Benefits of upstreaming
Upstreaming consists in submitting and merging in an official open-source project the modifications and improvements done to support a specific hardware platform or device, or other types of improvements: bug fixes, performance optimizations, feature additions.
Upstreaming brings many benefits:
- Reduced maintenance costs
- Easier upgrades to newer versions
- Higher code quality, thanks to the review from experts of the open-source project
- Guarantee to use the latest standard interfaces, mechanisms and best practices
- Higher attractiveness of a platform or device when it is supported by official versions of the Linux kernel
Our upstreaming expertise
Bootlin has a multi-year experience submitting and merging new drivers, new features, and bug fixes to projects like the Linux kernel, U-Boot, Barebox, Buildroot or the Yocto Project. Our engineers have merged thousands of patches in the official Linux kernel to add various features, and several of them are maintainers of specific subsystems or architectures in the Linux kernel. Thanks to this strong community participation, and to the participation to multiple conferences, our engineers have contacts with key members of the embedded Linux community.
We are able to help processor vendors, board vendors or system makers improve the support of their hardware in the Linux kernel and other open-source projects, and submit the corresponding changes to the respective open-source communities.
Over the last years, thanks to the collaboration with various hardware vendors, we have added in the Linux kernel:
- Support for multiple Marvell EBU ARM processors, notably Armada 370, Armada XP, Armada 38x, Armada 39x
- Support for Atmel ARM processors and various hardware blocks of those processors
- Support for Allwinner ARM processors
- Support for Marvell Berlin processors
- Support for numerous ARM boards, using Marvell, Atmel, Allwinner or Freescale processors
- Numerous device drivers
Contact
Contact info@bootlin.com for more information.