Bootlin at the Libre Software Meeting

In a previous post, we detailed all the talks of the Embedded Systems and Open Hardware track of the Libre Software Meeting, taking place in Geneva in early July.

Bootlin will have a quite important presence at this event, with three talks and one tutorial given by Bootlin engineers. You’ll find below the descriptions of the talks given by Bootlin. Both my colleague Maxime Ripard and myself will be present at Libre Software Meeting, and we will be happy to meet you there to discuss Embedded Linux and Android topics!

A look through the Android Stack

Android has established itself in the past years as a major player in the mobile market, outperforming any other mobile systems.

To do so, Google relied both on well established open-source components, such as the Linux Kernel, and munching them together in a brand new userspace environment. This talk will detail the most important components of Android userspace and the interactions between them that allow developers to face a consistent API for their applications.

This talk will be given on Tuesday 9th July 2012, at 14:00, by Maxime Ripard, embedded Linux and Android engineer at Bootlin. Maxime is also teaching our newest training course on Android system development.

Buildroot: a nice, simple and efficient embedded Linux build system

Started in late 2001 by uClibc developers, Buildroot has grown over its 10 years history from a testing tool for the uClibc C library to a complete, vendor-neutral, embedded Linux build system. Until early 2009, the project was mostly unmaintained and the quality slowly decreased, frustrating many Buildroot users. Fortunately, since early 2009, Peter Korsgaard took over the maintainership of Buildroot, and the project has considerably evolved since then: stable releases are published every three months, the user and developer community has grown significantly, the existing features have been cleaned up, many other new features have been added, the project is no longer uClibc-specific and the quality has been vastly improved. Buildroot now offers a nice, simple and efficient mechanism to build small to medium sized embedded Linux systems, such as the ones found in many industrial systems or highly dedicated systems. Many users are amazed about how easy it is to get started with Buildroot, especially compared to other build systems. This presentation will show how Buildroot can be used to build embedded Linux systems, highlighting the new features and improvements made over the last few years, and detailing how the simplicity of Buildroot allows you to focus on developing the applications for your system. A quick overview of the future Buildroot developments will also be provided.

This talk will take place on Wednesday 10th July at 17:00 and will be given by Thomas Petazzoni, embedded Linux engineer at Bootlin, and long time Buildroot contributor.

Linux kernel on ARM: consolidation work

In Spring 2011, Linus Torvalds asked the ARM Linux maintainers to clean up the contents of arch/arm/ in the Linux kernel code by doing more consolidation between ARM sub-architectures.

More than a year later, a lot of work has been accomplished in this area, especially thanks to the introduction of the device tree for the ARM architecture, the pinctrl subsystem and the clock framework into the Linux kernel.

Through this talk, we will present the challenges the ARM architecture creates in terms of Linux kernel support, and then describe from a technical point of view how the device tree, the pinctrl subsystem and the clock subsystem work and how they can improve the consolidation between different ARM sub-architectures.

The talk will be designed to be accessible to an audience having only a moderate knowledge of kernel programming and internals, and will therefore provide enough context for such audience to understand the issues that those different mechanisms are striving to solve.

This talk will take place on Thursday 11th July at 10:00 and will be given by Thomas Petazzoni, embedded Linux engineer at Bootlin.

Tutorial on using Buildroot, a nice, simple and efficient embedded Linux build system

Started in late 2001 by uClibc developers, Buildroot has grown over its 10 years history from a testing tool for the uClibc C library to a complete, vendor-neutral, embedded Linux build system. Until early 2009, the project was mostly unmaintained and the quality slowly decreased, frustrating many Buildroot users. Fortunately, since early 2009, Peter Korsgaard took over the maintainership of Buildroot, and the project has considerably evolved since then: stable releases are published every three months, the user and developer community has grown significantly, the existing features have been cleaned up, many other new features have been added, the project is no longer uClibc-specific and the quality has been vastly improved. Buildroot now offers a nice, simple and efficient mechanism to build small to medium sized embedded Linux systems, such as the ones found in many industrial systems or highly dedicated systems. Many users are amazed about how easy it is to get started with Buildroot, especially compared to other build systems.

This workshop follows the Buildroot presentation proposed in the same topic. During one half-day participants will be introduced on how to efficiently use Buildroot for their own projects:

  • Basic usage of Buildroot: generate the first system, boot it on a hardware platform
  • Add packages to Buildroot
  • Customize Buildroot for real-life projects: how to integrate project specific patches, configuration and customization

Participants are invited to come with their own laptop, installed with a sufficiently recent GNU/Linux distribution. Participants are recommended to attend the Buildroot talk by the same speaker before attending the workshop, as the talk will give an overall introduction on Buildroot.

This tutorial will take place on Thursday 11th July from 14:00 to 17:00 and will be given by Thomas Petazzoni, embedded Linux engineer at Bootlin, and long time Buildroot contributor.

Embedded topics at the Libre Software Meeting, Geneva, July 9-11

Libre Software Meeting, Geneva
Libre Software Meeting, Geneva

The Libre Software Meeting is a community-driven free software event that exists since 2000, composed of talks and workshops. Its 2012 edition will take place from July 7th to July 12th in Geneva, Switzerland.

In the context of this conference, I was responsible with Florian Fainelli from the OpenWRT project to organize the Embedded systems and open hardware track. This track will offer an interesting selection of talks related to embedded topics, concentrated between July 9th and July 11th:

Geneva
Geneva

In the Operating Systems track, some other conferences might be of interested to Embedded Linux developers as well:

The entrace to the Libre Software Meeting is free, so don’t hesitate to book your train or flight tickets, and join us at this event!

Videos from Libre Software Meeting 2010 in France

RMLL 2010The Libre Software Meeting (Rencontres Mondiales du Logiciel Libre in French) is a community-driven event that takes place every year in France, and covers a wide range of topics in the free and open source software domain. Each year, an Embedded systems and free hardware topic is proposed, which in 2010 was lead by Florian Fainelli, Pierre Ficheux and myself.

While most of the talks took place in French, a few talks were given in English and as we recoded videos from those talks, we thought it’d be a good idea to highlight them to the english readers of our blog. We found it especially important since amongst those videos, there are two particularly interesting presentations from Sarah Sharp, a kernel developer from Intel, about USB3 and its support in Linux. As usual, all our videos are published under the Creative Commons Attribution – ShareAlike Licence version 3.0 license.

Sarah Sharp presenting USB3 at LSM2010

The talks given in English were :

Our french readers will find all other videos in this blog post.

Call for presentations for the LSM embedded track

The Libre Software Meeting (LSM) is an annual event on free software taking place in july in France since 2000. The LSM meeting is organized this year in Nantes, France from 7th to 11th July. Amongst several tracks, the Libre Software Meeting will feature an « Embedded Systems and Open Hardware » track, for which the call for presentations has been released recently.

The purpose of the “Embedded Systems and Open Hardware” session is to give the state of the art of free software for embedded systems and Open Hardware. Technical topics of this session include but are not limited to:

  • Embedded OS Development kernel architecture, implementation and port for embedded systems
  • Embedded Development Tools: tool chains and project cases (tool chain projects, packaging for cross compilation, portability …)
  • Embedded Linux: µClinux…
  • Real-time extensions for Linux: RTLinux, RTAI…
  • Hard real-time kernels: eCos, RTEMS, ADEOS, Xenomai…
  • Soft Real-time kernels
  • Embedded Java
  • GUI for embedded systems: Gtk, Qt, Nano/X…
  • Linux and System on Chip (SoC)
  • Open Hardware, Open design, free IP modules (Intellectual Property) and softcores: opencores, OpenRISC, NIOS, Microblaze, LEONSparc, FPGA…

The conference will last 30 minutes, questions included. Round tables will be organized. Synthetic presentations are scheduled to last 20 minutes. PDF versions of the presentation are not mandatory but they will be greatly appreciated (with an online web access just after the LSM event, they are a very useful documentation source for the entire community).

If you plan to participate and to propose a presentation, please send a message as soon as possible to the following address: embarque@rmll.info with a summary of your presentation (and if you can, a summary in English too) no later than 15th march 2009. Feel free to forward this Call For Presentation to other places or to everyone you think could be interested.