Tag: kernel

Bootlin working on the $9 C.H.I.P. computer

C.H.I.P computer

If you’re following the news about embedded Linux and new cool development platforms, you for sure couldn’t miss the announcement on the world’s first $9 computer. This computer, called C.H.I.P., was started through a crowd-funding campaign on Kickstarter and reception in the Free Software and Open Source community has been very positive. Out of an initial funding goal of $50,000, NextThing Co, the Oakland, California based company creating this product eventually managed to raise more $2,000,000 of funding.

NextThing Co announced their intention to support the platform in the most open way possible: the schematics will be made available, and it will be supported in the mainline Linux kernel.

It turns out that the processor NextThing Co has chosen for this platform is an Allwinner R8 processor. Bootlin has been working since several years on supporting Allwinner processors in the mainline Linux kernel: our engineer Maxime Ripard is the maintainer of the Allwinner SoC support.

Thanks to this long term involvement, Bootlin has been asked by NextThing Co to work with them to support the C.H.I.P. computer in the mainline Linux kernel, and in the process bring some significant improvements to the support of Allwinner processors in the kernel.

C.H.I.P, world first $9 computer

NextThing Co announced recently our collaboration in a blog post on Kickstarter:

We’re incredibly excited to announce that we’ve partnered with one of the premier contributors to ARM Linux: Bootlin! We will be collaborating with their amazing team of ARM Linux engineers, and of course our Kernel Hacker backers to help us test and mainline C.H.I.P.’s kernel modifications as we move forward.

Bootlin is also very excited to be working with NextThing Co on this project! Thanks to this, over the next months, we will have a very substantial amount of time dedicated to this project, and we will regularly push code to support the missing hardware Allwinner SoC hardware blocks in the mainline Linux kernel and to support the C.H.I.P. board.

Pocket C.H.I.P

More details about the C.H.I.P:

  • Availability planned for 2016 for the general public. A selection of 1000 kernel hackers who backed on Kickstarter will have the platform earlier.
  • Very small platform: 40mm x 60mm, making is even smaller than a Raspberry Pi or BeagleBone.
  • Allwinner R8 processor, clocked at 1 Ghz, and offering OpenGL/OpenVG acceleration through an ARM Mali GPU
  • 512 MB of RAM
  • 4GB of on-board NAND flash storage
  • WiFi and Bluetooth 4.0 to connect the system to the outside world
  • One USB host port
  • Powered through a micro USB connector which also supports USB OTG (either USB host or device).
  • Jack connector for composite video out, headphones and microphone input.
  • Many headers to connect external devices (SPI, I2C, UART + 8 GPIOs)
  • Integrated circuit for charging a LiPo battery and being powered by it
  • Additional HDMI or VGA add-on boards will be needed to connect to displays with the corresponding connectivity.

Bootlin engineer Alexandre Belloni co-maintainer of Linux Atmel processor support

Atmel SAMA5After becoming the co-maintainer of the Linux RTC subsystem, Bootlin engineer Alexandre Belloni also recently became a co-maintainer for the support of Atmel ARM processors in the Linux kernel.

Bootlin has been working since early 2014 with Atmel to improve support for their processors in the mainline kernel. Since this date, our work has mainly consisted in:

  • Modernizing existing code for Atmel processors: complete the switch to the Device Tree and the common clock framework for all platforms, rework all that was needed to make Atmel processor support compatible with the ARM multiplatform kernel, and do a lot of related driver and platform refactoring.
  • Implement a complete DRM/KMS driver for the display subsystem of the most recent Atmel processors.
  • Upstream support for the Atmel SAMA5D4, the latest Cortex-A5 based SoC from Atmel.

Thanks to this long-term involvement from Alexandre Belloni and Boris Brezillon, Alexandre was appointed as a co-maintainer of Atmel support, replacing Andrew Victor who hasn’t been active in kernel development since quite some time. He is joining Nicolas Ferre and Jean-Christophe Plagniol-Villard in the team of maintainers for the Atmel platform.

Alexandre has sent his first pull request as an Atmel co-maintainer on May 22, sending 9 patches to the ARM SoC maintainers, planned for the 4.2 kernel release. His pull request was quickly merged by ARM SoC maintainer Arnd Bergmann.

Bootlin is proud to have one of its engineers as the maintainer of one very popular embedded Linux platform, which has had since many years a strong commitment of upstream Linux kernel support. Alexandre is the third Bootlin engineer to become an ARM platform maintainer: Maxime Ripard is the maintainer of Allwinner ARM processor support, and Gregory Clement is the co-maintainer of Marvell EBU ARM processor support.

Embedded Linux and kernel job openings for 2015

At Bootlin, we are starting to get more and more requests for very cool projects. As it can be very frustrating to turn down very interesting opportunities (such as projects that allow us to contribute to the Linux kernel, Buildroot or Yocto Projects), we have decided to look for new engineers to join our technical team.

Job description in a nutshell

  • Technical aspects: mainline Linux kernel development, Linux BSP and embedded Linux system integration, technical training
  • Location: working in one of our offices in France (Toulouse or Orange)
  • Contract: full-time, permanent French contract

Mainline Linux kernel development

Believe it or not, we now have an increasing number of customers contracting us to support their hardware in the mainline Linux kernel. They are either System on Chip manufacturers or systems makers, who now understand the strong advantages brought by mainline Linux kernel support to their customers and to themselves.

You can see the results: Bootlin is now consistently in the top 20 companies contributing to the Linux kernel. We are even number 6 for Linux 4.0!

Note that this job doesn’t only require technical skills. It also has a strong social dimension, having to go through multiple iterations with the community and with kernel subsystem maintainers to get your code accepted upstream.

Linux BSP and embedded Linux system integration

Such activity involves developing and integrating everything that’s needed to deploy Linux on the customer hardware: bootloader, kernel, build environment (such as Buildroot or the Yocto project), upgrade system, optimizing performance (such as boot time) and fixing issues. Another way is to provide guidance and support to customer learning to do such a job.

As opposed to Linux kernel development projects which are often long term ones (though with step by step objectives which can be reached in days), these are usually shorter and more challenging projects. They allow us to stay in touch with the real-life challenges that customer engineers face every day, and that require to achieve substantial results in a relatively small number of days.

Such projects also constitute opportunities to contribute improvements to the mainline kernel and bootloader projects, as well to the build system projects themselves (Buildroot, Yocto Project, OpenWRT…).

Training and sharing experience

Knowledge sharing is an important part of Bootlin mission and activity. Hence, after gaining sufficient on-the-job experience, another important aspect of the job is teaching, maintaining and improving Bootlin training courses.

You will also be strongly incited to share your technical experience by writing blog posts or kernel documentation, and by proposing talks at international conferences, especially the Embedded Linux Conference (USA, Europe).

Profile

  • Experience: we are open to both experienced engineers and people just out of engineering schools. Though prior experience with the technical topics will be an advantage, we are also interested in young engineers demonstrating great potential for learning, coding and knowledge sharing. People having made visible contributions in these areas will have an advantage too.
  • Language skills: fluency in oral and written English is very important. French speaking skills won’t be a requirement, but an advantage too.
  • Traveling: for training sessions and conference participation, you will need the ability to travel rather frequently, up to 8-10 times a year.
  • Ability to relocate, to one of our offices in France, either in Toulouse or in Orange, to strengthen our engineering teams here.

Details about Toulouse and Orange

  • Toulouse is a dynamic city with lots of high-tech and embedded systems companies in particular. Our office in Colomiers can easily be reached by train from downtown Toulouse if you wish to settle there. You would be working with Boris Brezillon, Antoine Ténart, Maxime Ripard and our CTO Thomas Petazzoni.
  • Our main office is settled in Orange in the heart of the Provence region, close to Avignon, a smaller but dynamic city too. It enjoys a sunny climate and the proximity of the Alps and the Mediterranean sea. Accommodation is very affordable and there are no traffic issues! You would be working with our founder Michael Opdenacker and of course remotely with the rest of the engineering team. In particular, we are interested in foreign engineers who could help us develop our services in their home countries.

We prefer not to offer home based positions for the moment, which have their own complexity and cost, while we have plenty of space left in our current offices.

See a full description and details about how to contact us.

Bootlin engineer Alexandre Belloni co-maintainer of the Linux RTC subsystem

SparkFun Real Time Clock ModuleThe Linux RTC subsystem supports the Real Time Clock drivers for a large number of platforms and I2C or SPI based Real Time Clocks: it contains about 140 different device drivers, plus the RTC core itself. The current maintainer, Alessandro Zummo, had unfortunately very little time to address all the patches that were sent, and many of them where usually handled by Andrew Morton, acting as a fallback for various parts of the kernel that are not enough actively maintained.

To address this lack of maintainer time, Bootlin engineer Alexandre Belloni recently became a co-maintainer of the RTC subsystem, as can be seen in this patch to the MAINTAINERS file. Alexandre has already started his work by cleaning up the patchwork instance listing all the pending RTC patches, reducing the number of pending patches from 2843 to 436, actively applying new patches being posted, and reviving old patches that never got any attention.

Up to the 4.1 release included, RTC patches will flow to Linus Torvalds through Andrew Morton, but starting from Linux 4.2, Alexandre will start sending his pull requests directly to Linus.

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.

Linux 3.18 released, Bootlin 13th contributing company

PenguinLinus Torvalds has recently released the 3.18 version of the Linux kernel. As usual, LWN.net made an excellent coverage of the merge window: part 1, part 2 and part 3.

As of 3.18-rc6, LWN.net gathered some statistics about the 3.18 kernel contributions, and Bootlin is ranked as the 13th contributing company for this release in number of patches (see the statistics), right after MEV Limited and before Qualcomm.

A quick summary of our contributions:

  • Improvements to the support of Atmel ARM processors: addition of a memory driver for the RAM controller (Alexandre Belloni), improvements to the irqchip driver to support the new SAMA5D4 processor (Alexandre Belloni), updates to the defconfigs (Alexandre Belloni), new clock driver for the SAMA5D4 processor (Alexandre Belloni), preparation work for multi-platform (Boris Brezillon), numerous fixes to clock drivers (Boris Brezillon), NAND driver improvements (Boris Brezillon), new reset and poweroff drivers and moved all the corresponding logic to a Device Tree based description (Maxime Ripard), refactoring of the clocksource driver and move to the proper drivers/clocksource directory (Maxime Ripard).
  • Improvements to the support of Marvell EBU ARM processors: XOR driver improvements (Ezequiel Garcia), pin-muxing description in Device Tree for more platforms (Ezequiel Garcia), support for the RTC on Armada 375 (Grégory Clement), support for the Spread Sprectrum Generator on Armada 370 (Grégory Clement), improvements to the support of the Armada 370 RD platform (Thomas Petazzoni), extensions to the cpufreq-dt driver to support platforms with independent clocks for each CPU, various fixes.
  • Improvements to the support of Marvell Berlin ARM processors: add support for the Ethernet controller by re-using the existing pxa168_eth driver (Antoine Ténart).
  • Improvements to the support of Allwinner ARM processors: addition of the support for a phase property to the Common Clock Framework, and usage in the context of the MMC clock on Allwinner processors (Maxime Ripard).
  • Various small UBI improvements (Ezequiel Garcia).
  • A number of trivial fixes: removal of IRQF_DISABLED, typo fixes, etc. (Michael Opdenacker).

The detailed list of the patches we have contributed:

DMAEngine Documentation: Work (finally) in Progress

While developping a DMA controller driver for the Allwinner A31 SoCs (that eventually got merged in the 3.17 kernel), I’ve realised how under-documented the DMAEngine kernel subsystem was, especially for a newcomer like I was.

After discussing this with a few other kernel developers in the same situation, I finally started to work on such a documentation during the summer, and ended up submitting it at the end of July. As you might expect, it triggered a lot of questions, comments and discussions that enhanced a lot the documentation itself but also pointed out some inconsistencies in the API, obscure areas or just enhancements.

This also triggered an effort to clean up these areas, and hopefully, a lot more will follow, allowing to eventually clean up the framework as a whole.

And the good thing is that this documentation has been merged by the DMAEngine maintainer and is visible in linux-next, feel free to read it, and enhance it!

Linux 3.17 released, Bootlin 14th contributing company

PenguinLinux 3.17 has been released a few days ago. One can read the coverage of the 3.17 merge window by LWN (part 1 and part 2) to get some details about the new features brought by this kernel release.

As usual, Bootlin has continued to contribute a significant number of patches to this kernel release, even though with 147 patches, our contribution has been less important than for the 3.16 release for which we contributed 388 patches. With 147 patches merged, Bootlin is the 14th contributing company by the number of patches, according to the statistics.

Our contributions remain mainly focused on support for various families of ARM processors:

  • For the Atmel processors
    • Switched to use the generic PWM framework instead of custom PWM drivers. This allowed to remove three obsolete drivers (a backlight driver, a LED driver and a misc driver). This work was done by Alexandre Belloni.
    • Continue the migration to the common clock framework, by adding clock information to a large number of Atmel boards. Done by Alexandre Belloni.
    • Migration of the interrupt controller driver from arch/arm/mach-at91 to drivers/irqchip. Done by Boris Brezillon.
  • For the Marvell EBU processors (Armada 370, 375, 38x, XP)
    • Addition of the mvpp2 network driver, which is used on the Armada 375 SoC. This work was done by Marcin Wojtas from Semihalf, with a lot of review, help and debugging done by Ezequiel Garcia.
    • Addition of cpuidle support for Armada 370 and Armada 38x. This work was done by Grégory Clement and Thomas Petazzoni.
    • Preparation work to enable cpufreq on Armada XP was merged. However the feature cannot be enabled yet due to missing features in the cpufreq-cpu0 driver. Done by Thomas Petazzoni.
  • For Marvell Berlin processors
    • SMP support has been added. Done by Antoine Ténart.
    • Description of the I2C controller has been added to the Device Tree. Done by Antoine Ténart.
    • Support for AHCI has been added. Also done by Antoine Ténart.
  • For Allwinner processors
    • New DMA controller driver for the DMA engine of the Allwinner A31 SoC. Done by Maxime Ripard.
    • A number of fixes and improvements to the pin-muxing driver for Allwinner platforms. Done by Maxime Ripard.
    • Support for the Merrii A31 Hummingbird board has been added. Done by Maxime Ripard.
  • Other changes
    • Addition of a helper function to convert an ONFI timing mode into the according NAND timings. Done by Boris Brezillon.
    • Addition of a driver for the Foxlink FL500WVR00-A0T panel. Done by Boris Brezillon.

The detailed list of our contributions:

Atmel SAMA5D4 support in the mainline Linux kernel

Atmel SAMA5D4Atmel announced its new ARM Cortex-A5-based SoC on October 1, the SAMA5D4. Compared to the previous Cortex-A5 SoC from Atmel, the SAMA5D3, this new version brings a L2 cache, NEON, a slightly different clock tree, a hardware video decoder, and Trustzone support.

Bootlin engineers have worked since several months with Atmel engineers to prepare and submit the support for this new SoC to the mainline Linux kernel. We have actually submitted the patches on September, 11th, almost a month before the official release of the new chip! This means that most of the support for this new SoC will already be part of the upcoming 3.18 kernel release. Meanwhile, it is already possible to test it out by using the linux-next repository.

There are however a few pieces missing pieces to support all aspects of the chip:

  • A few patches are needed to get proper NAND flash controller support.
  • The DMA controller is brand new in this SAMA5D4 SoC, and the DMA controller driver has not yet been merged, even though the patches have been posted a long time ago, and are currently in their sixth iteration.
  • Display support, through a DRM/KMS driver, is also being reviewed. The driver, written by Bootlin engineer Boris Brezillon, was initially designed for the sam9x5 and sam5d3, but will be compatible with sama5d4 as well. The patch series is currently in its seventh iteration.

The last big missing part is support for non-secure mode: for the moment, the system always runs in secure mode. Running the kernel in non-secure mode will require some more work but an initial version will probably be pushed during the next development cycle.

Besides this work on SAMA5D4 support ahead of its public release, Bootlin is also doing a lot of maintenance work on all the Atmel ARM platforms in the Linux kernel: migration to the Device Tree, to the clock framework, to several other new subsystems, etc. See the summary of our kernel contributions to 3.16, 3.15 and 3.14.

Through this work, the Bootlin engineering team has a very deep knowledge of the Linux support for Atmel ARM processors. Do not hesitate to contact us if you need help to bring up the bootloader or kernel on your custom Atmel ARM platform! It is also worth mentioning that Free-Electrons is part of the Atmel partner ecosystem.

2014 Q3 newsletter

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

Kernel contributions

Since our last newsletter, our engineering team continued to make significant contributions to the Linux kernel, especially in the area of supporting ARM processors and platforms:

  • 218 patches from Bootlin were merged into Linux 3.15, making Bootlin the 12th contributing company for this release by number of patches. See our blog post.
  • 388 patches from Bootlin were merged into Linux 3.16, making Bootlin the 7th contributing company for this release, by number of patches. See our blog post.
  • For the upcoming 3.17 release, we already have 146 patches merged, and we have a lot more work being done for future kernel releases.

The major areas of our contributions were:

  • The addition of an ubiblk driver, which allows traditional block filesystems to be used on top of UBI devices, and therefore on NAND flash storage. Only read-only support is available, but it already allows to make use of the super efficient SquashFS filesystem on top of NAND flash in a safe way.
  • Another major addition is support for the new Marvell Armada 375 and Armada 38x processors. In just two releases (3.15 and 3.16) we almost pushed entire support for these new processors. The network driver for Armada 375 is one missing piece, coming in 3.17.
  • Our maintenance work on the Atmel AT91 and SAMA5 processors has continued, with more conversion to the Device Tree, the common clock framework, and other modern kernel mechanisms. We have also developed the DRM/KMS (graphics) driver for the SAMA5D3 SoC, which has already been posted and should hopefully be merged soon.
  • Our work to support the Marvell Berlin processor has started to be merged in 3.16. This processor is used in various TVs, set-top boxes or devices like the Google Chromecast. Basic support was merged including Device Trees, clock drivers, pin-muxing driver, GPIO and SDHCI support. AHCI support will be in 3.17, and USB and network support should be in 3.18.
  • Additional work was done on support for Allwinner ARM SoCs, especially the A31 processor: SPI and I2C support, drivers for the P2WI bus and the PRCM controller, and support for USB.

We now have broad experience in writing kernel drivers and getting code merged into the mainline tree. Do not hesitate to contact us if you need help to develop Linux kernel drivers, or to support a new board or processor.

Buildroot contributions

Our involvement into the Buildroot project, a popular embedded Linux build system, is going on. We have merged 159 patches in the 2014.05 release of the project (total of 1293 patches), and 129 patches in the 2014.08 release of the project (total of 1353 patches). Moreover, our engineer Thomas Petazzoni is regularly an interim maintainer of the project, when the official maintainer Peter Korsgaard is not available. Some of the major features we contributed: major improvements to Python 3 support, addition of EFI bootloaders, addition of support for the Musl C library.

Regular embedded Linux projects

Of course, we also conducted embedded Linux development and boot time optimization projects for various embedded system makers, with less visible impact on community projects. However, we will try to share generic technical experience from such projects through future blog posts.

New training course: Yocto Project and OpenEmbedded

A large number of embedded Linux projects use embedded Linux build systems to integrate the various software components of the system into a working root filesystem image. Among the solutions available to achieve this, the Yocto Project and OpenEmbedded are very popular.

We have therefore launched a new 3 day Yocto Project and OpenEmbedded training course to help engineers and companies who are using, or are interested in using these solutions for their embedded Linux projects. Starting from the basics of understanding the core principles of Yocto, the training course goes into the details of writing package recipes, integrating support for a board into Yocto, creating custom images, and more.

The detailed agenda of the training course is available. You can order this training course at your location, or participate to the first public session organized on November 18-20 in France.

Embedded Linux training course updated

The embedded Linux ecosystem is evolving very quickly, and therefore we are continuously updating our training courses to match the latest developments. As part of this effort, we have recently conducted a major update to our Embedded Linux course: the hardware platform used for the practical labs has been changed to the popular and very interesting Atmel Xplained SAMA5D3, and many practical labs have been improved to provide a more useful learning experience. See our blog post for more details.

Mailing list for training participants

We have launched a new service for the participants to our training sessions: a mailing list dedicated to them, and through which they can ask additional questions after the course, share their experience, get in touch with other training participants and Bootlin engineers. Of course, all Bootlin engineers are on the mailing list and participate to the discussions. Another useful service offered by our training courses!

This resource is no longer available, but participants to our training sessions are still welcome to contact us by e-mail.

Conferences: ELC, ELCE, Kernel Recipes

The Bootlin engineering team will participate to the Embedded Linux Conference Europe and Linux Plumbers, next month in Düsseldorf, Germany. Several Bootlin engineers will also be giving talks during ELCE:

In addition, Thomas will participate to the Buildroot Developers Day, taking place right before the Embedded Linux Conference Europe in Düsseldorf.

See also our blog post about ELCE for more details.

Maxime Ripard and Michael Opdenacker will participate to the Kernel Recipes 2014 conference, on September 25-26 in Paris. Maxime will be giving his Allwinner kernel talk at this conference. See our blog post for more details.

Last but not least, we have recently published the videos of a number of talks from the previous Embedded Linux Conference, held earlier this year in San Jose. A lot of interesting material about embedded Linux! Check out our blog post for more details.

Upcoming training sessions

We have a number of public training sessions dates, with seats available:

Sessions and dates