernel functions as tracepoints, and build complex events and traces to pinpoint really specific sequences.

I recommend to read this LWN article on inter-event tracing, and of course have a look at Tom’s talk and slides.

Steering Xenomai into the Real-Time Linux Future – Jan Kiszka

Talk selected by Thomas Petazzoni

In this talk, long-term Xenomai developer and Siemens engineer Jan Kiszka gave a very interesting status of the Xenomai project and its roadmap. He started by refreshing the audience about what Xenomai is: an RTOS-to-Linux portability framework. It comes in two flavors: a co-kernel extension for a patched Linux kernel, and as libraries running for native Linux (including PREEMPT_RT). He then went on to compare the respective advantages and drawbacks of the two flavors, citing accurate modeling of legacy RTOS behavior and strong separation of real-time vs. non real-time code as the key advantages of the co-kernel approach.

Jan then summarized the history of Xenomai, from the early days as a sub-project of RTAI to the current status of Xenomai 3.0, released in 2015 after more than 5 years of development. However, even though Xenomai is widely used in the industry, its development relies on just a few individuals. Siemens is a heavy user of Xenomai, and in 2017, they started a discussion: should they migrate away from Xenomai or invest into it. Siemens made the decision to invest in the project. The same year, Xenomai main developer Philippe Gerum published an e-mail RTnet, Analogy and the elephant in the room also calling for help to maintain some parts of Xenomai.

Following those discussions, some changes were decided in the Xenomai project: Philippe Gerum will step back from the project lead, and Jan Kiszka will take over his role.

Regarding the I-Pipe kernel patch (which allows to support the co-kernel approach), the Xenomai project will discontinue a number of architectures (nios2, SH, Blackfin, PPC64, ARM < v7) and will only maintain patches for the latest Linux kernel LTS, in order to reduce the maintenance effort. Jan announced that Xenomai 3.0.7 is soon to be released, that Xenomai 3.1 will introduce ARM64 support, and that Xenomai 2 is unmaintained and therefore users should migrate to Xenomai 3. He also gave a status on the driver stacks, citing that RTnet needs more love, and that Analogy is orphaned and needs a new maintainer. Towards the end of his talk, Jan then started discussing the more distant future of Xenomai. The future version of Xenomai has the goal of improving the integration of the co-kernel approach, to simplify maintenance and possibly provide a chance to be upstreamed in Linux. This new approach will be split in two elements, called Dovetail (interrupt routing, co-kernel hooks) and Steely (co-kernel implementation). He made it clear that this is currently not production-ready at all. He noted that this new implementation allows a significant reduction of the code base, about 50% smaller than the current implementation. The code is already available in two Git repositories: Dovetail and Steely.

All in all, Jan’s talk was a very interesting one, providing a good coverage of Xenomai’s status and future. The video of his talk is definitely worth watching, and the slides are also available.

An Introduction to Asymmetric Multiprocessing: When this Architecture can be a Game Changer and How to Survive It – Nicola La Gloria & Laura Nao

Talk selected by Mylène Josserand

In this talk, Nicola La Gloria and Laura Nao from Kynetics presented how to handle communication between a micro-controller running bare metal code and a CPU with a full OS (such as GNU/Linux or Android).

They showed the different approaches for communication (supervised or not supervised: i.e. CPU and MCU can communicate using an hypervisor or directly) and presented the Inter-Processing Communication.

After this introduction, Laura told us about their use-case, running on an NXP i.MX7, which comprises a Cortex-M4 micro-controller and a Cortex-A7 processor: the MCU retrieves data from a sensor, which will be displayed by the CPU.
She gave feedback on how they implemented this communication and the different mechanisms used (Message Unit, RPMsg, RDC, kexec/kdump, etc). The explanation of the different mechanisms was really interesting, and particularly relevant for those who had never heard about them.

They did a short tutorial and gave some tips that would definitely be appreciated by people who start this kind of project. And finally, they did a demonstration of all the work they have done.

So if you are interested in the subject or even only for your general knowledge, have a look at their talk (video and slides).

System-in-Package Technology: Making it Easier to Build Your Own Linux Computer – Erik Welsh & Jason Kridner

Talk selected by Alexandre Belloni

Eric Welsh started to talk about how software influences hardware design and why open source hardware matters. He then presented the System-in-Package technology and in particular the Octavo OSD3358. It includes a TI AAM335x SoC, DDR3 SDRAM, a PMIC and all the related power circuitry, components which are always required. This allows the hardware engineers to concentrate on the added value of the final product.

Great pictures and videos of the SiP internals and its manufacturing process were shown.

Jason then came on stage to present the OSD3358 integration on the PocketBeagle.

Eric finally explained how easy it is to assemble the OSD3358 on a PCB, even by hand with a video to prove it. He finally concluded by summing up the benefits of using a SiP: easy bring-up, lower cost of PCB, easy manufacturing and migration from SBC prototyping to custom PCB.

It was quite enlightening for software engineers as it showed the hardware internals with some great details.
Have a look at the video and slides.

In conclusion, this was again a really nice opportunity to share and acquire knowledge from other engineers deeply involved in the Open Source community, as well as meeting people that we sometimes know only by their name on a mailing list. Next year this event will happen in Monterey Bay, California (March 19 – 21, 2019). See you there!

Bootlin at the Embedded Linux Conference 2018

Like every year for more than 10 years, Bootlin engineers will participate to the next Embedded Linux Conference, which takes place in Portland on March 12-14. Of course, it will be our first ELC with our new company name! In total, eight engineers from Bootlin will participate to the event. Maxime Chevallier, who joined Bootlin last Monday, will be attending the conference, his first one with a Bootlin hat (but Maxime has already been a speaker at the last Embedded Linux Conference Europe).

Embedded Linux Conference 2018

We will also be giving a number of talks, tutorials or moderating Bird of a Feather sessions:

We’re really happy to again meet the embedded Linux open-source community at this event! It is worth mentioning that following this event, Bootlin CTO Thomas Petazzoni will be in the Silicon Valley on March 15-16, available for business meetings: do not hesitate to contact us if you’re interested.

Bootlin at the Embedded Linux Conference 2017

Last month, five engineers from Bootlin participated to the Embedded Linux Conference in Portlan, Oregon. It was once again a great conference to learn new things about embedded Linux and the Linux kernel, and to meet developers from the open-source community.

Bootlin team at work at ELC 2017, with Maxime Ripard, Antoine Ténart, Mylène Josserand and Quentin Schulz

Bootlin talks

Bootlin CEO Michael Opdenacker gave a talk on Embedded Linux Size Reduction techniques, for which the slides and video are available:

Bootlin engineer Quentin Schulz gave a talk on Power Management Integrated Circuits: Keep the Power in Your Hands, the slides and video are also available:

Bootlin selection of talks

Of course, the slides from many other talks are progressively being uploaded, and the Linux Foundation published the video recordings in a record time: they are all already available on Youtube!

Below, each Bootlin engineer who attended the conference has selected one talk he/she has liked, and gives a quick summary of the talk, hopefully to encourage you watch the corresponding video recording.

Using SWupdate to Upgrade your system, Gabriel Huau

Talk selected by Mylène Josserand.

Gabriel Huau from Witekio did a great talk at ELC about SWUpdate, a tool created by Denx to update your system. The talk gives an overview of this tool, how it is working and how to use it. Updating your system is very important for embedded devices to fix some bugs/security fixes or add new features, but in an industrial context, it is sometimes difficult to perform an update: devices not easily accessible, large number of devices and variants, etc. A tool that can update the system automatically or even Over The Air (OTA) can be very useful. SWUpdate is one of them.

SWUpdate allows to update different parts of an embedded system such as the bootloader, the kernel, the device tree, the root file system and also the application data.
It handles different image types: UBI, MTD, Raw, Custom LUA, u-boot environment and even your custom one. It includes a notifier to be able to receive feedback about the updating process which can be useful in some cases. SWUPdate uses different local and OTA/remote interfaces such as USB, SD card, HTTP, etc. It is based on a simple update image format to indicate which images must be updated.

Many customizations can be done with this tool as it is provided with the classic menuconfig configuration tool. One great thing is that this tool is supported by Yocto Project and Buildroot so it can be easily tested.

Do not hesitate to have a look to his slides, the video of his talk or directly test SWUpdate!

GCC/Clang Optimizations for embedded Linux, Khem Raj

Talk selected by Michael Opdenacker.

Khem Raj from Comcast is a frequent speaker at the Embedded Linux Conference, and one of his strong fields of expertise is C compilers, especially LLVM/Clang and Gcc. His talk at this conference can interest anyone developing code in the C language, to know about optimizations that the compilers can use to improve the performance or size of generated binaries. See the video and slides.

Khem Raj slide about compiler optimization optionsOne noteworthy optimization is Clang’s -Oz (Gcc doesn’t have it), which goes even beyond -Os, by disabling loop vectorization. Note that Clang already performs better than Gcc in terms of code size (according to our own measurements). On the topic of bundle optimizations such as -O2 or -Os, Khem added that specific optimizations can be disabled in both compilers through the -fno- command line option preceding the name of a given optimization. The name of each optimization in a given bundle can be found through the -fverbose-asm command line option.

Another new optimization option is -Og, which is different from the traditional -g option. It still allows to produce code that can be debugged, but in a way that provides a reasonable level of runtime performance.

On the performance side, he also recalled the Feedback-Directed Optimizations (FDO), already covered in earlier Embedded Linux Conferences, which can be used to feed the compiler with profiler statistics about code branches. The compiler can use such information to optimize branches which are the more frequent at run-time.

Khem’s last advise was not to optimize too early, and first make sure you do your debugging and profiling work first, as heavily optimized code can be very difficult to debug. Therefore, optimizations are for well-proven code only.

Note that Khem also gave a similar talk in the IoT track for the conference, which was more focused on bare-metal code optimization code and portability: “Optimizing C for microcontrollers” (slides, video).

A Journey through Upstream Atomic KMS to Achieve DP Compliance, Manasi Navare

Talk selected by Quentin Schulz.

This talk was about the journey of a new comer in the mainline kernel community to fix the DisplayPort support in Intel i915 DRM driver. It first presented what happens from the moment we plug a cable in a monitor until we actually see an image, then where the driver is in the kernel: in the DRM subsystem, between the hardware (an Intel Integrated Graphics device) and the libdrm userspace library on which userspace applications such as the X server rely.

The bug to fix was that case when the driver would fail after updating to the requested resolution for a DP link. The other existing drivers usually fail before updating the resolution, so Manasi had to add a way to tell the userspace the DP link failed after updating the resolution. Such addition would be useless without applications using this new information, therefore she had to work with their developers to make the applications behave correctly when reading this important information.

With a working set of patches, she thought she had done most of the work with only the upstreaming left and didn’t know it would take her many versions to make it upstream. She wished to have sent a first version of a driver for review earlier to save time over the whole development plus upstreaming process. She also had to make sure the changes in the userspace applications will be ready when the driver will be upstreamed.

The talk was a good introduction on how DisplayPort works and an excellent example on why involving the community even in early stages of the development process may be a good idea to quicken the overall driver development process by avoiding complete rewriting of some code parts when upstreaming is under way.

See also the video and slides of the talk.

Timekeeping in the Linux Kernel, Stephen Boyd

Talk selected by Maxime Ripard.

Stephen did a great talk about one thing that is often overlooked, and really shouldn’t: Timekeeping. He started by explaining the various timekeeping mechanisms, both in hardware and how Linux use them. That meant covering the counters, timers, the tick, the jiffies, and the various POSIX clocks, and detailing the various frameworks using them. He also explained the various bugs that might be encountered when having a too naive counter implementation for example, or using the wrong POSIX clock from an application.

See also the video and slides of the talk.

Android Things, Karim Yaghmour

Talk selected by Antoine Ténart

Karim did a very good introduction to Android Things. His talk was a great overview of what this new OS from Google targeting embedded devices is, and where it comes from. He started by showing the history of Android, and he explained what this system brought to the embedded market. He then switched to the birth of Android Things; a reboot of Google’s strategy for connected devices. He finally gave an in depth explanation of the internals of this new OS, by comparing Android Things and Android, with lots of examples and demos.

Android Things replaces Brillo / Weave, and unlike its predecessor is built reusing available tools and services. It’s in fact a lightweight version of Android, with many services removed and a few additions like the PIO API to drive GPIO, I2C, PWM or UART controllers. A few services were replaced as well, most notably the launcher. The result is a not so big, but not so small, system that can run on headless devices to control various sensors; with an Android API for application developers.

See also the video and slides of the talk.

Slides from the Embedded Linux Conference

Two weeks ago, the entire Bootlin engineering team (9 persons) attended the Embedded Linux Conference in San Diego. We had some really good time there, with lots of interesting talks and useful meetings and discussions.

Tim Bird opening the conferenceDiscussion between Linus Torvalds and Dirk Hohndel

In addition to attending the event, we also participated by giving 5 different talks on various topics, for which we are publishing the slides:

Boris Brezillon, the new NAND Linux subsystem maintainer, presented on Modernizing the NAND framework: The big picture.

Boris Brezillon's talk on the NAND subsystem

Antoine Ténart presented on Using DT overlays to support the C.H.I.P’s capes.

Antoine Tenart's talk on using DT overlays for the CHIP

Maxime Ripard, maintainer of the Allwinner platform support in Linux, presented on Bringing display and 3D to the C.H.I.P computer.

Maxime Ripard's talk on display and 3D for the CHIP

Alexandre Belloni and Thomas Petazzoni presented Buildroot vs. OpenEmbedded/Yocto Project: a four hands discussion.

Belloni and Petazzoni's talk on OpenEmbedded vs. Buildroot

Thomas Petazzoni presented GNU Autotools: a tutorial.

Petazzoni's tutorial on the autotools

All the other slides from the conference are available from the event page as well as from eLinux.org Wiki. All conferences have been recorded, and the videos will hopefully be posted soon by the Linux Foundation.

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!

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.

Bootlin talks at the Embedded Linux Conference Europe

Father Mathew BridgeThe Embedded Linux Conference Europe 2015 will take place on October 5-7 in Dublin, Ireland. As usual, the entire Bootlin engineering team will participate to the event, as we believe it is one of the great way for our engineers to remain up-to-date with the latest embedded Linux developments and connect with other embedded Linux and kernel developers.

The conference schedule has been announced recently, and a number of talks given by Bootlin engineers have been accepted:

We submitted other talks that got rejected, probably since both of them had already been given at the Embedded Linux Conference in California: Maxime Ripard’s talk on dmaengine and Boris Brezillon’s talk on supporting MLC NAND (which we regret since Boris is currently actively working on this topic, so we are expecting to have some useful results by the time of ELCE, compared to his ELC talk which was mostly a presentation of the issues and some proposals to address them). Interested readers can anyway watch those talks and/or read the slides.

In addition to the Embedded Linux Conference Europe itself:

  • Thomas Petazzoni will participate to the Buildroot developers meeting on October 3/4, right before the conference.
  • Alexandre Belloni will participate to the OEDEM, the 2015 OpenEmbedded Developer’s European Meeting, taking place on October 9 after the conference.

ELC 2015 videos available

The videos from the last Embedded Linux Conference that took place late March in San Jose, California, are now available on Youtube! This represents a lot of interesting and useful content about embedded Linux topics.

You’ll find below the videos of the three talks given by Bootlin engineers at this Embedded Linux Conference.

An Overview of the kernel DMAEngine subsystem, Maxime Ripard

MLC/TLC NAND Support: Challenges for MTD/NAND Subsystem, Boris Brezillon

The Device Tree as a Stable ABI: A Fairy Tale?, Thomas Petazzoni

Embedded Linux Conference schedule announced, several talks from Bootlin

The schedule for the upcoming Embedded Linux Conference, which takes place on March 23-25 in San Jose, has been announced and is available publicly at http://elcabs2015.sched.org/, together with the Android Builders Summit schedule. As usual, there are lots of talks that look very interesting, so we can expect a very useful conference once again.

ELC 2015

This time around, there will be three talks given by Bootlin engineers:

So, book your tickets, and join us for the Embedded Linux Conference at the end of March!

2015 Q1 newsletter

The Bootlin team wishes you a Happy New Year for 2015, with plenty of optimism and energy!

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

Kernel contributions

We continue to work significantly on support for various ARM processors in the Linux kernel. Our contributions to the latest kernel releases:

  • 147 patches from Bootlin merged in Linux 3.17, making Bootlin the 14th contributing company for this release by number of patches. See our blog post about this release.
  • 155 patches from Bootlin merged in Linux 3.18, making Bootlin the 14th contributing company. See our blog post for more details.
  • For the upcoming 3.19 release, we already have 196 patches merged.

One of the highlights was that we added support for the Atmel SAMA5D4 SoC to the Linux kernel even before the new chip was announced by Atmel! That’s a very positive sign for customers when an SoC is supported in the mainline Linux kernel sources right at product launch, instead of having to wait for months or years before the community developers can catch up.

Note that we also added Atmel SAMA5D3 SoC support to Xenomai, a hard real-time extension for the Linux kernel. Thanks to this, the Atmel SAMA5D3 Xplained board can now run with the 2.6.x release of Xenomai.

Besides those highlights, most of our kernel contributions were as usual centered around support for specific families of ARM processors: CPUs from Marvell EBU and Marvell Berlin, from Atmel and from Allwinner. We added a new network driver for some Marvell EBU processors, added SMP support for Marvell Berlin processors, added a DMA controller driver for Allwinner processors, and did a lot of maintenance work to support these processors in the mainline kernel.

Buildroot contributions

Our involvement into the Buildroot project, a popular embedded Linux build system, is going on. Our engineer Thomas Petazzoni contributed 136 patches to the 2014.11 release, making him the second contributor by number of patches. Thomas is also taking care of the maintenance of the project on a more regular basis, reviewing and merging patches from contributors.

OpenWRT contributions

We have recently started contributing to the OpenWRT project: improve the kernel support to use defconfig, introduce a notion of board to support different NAND configurations for each platform. We will soon to be pushing support for the Marvell Armada 385 platform, and improved support for the Marvell Armada 370 and XP platforms.

Recent projects

Besides our publicly visible kernel contributions, we do also work on customer-specific projects. Among the latest projects we have done:

  • Develop a complete Board Support Package for a custom TI AM335x based platform: U-Boot porting, Linux kernel porting, and development of a Yocto-generated system. Qt5 and OpenGL are used for the graphical application, a fairly complex audio setup had to be supported, and many traditional interfaces as well (USB Host and Device, CAN, display, etc.)
  • Develop a Board Support Package for a custom Marvell Armada 375 based platform for a telephony system. Not only did we port a Linux kernel on this platform, but we also wrote several DAHDI drivers to interface the telephony hardware of the platform with Asterisk.
  • NAND and UBI stress-testing for a customer-specific Freescale i.MX28 based platform. We improved the NAND controller driver, added a new MTD tool to generate bitflips, and did some long term power-cut stress-testing of the UBIFS setup to ensure the reliability of the platform. See our kernel driver improvements and the new nandflipbits tool.
  • Adapt an existing ADC driver for a customer-specific platform to the modern Industrial Input Output (IIO) subsystem of the kernel.

Conferences: FOSDEM, Embedded World and Embedded Linux Conference

Several Bootlin engineers will participate to the FOSDEM conference, taking place on January 30 and February 1 in Brussels. In addition, Thomas Petazzoni will be participating to the Buildroot Developers Meeting that takes place right after FOSDEM in the Google offices in Brussels.

Bootlin will participate to the Embedded World trade show on February 24-26 in Nuremberg, Germany. We will be present at Atmel’s booth and visiting exhibitor booths too. For people in Europe, this will be a good opportunity to ask your questions about our embedded Linux training and engineering services. In particular, you will be able meet our engineers Alexandre Belloni, Thomas Petazzoni (CTO), Michael Opdenacker (CEO) and Anja Roubin as well, the new person in charge of our training services.

This year again, most of the Bootlin engineering team (7 engineers) will participate to the 2015 edition of the Embedded Linux Conference on March 23-25 in San Jose, California. We submitted several talk proposals, but our presence won’t depend on the number of talks that are eventually accepted. Participating to this conference, and to its European edition in the fall too, is very important for us to make sure we do not miss any of the interesting developments in the technical community, and above all to strengthen our ties with the community developers. This helps us to be good technical trainers with valuable experience and information to share. The strong relationships with other community developers (and in particular with project maintainers) also help us when our customers contract us to add hardware support or features to official versions of community projects such as the Linux kernel.

Free technical documentation resources

Since the latest edition of this newsletter, we started running our new Yocto Project and OpenEmbedded course, and we released all training materials for this course. As usual, such materials are meant to be used by people learning by themselves too. All you have to do is get your hands on a Beaglebone Black board, read the slides and try to do the labs!

Our engineer Maxime Ripard also contributed documentation about the DMAEngine subsystem in the Linux kernel.

Upcoming training sessions – Now in Paris too!

The news is that we will run new public sessions in Paris, in addition to the ones we usually organize in Toulouse, Avignon and Lyon in France. We are starting with our embedded Linux and our Yocto courses, but other topics will follow too.

So, here are our next session dates:

See sessions and dates for more details. Of course, we can also deliver our training courses at your location, anywhere in the world. Feel free to contact us for a quote.

If you are interested in more frequent news about Bootlin, you can follow us on Twitter, Google+ and LinkedIn.