Bootlin – Page 38 – Embedded Linux and kernel engineering

ELCE 2015 conference videos available

As often in the recent years, the Linux Foundation has shot videos of most of the talks at the Embedded Linux Conference Europe 2015, in Dublin last October.

These videos are now available on YouTube, and individual links are provided on the elinux.org wiki page that keeps track of presentation materials as well. You can also find them all through the Embedded Linux Conference Europe 2015 playlist on YouTube.

All this is of course a priceless addition to the on-line slides. We hope these talks will incite you to participate to the next editions of the Embedded Linux Conference, like in San Diego in April, or in Berlin in October this year.

In particular, here are the videos from the presentations from Bootlin engineers.

Alexandre Belloni, Supporting multi-function devices in the Linux kernel

Kernel maintainership: an oral tradition

Tutorial: learning the basics of Buildroot

Our CTO Thomas Petazzoni also gave a keynote (Linux kernel SoC mainlining: Some success factors), which was well attended. Unfortunately, like for some of the other keynotes, no video is available.

Seminar “Porting Linux on an ARM board”, materials available

On December 10th 2015, Bootlin engineer Alexandre Belloni gave a half-day seminar on the topic of Porting Linux on an ARM board in Toulouse, France. This seminar covers topics like porting the bootloader, understanding the concept of the Device Tree, writing Linux device drivers and more. With ~50 persons from various companies attending and lots of questions from the audience, this first edition has been very successful, which shows an increasing interest for using Linux on ARM platforms in the industry.

We are now publishing the 220 slides materials from this seminar, available in PDF format. Like all our training materials, this material is published under the Creative Commons BY-SA 3.0 license, which allows everyone to re-use it for free, provided the derivative works are released under the same license. We indeed re-used quite extensively parts of our existing training materials for this half-day seminar.

We plan to give this half-day seminar in other locations in France in 2016. Contact us if you are interested in organizing a similar seminar in your area (we are happy to travel!).

Device Tree on ARM article in French OpenSilicium magazine

Our French readers are most likely aware of the existence of a magazine called OpenSilicium, a magazine dedicated to embedded technologies, with frequent articles on platforms like the Raspberry Pi, the BeagleBone Black, topics like real-time, FPGA, Android and many others.

Open Silicium #17

Issue #17 of the magazine has been published recently, and features a 14-pages long article Introduction to the Device Tree on ARM, written by Bootlin engineer Thomas Petazzoni.

Open Silicium #17

Besides Thomas article, many other topics are covered in this issue:

A summary of the Embedded Linux Conference Europe 2015 in Dublin
Icestorm, a free development toolset for FPGA
Using the Armadeus APF27 board with Yocto
Set up an embedded Linux system on the Zynq ZedBoard
Debugging with OpenOCD and JTAG
Usage of the mbed SDK on a small microcontroller, the LPC810
From Javascript to VHDL, the art of writing synthetizable code using an imperative language
Optimization of the 3R strems decompression algorithm

Bootlin at FOSDEM and the Buildroot Developers Meeting

The FOSDEM conference will take place on January 30-31 in Brussels, Belgium. Like every year, there are lots of interesting talks for embedded developers, starting from the Embedded, Mobile and Automotive Devroom, but also the Hardware track, the Graphics track. Some talks of the IoT and Security devrooms may also be interesting to embedded developers.

Thomas Petazzoni, embedded Linux engineer and CTO at Bootlin, will be present during the FOSDEM conference. Thomas will also participate to the Buildroot Developers Meeting that will take place on February 1-2 in Brussels, hosted by Google.

Linux 4.4, Bootlin contributions

Linux 4.4 has been released, a week later than the normal schedule in order to allow kernel developers to recover from the Christmas/New Year period. As usual, LWN has covered the 4.4 cycle merge window, in two articles: part 1 and part 2. This time around, KernelNewbies has a nice overview of the Linux 4.4 changes. With 112 patches merged, we are the 20th contributing company by number of patches according to the statistics.

Besides our contributions in terms of patches, some of our engineers have also become over time maintainers of specific areas of the Linux kernel. Recently, LWN.net conducted a study of how the patches merged in 4.4 went into the kernel, which shows the chain of maintainers who pushed the patches up to Linus Torvalds. Bootlin engineers had the following role in this chain of maintainers:

As a co-maintainer of the Allwinner (sunxi) ARM support, Maxime Ripard has submitted a pull request with one patch to the clock maintainers, and pull requests with a total of 124 patches to the ARM SoC maintainers.
As a maintainer of the RTC subsystem, Alexandre Belloni has submitted pull requests with 30 patches directly to Linus Torvalds.
As a co-maintainer of the AT91 ARM support, Alexandre Belloni has submitted pull requests with 46 patches to the ARM SoC maintainers.
As a co-maintainer of the Marvell EBU ARM support, Gregory Clement has submitted pull requests with a total of 33 patches to the ARM SoC maintainers.

Our contributions for the 4.4 kernel were centered around the following topics:

Alexandre Belloni continued some general improvements to support for the AT91 ARM processors, with fixes and cleanups in the at91-reset, at91-poweroff, at91_udc, atmel-st, at91_can drivers and some clock driver improvements.
Alexandre Belloni also wrote a driver for the RV8803 RTC from Microcrystal.
Antoine Ténart added PWM support for the Marvell Berlin platform and enabled the use of cpufreq on this platform.
Antoine Ténart did some improvements in the pxa3xx_nand driver, still in preparation to the addition of support for the Marvell Berlin NAND controller.
Boris Brezillon did a number of improvements to the sunxi_nand driver, used for the NAND controller found on the Allwinner SoCs. Boris also merged a few patches doing cleanups and improvements to the MTD subsystem itself.
Boris Brezillon enabled the cryptographic accelerator on more Marvell EBU platforms by submitting the corresponding Device Tree descriptions, and he also fixed a few bugs found in the driver
Maxime Ripard reworked the interrupt handling of per-CPU interrupts on Marvell EBU platforms especially in the mvneta network driver. This was done in preparation to enable RSS support in the mvneta driver.
Maxime Ripard added support for the Allwinner R8 and the popular C.H.I.P platform.
Maxime Ripard enabled audio support on a number of Allwinner platforms, by adding the necessary clock code and Device Tree descriptions, and also several fixes/improvements to the ALSA driver.

The details of our contributions for 4.4:

UN climate conference: switching to “green” electricity

The United Nations 2015 Climate Change Conference is an opportunity for everyone to think about contributing to the transition to renewable and sustainable energy sources.

One way to do that is to buy electricity that is produced from renewable resources (solar, wind, hydro, biomass…). With the worldwide opening of the energy markets, this should now be possible in most parts of the world.

So, with a power consumption between 4,000 and 5,000 kWh per year, we have decided to make the switch for our main office in Orange, France. But how to choose a good supplier?

Greenpeace turned out to be a very good source of information about this topic, comparing the offerings from various suppliers, and finding out which ones really make serious investments in renewable energy sources.

Here are the countries for which we have found Greenpeace rankings:
Australia France

If you find a similar report for your country, please let us know, and we will add it to this list.

Back to our case, we chose Enercoop, a French cooperative company only producing renewable energy. This supplier has by far the best ranking from Greenpeace, and stands out from more traditional suppliers which too often are just trading green certificates, charging consumers a premium rate without investing by themselves in green energy production.

The process to switch to a green electricity supplier was very straightforward. All we needed was an electricity bill and 15 minutes of time, whether you are an individual or represent a company. From now on, Enercoop will guarantee that for every kWh we consume from the power grid, they will inject the same amount of energy into the grid from renewable sources. There is no risk to see more power outages than before, as the national company operating and maintaining the grid stays the same.

It’s true our electricity is going to cost about 20% more than nuclear electricity, but at least, what we spend is going to support local investments in renewable energy sources, that don’t degrade the fragile environment that keeps us alive.

Your comments and own tips are welcome!

Linux 4.3 released, Bootlin contributions inside

The 4.3 kernel release has been released just a few days ago. For details about the big new features in this release, we as usual recommend to read LWN.net articles covering the merge window: part 1, part 2 and part 3.

According to the KPS statistics, there were 12128 commits in this release, and with 110 patches, Bootlin is the 20th contributing company. As usual, we did some contributions to this release, though a somewhat smaller number than for previous releases.

Our main contributions this time around:

On the support for Atmel ARM SoCs
- Alexandre Belloni contributed a fairly significant number of cleanups: description of the slow clock in the Device Tree, removal of left-over from platform-data usage in device drivers (no longer needed now that all Atmel ARM platforms use the Device Tree).
- Boris Brezillon contributed numerous improvements to the atmel-hlcdc, which is the DRM/KMS driver for the modern Atmel ARM SoCs. He added support for several SoCs to the driver (SAMA5D2, SAMA5D4, SAM9x5 and SAM9n12), added PRIME support, and support for the RGB565 and RGB444 output configurations.
- Maxime Ripard improved the dmaengine drivers for Atmel ARM SoCs (at_hdmac and at_xdmac) to add memset and scatter-gather memset capabilities.
On the support for Allwinner ARM SoCs
- Maxime Ripard converted the SID driver to the newly introduced nvmem framework. Maxime also did some minor pin-muxing and clock related updates.
- Boris Brezillon fixed some issues in the NAND controller driver.
On the support for Marvell EBU ARM SoCs
- Thomas Petazzoni added the initial support for suspend to RAM on Armada 38x platforms. The support is not fully enabled yet due to remaining stability issues, but most of the code is in place. Thomas also did some minor updates/fixes to the XOR and crypto drivers.
- Grégory Clement added the initial support for standby, a mode that allows to forcefully put the CPUs in deep-idle mode. For now, it is not different from what cpuidle provides, but in the future, we will progressively enable this mode to shutdown PHY and SERDES lanes to save more power.
On the RTC subsystem, Alexandre Belloni did numerous fixes and cleanups to the rx8025 driver, and also a few to the at91sam9 and at91rm9200 drivers.
On the common clock framework, Boris Brezillon contributed a change to the ->determinate_rate() operation to fix overflow issues.
On the PWM subsystem, Boris Brezillon contributed a number of small improvements/cleanups to the subsystem and some drivers: addition of a pwm_is_enabled() helper, migrate drivers to use the existing helper functions when possible, etc.

The detailed list of our contributions is:

Bootlin at the Linux Kernel Summit 2015

The Linux Kernel Summit is, as Wikipedia says, an annual gathering of the top Linux kernel developers, and is an invitation-only event.

In 2012 and 2013, several Bootlin engineers have been invited and participated to a sub-event of the Linux Kernel Summit, the “ARM mini-kernel summit”, which was more specifically focused on ARM related developments in the kernel. Gregory Clement and Thomas Petazzoni went to the event in 2012 in San Diego (United States) and in 2013, Maxime Ripard, Gregory Clement, Alexandre Belloni and Thomas Petazzoni participated to the ARM mini-kernel summit in Edinburgh (UK).

This year, Thomas Petazzoni has been invited to the Linux Kernel Summit, which will take place late October in Seoul (South Korea). We’re happy to see that our continuous contributions to the Linux Kernel are recognized and allow us to participate to such an invitation-only event. For us, participating to the Linux Kernel Summit is an excellent way of keeping up-to-date with the latest Linux kernel developments, and also where needed, give our feedback from our experience working in the embedded industry with several SoC, board and system vendors.

The quest for Linux friendly embedded board makers

Beagle Bone Black board We used to keep a list of Linux friendly embedded board makers. When this page was created in the mid 2000s, this page was easy to maintain. Though more and more products were created with Linux, it was still difficult to find good hardware platforms that were supported by Linux.

So, to help community members and system makers selecting hardware for their embedded Linux projects, we compiled a first selection of board makers that were meeting the below criteria:

Offering attractive and competitive products
At least one product supported Free Software operating systems (such as Linux, eCos and NetBSD.
At least one product meeting the above requirements, with a public price (without having to register), and still available on the market.
Specifications and documentation directly available on the website (no registration required). Engineers like to study their options on their own without having to share their contact details with salespeople who would then chase them through their entire life, trying to sell inappropriate products to them.
Website with an English version.

In the beginning, this was enough to reduce the list to 10-20 entries. However, as Linux continued to increase in popularity, and as hardware platform makers started to understand the value of transparent pricing and technical documentation, the criteria were no longer sufficient to keep the list manageable.

Therefore, we added another prerequisite: at least one product supported (at least partially) in the official version of the corresponding Free Software operating system kernel. This was a rather strong requirement at first, but only such products bring a guarantee for long term community support, making it much easier to develop and maintain embedded systems. Compare this with hardware supporting only a very old and heavily patched Linux kernel, for example, which software can only be maintained by its original developers. This also reveals the ability of the hardware vendor to work with the community and share technical information with its users and developers.

Then, with the development of low-cost community boards, and chip manufacturers efforts to support their hardware in the mainline Linux kernel, the list again became difficult to maintain.

The next prerequisite we could add is the availability as Open-source hardware, allowing customers to modify the hardware according to their needs. Of course, hardware files should be available without registration.

However, rather than keeping our own list, the best is to contribute to Wikipedia, which has a dedicated page on Open-Source computing hardware. At least, all the boards we could find are listed there, after adding a few.

Don’t hesitate to post comments to this page to share information about hardware which could be worth adding to this Wikipedia page!

Anyway, the good news is that Linux and Open-Source friendly hardware is now easier and easier to find than it was about 10 years back. Just have a preference for hardware that is supported in the mainline Linux kernel sources, or at least from a maker with earlier products which are already supported. A git grep -i command in the sources will help.