Report from the Buildroot Developers Meeting at FOSDEM 2023

With the FOSDEM conference taking place on-site again after 2 years of virtual conference, this month of February also saw the return of the traditional Buildroot Developers Meeting from the Buildroot project.

This meeting is traditionnally held twice a year, around FOSDEM and around the Embedded Linux Conference Europe, and allows maintainers and contributors to the Buildroot project to gather for a few days and make progress on various tasks/topics.

This year, the post-FOSDEM Buildroot Developers Meeting took place on February 6, 7 and 8 in Brussels, and was hosted at the Smile offices, who kindly sponsored the location for the meeting.

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Embedded Linux and Yocto training courses now available in Italian

Flag of ItalyBuongiorno!

For many years, we have been offering our training courses in both English and French. We are happy to announce that we are now expanding our offering towards our Italian customers: we are now able to deliver our very popular Embedded Linux system development and Yocto Project and OpenEmbedded development training courses in Italian. Those courses are delivered by a native Italian speaker, Bootlin engineer Luca Ceresoli. Luca has 20 years of experience working with embedded systems, including 15 years on embedded Linux.

Thanks to this offering, our Italian customers can enjoy a training course delivered in their native language, which obviously facilitates communication, understanding and interaction. We can offer our Embedded Linux course and Yocto course in Italian through either private on-site sessions or private on-line sessions. Contact us at training@bootlin.com for details and pricing!

Ti aspettiamo!

Embedded Linux Conference Europe 2022: a selection of talks by Bootlin engineers

Almost the entire engineering team of Bootlin attended the Embedded Linux Conference Europe 2022 in Dublin mid-september, an important event for Bootlin as it helps everyone in the team stay up to date with the latest developments in the Embedded Linux ecosystem, and connect with members of the community.

All the slides and videos are available at https://elinux.org/ELC_Europe_2022_Presentations, which is one of the great things about the Embedded Linux Conference.

After such conferences, we have a tradition at Bootlin: share with our readers a selection of talks that we found interesting. Several members of our engineering team were asked to select one of their favorite talks, and highlight it with a short summary.

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Welcome to Alexis Lothoré

Welcome on board!Bootlin is really happy to welcome another engineer in its team: Alexis Lothoré, who joined us on January 3, 2023.

Alexis graduated in 2016 from INSA Toulouse and built his experience on embedded systems and embedded Linux while working for Smile and then Somfy Protect. In addition to his experience on embedded Linux, Alexis has experience on micro-controller based development, with real-time operating systems such as FreeRTOS, and also has a wide knowledge around connected systems: protocols, security, robustness, evolutivity.

Alexis is now joining our team located in Toulouse, France, where he will work at our office with Hervé Codina, Paul Kocialkowski, Köry Maincent, Thomas Perrot, Miquèl Raynal, Jérémie Dautheribes and Thomas Petazzoni.

For more details, see Alexis page on Bootlin.com and his LinkedIn profile.

Debugging, tracing and profiling training course materials published

Icon from flaticon.comBack in November 2022, we announced the availability of a new training course titled Linux debugging, profiling, tracing and performance analysis.

At the time, this training course was still being prepared, but since then Bootlin engineer Clément Léger finished the preparation and successfully delivered the training course to a group of participants.

We are now happy to announce the availability of the training materials corresponding to this course, continuing Bootlin’s long commitment of free availability of all its training materials. On the training page, you can access:

We have a public on-line session of this course planned on January 30-February 2 which is full, but we have a few seats left for the next session on March 20-23, registration available on-line.

We will of course schedule other public on-line sessions of this course this year. If you have a sufficiently large group of participants to train, we also offer private on-line and private on-site sessions.

The icon used in this blog post comes from flaticon.com.

Updated Buildroot support for STM32MP1 platforms, ST BSP v4.1

Back in December 2021, we announced the buildroot-external-st project, which is an extension of the Buildroot build system with ready-to-use configurations for the STMicroelectronics STM32MP1 platforms. Later on, in July 2022, we updated it to the lastest Buildroot LTS 2022.02 and version 4.0 of ST BSP version.

More specifically, this project is a BR2_EXTERNAL repository for Buildroot, with a number of defconfigs that allow to quickly build embedded Linux systems for the STM32MP1 Discovery Kit platforms. It’s a great way to get started with Buildroot on those platforms.

Today, we are happy to announce an updated version of this project, published under the branch st/2022.02.7 at https://github.com/bootlin/buildroot-external-st. This new version brings the following changes:

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Linux 6.1 released, Bootlin contributions

Linux 6.1 has been released yesterday, a week later than expected. Head over to LWN (part 1, part 2) or KernelNewbies for an overview of the major features merged in this release.

For this release, Bootlin contributed a total of 38 patches, with the following highlights:

  • Maxime Chevallier added initial support for the QUSGMII PHY mode, together with supporting code in the lan966x MAC driver and lan966x PHY driver.
  • Maxime Chevallier added a new PCS driver for the Altera PSE
  • Maxime Chevallier converted the Altera TSE MAC driver to phylink
  • Paul Kocialkowski contributed many improvements to the Allwinner sun6i camera interface driver, which are preparation commits to introduce support for interacting with the Allwinner ISP

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Embedded Linux course labs now available on Beagle Bone

Following the release of the improved version of our embedded Linux course, we are happy to announce that we have finished porting our new labs to the BeagleBone Black and BeagleBone Black wireless boards.

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A custom PipeWire node

As described in previous articles (Introduction to PipeWire, Hands-on installation of PipeWire), the PipeWire daemon is responsible for running the graph execution. Nodes inside this graph can be implemented by any process that has access to the PipeWire socket that is used for IPC. PipeWire provides a shared object library that abstracts the communication with the main daemon and the communication with the modules that are required by the client.

In this blog post, our goal will be to implement an audio source node that plays audio coming from a file, in a loop. This will be an excuse to see a lot of code, showing what the library API looks like and how it should be used. To introduce some dynamism to a rather static setup, we’ll rely on an input from a Wii Nunchuck, connected using a custom Linux driver and relying on the input event userspace API.

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Updated Yocto support for SiFive RISC-V platforms

SiFive logoA few months ago, we started supporting SiFive in their effort to maintain and improve the Yocto support for their RISC-V processors and platforms. The Yocto support for SiFive platforms is divided into two layers:

These layers allow to build ready-to-use Yocto images for the Qemu RISC-V 64-bit emulation, the HiFive Unleashed and HiFive Unmatched development boards.

As part of our work on the Yocto support for SiFive platofrms, we have already published three new releases of these layers: 2022.06, 2022.08 and 2022.10. In this blog post, we review the main highlights of those releases.

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