Tag: training

Covid-19: Bootlin proposes online sessions for all its courses

Tux working on embedded Linux on a couchLike most of us, due to the Covid-19 epidemic, you may be forced to work from home. To take advantage from this time confined at home, we are now proposing all our training courses as online seminars. You can then benefit from the contents and quality of Bootlin training sessions, without leaving the comfort and safety of your home. During our online seminars, our instructors will alternate between presentations and practical demonstrations, executing the instructions of our practical labs.

At any time, participants will be able to ask questions.

We can propose such remote training both through public online sessions, open to individual registration, as well as dedicated online sessions, for participants from the same company.

Public online sessions

We’re trying to propose time slots that should be manageable from Europe, Middle East, Africa and at least for the East Coast of North America. All such sessions will be taught in English. As usual with all our sessions, all our training materials (lectures and lab instructions) are freely available from the pages describing our courses.

Our Embedded Linux and Linux kernel courses are delivered over 7 half days of 4 hours each, while our Yocto Project, Buildroot and Linux Graphics courses are delivered over 4 half days. For our embedded Linux and Yocto Project courses, we propose an additional date in case some extra time is needed to complete the agenda.

Here are all the available sessions. If the situation lasts longer, we will create new sessions as needed:

Type Dates Time Duration Expected trainer Cost and registration
Embedded Linux (agenda) Sep. 28, 29, 30, Oct. 1, 2, 5, 6 2020. 17:00 – 21:00 (Paris), 8:00 – 12:00 (San Francisco) 28 h Michael Opdenacker 829 EUR + VAT* (register)
Embedded Linux (agenda) Nov. 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 9, 10, 12, 2020. 14:00 – 18:00 (Paris), 8:00 – 12:00 (New York) 28 h Michael Opdenacker 829 EUR + VAT* (register)
Linux kernel (agenda) Nov. 16, 17, 18, 19, 23, 24, 25, 26 14:00 – 18:00 (Paris time) 28 h Alexandre Belloni 829 EUR + VAT* (register)
Yocto Project (agenda) Nov. 30, Dec. 1, 2, 3, 4, 2020 14:00 – 18:00 (Paris time) 16 h Maxime Chevallier 519 EUR + VAT* (register)
Buildroot (agenda) Dec. 7, 8, 9, 10, and 11, 2020 14:00 – 18:00 (Paris time) 16 h Thomas Petazzoni 519 EUR + VAT* (register)
Linux Graphics (agenda) Dec. 1, 2, 3, 4, 2020 14:00 – 18:00 (Paris time) 16 h Paul Kocialkowski 519 EUR + VAT* (register

* VAT: applies to businesses in France and to individuals from all countries. Businesses in the European Union won’t be charged VAT only if they provide valid company information and VAT number to Evenbrite at registration time. For businesses in other countries, we should be able to grant them a VAT refund, provided they send us a proof of company incorporation before the end of the session.

Each public session will be confirmed once there are at least 6 participants. If the minimum number of participants is not reached, Bootlin will propose new dates or a full refund (including Eventbrite fees) if no new date works for the participant.

We guarantee that the maximum number of participants will be 12.

Dedicated online sessions

If you have enough people to train, such dedicated sessions can be a worthy alternative to public ones:

  • Flexible dates and daily durations, corresponding to the availability of your teams.
  • Confidentiality: freedom to ask questions that are related to your company’s projects and plans.
  • If time left, possibility to have knowledge sharing time with the instructor, that could go beyond the scope of the training course.
  • Language: possibility to have a session in French instead of in English.

Online seminar details

Each session will be given through Jitsi Meet, a Free Software solution that we are trying to promote. As a backup solution, we will also be able to Google Hangouts Meet. Each participant should have her or his own connection and computer (with webcam and microphone) and if possible headsets, to avoid echo issues between audio input and output. This is probably the best solution to allow each participant to ask questions and write comments in the chat window. We also support people connecting from the same conference room with suitable equipment.

Each participant is asked to connect 15 minutes before the session starts, to make sure her or his setup works (instructions will be sent before the event).

How to register

For online public sessions, use the EventBrite links in the above list of sessions to register one or several individuals.

To register an entire group (for dedicated sessions), please contact training@bootlin.com and tell us the type of session you are interested in. We will then send you a registration form to collect all the details we need to send you a quote.

You can also ask all your questions by calling +33 484 258 097.

Questions and answers

Q : Should I order hardware in advance, our hardware included in the training cost?
R : No, practical labs are replaced by technical demonstrations, so you will be able to follow the course without any hardware. However, you can still order the hardware by checking the “Shopping list” pages of presentation materials for each session. This way, between each session, you will be able to replay by yourself the labs demonstrated by your trainer, ask all your questions, and get help between sessions through our dedicated Matrix channel to reach your goals.

Q: Why just demos instead of practicing with real hardware?
A: We are not ready to support a sufficient number of participants doing practical labs remotely with real hardware. This is more complicated and time consuming than in real life. Hence, what we we’re proposing is to replace practical labs with practical demonstrations shown by the instructor. The instructor will go through the normal practical labs with the standard hardware that we’re using.

Q: Would it be possible to run practical labs on the QEMU emulator?
R: Yes, it’s coming. In the embedded Linux course, we are already offering instructions to run most practical labs on QEMU between the sessions, before the practical demos performed by the trainer. We should also be able to propose such instructions for our Yocto Project and Buildroot training courses in the next months. Such work is likely to take more time for our Linux kernel course, practical labs being closer to the hardware that we use.

Q: Why proposing half days instead of full days?
A: From our experience, it’s very difficult to stay focused on a new technical topic for an entire day without having periodic moments when you are active (which happens in our public and on-site sessions, in which we interleave lectures and practical labs). Hence, we believe that daily slots of 4 hours (with a small break in the middle) is a good solution, also leaving extra time for following up your normal work.

Yocto Project training course available on STM32MP1 platform

Back in May 2019, we announced the availability of our Embedded Linux system development course on the STMicroelectronics STM32MP1 platform, in addition to the already supported Microchip SAMA5D3 Xplained board.

In the context of our partnership with STMicroelectronics, we are now happy to announce the availability of our Yocto Project and OpenEmbedded development training also on the STM32MP1 platform for the practical labs. We now support either the BeagleBoneBlack Wireless or the STMicroelectronics STM32MP1 platforms for this training course.

The complete training materials are available: detailed agenda, slides and practical labs. The complete source code of the training materials is also available in our Github repository.

Bootlin Yocto course on STM32MP1
Slides of Bootlin’s Yocto course for the STM32MP1

This will hopefully help customers around the world to get started with using Yocto on the STM32MP1 system-on-chip. The Yocto experts at Bootlin are available to deliver this 3-day course anywhere in the world, at your location. The first edition of this new variant of the course is going to be given this week to one of our customers in Spain. Contact us if you’re interested by having this course organized at your location!

Publication of Linux graphics training materials

Back in June 2019, we announced the availability of a new training course, Displaying and rendering graphics with Linux. At the time of this announcement, the training materials were not available though.

Since then, Bootlin engineer Paul Kocialkowski has been very busy preparing those training materials, and has successfully delivered the first edition of this course to one of our customers in Spain early September. After taking the time to polish those training materials following this first course, we are now very happy to publish and share this 200+ slides deck, covering a wide range of graphics related topics:

  • Image and color representation
  • Basic drawing
  • Basic and advanced operations
  • Hardware aspects overview
  • Hardware for display
  • Hardware for rendering
  • Memory aspects
  • Performance aspects
  • Software aspects overview
  • Kernel components in Linux
  • Userspace components with Linux

See also the detailed agenda of this training course. The LaTeX source code for all our training materials, including this graphics training, is available in a Git repository. It is worth mentioning that this training only consists of slides and demos, and does not include practical labs done by the participants, in order to keep the training logistics manageable and the duration reasonably short (2 days).

Here are a few slides showing various aspects of this training course:

Graphics training

Graphics training

Graphics training

Graphics training

Graphics training

By publishing this training materials right after our first course, and under the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA license, Bootlin sticks to its commitment of publishing all its training materials under a free documentation license, to better spread the knowledge in the entire embedded Linux community.

We are available to deliver this Displaying and rendering graphics with Linux course anywhere in the world, at your location. Contact us for more details.

Free seats in embedded Linux and kernel training sessions (Mar 2019)

Student penguinsAt Bootlin, we owe a lot to the Free Software community, and we’re doing our best to give back as much as we can.

One way of doing that is welcoming community contributors in our public training sessions organized in France. We’ve done that multiple times several years back, and this allowed us to meet very interesting people (who even had very valuable experience and points of view to share with the other course participants), while of course giving them extra knowledge that they can use for further contributions.

Here are the next sessions in which we can offer a free seat:

See our Free training seats page for practical details about how to apply.

Don’t hesitate to apply to this free seat. In past editions, we didn’t have so many people applying, and therefore you have a real chance to get selected!

Yocto project and OpenEmbedded training updated to Krogoth

yocto

Continuing our efforts to keep our training materials up-to-date we just refreshed our Yocto project and OpenEmbedded training course to the latest Yocto project release, Krogoth (2.1.1). In addition to adapting our training labs to the Krogoth release, we improved our training materials to cover more aspects and new features.

The most important changes are:

  • New chapter about devtool, the new utility from the Yocto project to improve the developers’ workflow to integrate a package into the build system or to make patches to existing packages.
  • Improve the distro layers slides to add configuration samples and give advice on how to use these layers.
  • Add a part about quilt to easily patch already supported packages.
  • Explain in depth how file inclusions are handled by BitBake.
  • Improve the description about tasks by adding slides on how to write them in Python.

The updated training materials are available on our training page: agenda (PDF), slides (PDF) and labs (PDF).

Join our Yocto specialist Alexandre Belloni for the first public session of this improved training in Lyon (France) on October 19-21, 2016. We are also available to deliver this training worldwide at your site, contact us!

Buildroot training updated to Buildroot 2016.05

Buildroot LogoAlmost exactly one year ago, we announced the availability of our training course on Buildroot. This course received very good feedback, both from our customers, and from the community.

In our effort to continuously improve and update our training materials, we have recently updated our Buildroot training course to Buildroot 2016.05, which was released at the end of May. In addition to adapting our practical labs to use this new Buildroot version, we have also improved the training materials to cover some of the new features that have been added over the last year in Buildroot. The most important changes are:

  • Cover the graph-size functionality, which allows to generate a pie chart of the filesystem size, per package. This is a very nice feature to analyze the size of your root filesystem and see how to reduce it.
  • Improve the description about the local site method and the override source directory functionalities, that are very useful when doing active application/library development in Buildroot, or to package custom application/library code.
  • Add explanations about using genimage to create complete SD card images that are ready to be flashed.
  • Add explanations about the hash file that can be added to packages to verify the integrity of the source code that is downloaded before it gets built.

The updated training materials are available on the training page: agenda (PDF), slides (PDF) and practical labs (PDF).

Contact us if you would like to organize this training session in your company: we are available to deliver it worldwide.

Free seat in Android training session

Student penguinsAt Bootlin, we owe a lot to the Free Software community, and we’re doing our best to give back as much as we can.

One way of doing that is welcoming community contributors in our public training sessions about embedded Linux, Linux kernel and Android system development organized in France. We’ve done that multiple times in the past, and this allowed us to meet very interesting people (who even had very valuable experience and points of view to share with the other course participants), while of course giving them extra knowledge that they can use for further contributions.

The next session in which we can offer a free seat is about Android system development, and will take place on June 20-23 in Toulouse, France. The session has a value of 1890 EUR (without V.A.T.) and includes lunch and breaks, as well as a free Beaglebone Black board with its 4.3″ LCD touchscreen cape.

This course will teach you how to modify Android to support a new embedded board (assuming that it is already supported by the Linux kernel), and how to build a real system through accessing specific hardware, customizing the filesystem and using debugging techniques.

How to apply?

  • You need to be a student or a contributor to a free software project, which doesn’t have to be related to the embedded field, and even if your contributions are modest.
  • Write to award@bootlin.com before May. 30 and tell us about your contributions and your interest in the session.
  • Thomas Petazzoni and Michael Opdenacker will review all the proposals and will select the candidate who best stands out in terms of past contributions and/or in potential for further ones after taking the course. Bootlin reserves the right not to select any candidate if nobody actually makes a sufficiently interesting application.
  • The winner will be notified by June 2, and will have to be ready to travel to Toulouse and stay there the whole 4 days at her/his own expense.

Don’t hesitate to apply to this free seat. In past editions, we didn’t have so many people applying, and therefore you have a real chance to get selected!

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.

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.

New training course on Buildroot: materials freely available

Buildroot LogoLast year, Bootlin launched a new training course on using the Yocto Project and OpenEmbedded to develop embedded Linux systems. In the selection of build system tools available in the embedded Linux ecosystem, another very popular choice is Buildroot, and we are happy to announce today that we are releasing a new 3 days training course on Buildroot!

Bootlin is a major contributor to the Buildroot upstream project, with more than 2800 patches merged as of May 2015 (including the ones contributed with our previous name). Our engineer Thomas Petazzoni alone has contributed more than 2700 patches. He has gathered an extensive knowledge of Buildroot and its internals, being one of the primary authors of the core infrastructures of Buildroot. He is a major participant to the Buildroot community, organizing the regular Buildroot Developer Days, supporting users through the mailing list and on IRC. Last but not least, Thomas acts as an interim maintainer when the main Buildroot maintainer is not available, an indication of Thomas strong involvement in the Buildroot project.

In addition, Bootlin has used and is using Buildroot in a significant number of customer projects, giving us an excellent view of Buildroot usage for real projects. This feedback has been driving some of our Buildroot contributions over the last years.

The 3 days training we have developed covers all the aspects of Buildroot: basic usage and configuration, understanding the source and build trees, creating new packages including advanced aspects, analyzing the build, tips for organizing your Buildroot work, using Buildroot for application development and more. See the detailed agenda.

buildroot-slidesWe can deliver this training course anywhere in the world, at your location (see our rates and related details). We have also scheduled a first public session in English in Toulouse, France, on November 30 to December 2. Contact us at training@bootlin.com if you are interested.

And finally, last but not least, like we do for all our training sessions, we are making the training materials freely available under a Creative Commons BY-SA license, at the time of the training announcement: the first session of this course is being given this week. For the Buildroot training, the available materials are:

Our materials have already been reviewed by some of the most prominent contributors to Buildroot: Peter Korsgaard (Buildroot maintainer), Yann E. Morin, Thomas De Schampheleire, Gustavo Zacarias and Arnout Vandecappelle. We would like to take this opportunity to thank them for their useful comments and suggestions in the development of this new training course.