Buildroot 2017.02 released, Bootlin contributions

Buildroot LogoThe 2017.02 version of Buildroot has been released recently, and as usual Bootlin has been a significant contributor to this release. A total of 1369 commits have gone into this release, contributed by 110 different developers.

Before looking in more details at the contributions from Bootlin, let’s have a look at the main improvements provided by this release:

  • The big announcement is that 2017.02 is going to be a long term support release, maintained with security and other important fixes for one year. This will allow companies, users and projects that cannot upgrade at each Buildroot release to have a stable Buildroot version to work with, coming with regular updates for security and bug fixes. A few fixes have already been collected in the 2017.02.x branch, and regular point releases will be published.
  • Several improvements have been made to support reproducible builds, i.e the capability of having two builds of the same configuration provide the exact same bit-to-bit output. These are not enough to provide reproducible builds yet, but they are a piece of the puzzle, and more patches are pending for the next releases to move forward on this topic.
  • A package infrastructure for packages using the waf build system has been added. Seven packages in Buildroot are using this infrastructure currently.
  • Support for the OpenRISC architecture has been added, as well as improvements to the support of ARM64 (selection of ARM64 cores, possibility of building an ARM 32-bit system optimized for an ARM64 core).
  • The external toolchain infrastructure, which was all implemented in a single very complicated package, has been split into one package per supported toolchain and a common infrastructure. This makes it much easier to maintain.
  • A number of updates has been made to the toolchain components and capabilities: uClibc-ng bumped to 1.0.22 and enabled for ARM64, mips32r6 and mips64r6, gdb 7.12.1 added and switched to gdb 7.11 as the default, Linaro toolchains updated to 2016.11, ARC toolchain components updated to arc-2016.09, MIPS Codescape toolchains bumped to 2016.05-06, CodeSourcery AMD64 and NIOS2 toolchains bumped.
  • Eight new defconfigs for various hardware platforms have been added, including defconfigs for the NIOSII and OpenRISC Qemu emulation.
  • Sixty new packages have been added, and countless other packages have been updated or fixed.
Buildroot developers at work during the Buildroot Developers meeting in February 2017, after the FOSDEM conference in Brussels.

More specifically, the contributions from Bootlin have been:

  • Thomas Petazzoni has handled the release of the first release candidate, 2017.02-rc1, and merged 742 patches out of the 1369 commits merged in this release.
  • Thomas contributed the initial work for the external toolchain infrastructure rework, which has been taken over by Romain Naour and finally merged thanks to Romain’s work.
  • Thomas contributed the rework of the ARM64 architecture description, to allow building an ARM 32-bit system optimized for a 64-bit core, and to allow selecting specific ARM64 cores.
  • Thomas contributed the raspberrypi-usbboot package, which packages a host tool that allows to boot a RaspberryPi system over USB.
  • Thomas fixed a large number of build issues found by the project autobuilders, contributing 41 patches to this effect.
  • Mylène Josserand contributed a patch to the X.org server package, fixing an issue with the i.MX6 OpenGL acceleration.
  • Gustavo Zacarias contributed a few fixes on various packages.

In addition, Bootlin sponsored the participation of Thomas to the Buildroot Developers meeting that took place after the FOSDEM conference in Brussels, early February. A report of this meeting is available on the eLinux Wiki.

The details of Bootlin contributions:

Linux 4.10, Bootlin contributions

After 8 release candidates, Linus Torvalds released the final 4.10 Linux kernel last Sunday. A total of 13029 commits were made between 4.9 and 4.10. As usual, LWN had a very nice coverage of the major new features added during the 4.10 merge window: part 1, part 2 and part 3. The KernelNewbies Wiki has an updated page about 4.10 as well.

On the total of 13029 commits, 116 were made by Bootlin engineers, which interestingly is exactly the same number of commits we made for the 4.9 kernel release!

Our main contributions for this release have been:

  • For Atmel platforms, Alexandre Belloni added support for the securam block of the SAMA5D2, which is needed to implement backup mode, a deep suspend-to-RAM state for which we will be pushing patches over the next kernel releases. Alexandre also fixed some bugs in the Atmel dmaengine and USB gadget drivers.
  • For Allwinner platforms
    • Antoine Ténart enabled the 1-wire controller on the CHIP platform
    • Boris Brezillon fixed an issue in the NAND controller driver, that prevented from using ECC chunks of 512 bytes.
    • Maxime Ripard added support for the CHIP Pro platform from NextThing, together with many addition of features to the underlying SoC, the GR8 from Nextthing.
    • Maxime Ripard implemented audio capture support in the sun4i-i2s driver, bringing capture support to Allwinner A10 platforms.
    • Maxime Ripard added clock support for the Allwinner A64 to the sunxi-ng clock subsystem, and implemented numerous improvements for this subsystem.
    • Maxime Ripard reworked the pin-muxing driver on Allwinner platforms to use a new generic Device Tree binding, and deprecated the old platform-specific Device Tree binding.
    • Quentin Schulz added a MFD driver for the Allwinner A10/A13/A31 hardware block that provides ADC, touchscreen and thermal sensor functionality.
  • For the RaspberryPi platform
    • Boris Brezillon added support for the Video Encoder IP, which provides composite output. See also our recent blog post about our RaspberryPi work.
    • Boris Brezillon made a number of improvements to clock support on the RaspberryPi, which were needed for the Video Encoder IP support.
  • For the Marvell ARM platform
    • Grégory Clement enabled networking support on the Marvell Armada 3700 SoC, a Cortex-A53 based processor.
    • Grégory Clement did a large number of cleanups in the Device Tree files of Marvell platforms, fixing DTC warnings, and using node labels where possible.
    • Romain Perier contributed a brand new driver for the SPI controller of the Marvell Armada 3700, and therefore enabled SPI support on this platform.
    • Romain Perier extended the existing i2c-pxa driver to support the Marvell Armada 3700 I2C controller, and enabled I2C support on this platform.
    • Romain Perier extended the existing hardware number generator driver for OMAP to also be usable for SafeXcel EIP76 from Inside Secure. This allows to use this driver on the Marvell Armada 7K/8K SoC.
    • Romain Perier contributed support for the Globalscale EspressoBin board, a low-cost development board based on the Marvell Armada 3700.
    • Romain Perier did a number of fixes to the CESA driver, used for the cryptographic engine found on 32-bit Marvell SoCs, such as Armada 370, XP or 38x.
    • Thomas Petazzoni fixed a bug in the mvpp2 network driver, currently only used on Marvell Armada 375, but in the process of being extended to be used on Marvell Armada 7K/8K as well.
  • As the maintainer of the MTD NAND subsystem, Boris Brezillon did a few cleanups in the Tango NAND controller driver, added support for the TC58NVG2S0H NAND chip, and improved the core NAND support to accommodate controllers that have some special timing requirements.
  • As the maintainer of the RTC subsystem, Alexandre Belloni did a number of small cleanups and improvements, especially to the jz4740

Here is the detailed list of our commits to the 4.10 release:

Bootlin and Raspberry Pi Linux kernel upstreaming

Raspberry Pi logoFor a few months, Bootlin has been helping the Raspberry Pi Foundation upstream to the Linux kernel a number of display related features for the Raspberry Pi platform.

The main goal behind this upstreaming process is to get rid of the closed-source firmware that is used on non-upstream kernels every time you need to enable/access a specific hardware feature, and replace it by something that is both open-source and compliant with upstream Linux standards.

Eric Anholt has been working hard to upstream display related features. His biggest contribution has certainly been the open-source driver for the VC4 GPU, but he also worked on the display controller side, and we were contracted to help him with this task.

Our first objective was to add support for SDTV (composite) output, which appeared to be much easier than we imagined. As some of you might already know, the display controller of the Raspberry Pi already has a driver in the DRM subsystem. Our job was to add support for the SDTV encoder (also called VEC, for Video EnCoder). The driver has been submitted just before the 4.10 merge window and surprisingly made it into 4.10 (see also the patches). Eric Anholt explained on his blog:

The Raspberry Pi Foundation recently started contracting with Bootlin to give me some support on the display side of the stack. Last week I got to review and release their first big piece of work: Boris Brezillon’s code for SDTV support. I had suggested that we use this as the first project because it should have been small and self contained. It ended up that we had some clock bugs Boris had to fix, and a bug in my core VC4 CRTC code, but he got a working patch series together shockingly quickly. He did one respin for a couple more fixes once I had tested it, and it’s now out on the list waiting for devicetree maintainer review. If nothing goes wrong, we should have composite out support in 4.11 (we’re probably a week late for 4.10).

Our second objective was to help Eric with HDMI audio support. The code has been submitted on the mailing list 2 weeks ago and will hopefully be queued for 4.12. This time on, we didn’t write much code, since Eric already did the bulk of the work. What we did though is debugging the implementation to make it work. Eric also explained on his blog:

Probably the biggest news of the last two weeks is that Boris’s native HDMI audio driver is now on the mailing list for review. I’m hoping that we can get this merged for 4.12 (4.10 is about to be released, so we’re too late for 4.11). We’ve tested stereo audio so far, no compresesd audio (though I think it should Just Work), and >2 channel audio should be relatively small amounts of work from here. The next step on HDMI audio is to write the alsalib configuration snippets necessary to hide the weird details of HDMI audio (stereo IEC958 frames required) so that sound playback works normally for all existing userspace, which Boris should have a bit of time to work on still.

On our side, it has been a great experience to work on such topics with Eric, and you should expect more contributions from Bootlin for the Raspberry Pi platform in the next months, so stay tuned!

Power measurement with BayLibre’s ACME cape

When working on optimizing the power consumption of a board we need a way to measure its consumption. We recently bought an ACME from BayLibre to do that.

Overview of the ACME

The ACME is an extension board for the BeagleBone Black, providing multi-channel power and temperature measurements capabilities. The cape itself has eight probe connectors allowing to do multi-channel measurements. Probes for USB, Jack or HE10 can be bought separately depending on boards you want to monitor.

acme

Last but not least, the ACME is fully open source, from the hardware to the software.

First setup

Ready to use pre-built images are available and can be flashed on an SD card. There are two different images: one acting as a standalone device and one providing an IIO capture daemon. While the later can be used in automated farms, we chose the standalone image which provides user-space tools to control the probes and is more suited to power consumption development topics.

The standalone image userspace can also be built manually using Buildroot, a provided custom configuration and custom init scripts. The kernel should be built using a custom configuration and the device tree needs to be patched.

Using the ACME

To control the probes and get measured values the Sigrok software is used. There is currently no support to send data over the network. Because of this limitation we need to access the BeagleBone Black shell through SSH and run our commands there.

We can display information about the detected probe, by running:

# sigrok-cli --show --driver=baylibre-acme
Driver functions:
    Continuous sampling
    Sample limit
    Time limit
    Sample rate
baylibre-acme - BayLibre ACME with 3 channels: P1_ENRG_PWR P1_ENRG_CURR P1_ENRG_VOL
Channel groups:
    Probe_1: channels P1_ENRG_PWR P1_ENRG_CURR P1_ENRG_VOL
Supported configuration options across all channel groups:
    continuous: 
    limit_samples: 0 (current)
    limit_time: 0 (current)
    samplerate (1 Hz - 500 Hz in steps of 1 Hz)

The driver has four parameters (continuous sampling, sample limit, time limit and sample rate) and has one probe attached with three channels (PWR, CURR and VOL). The acquisition parameters help configuring data acquisition by giving sampling limits or rates. The rates are given in Hertz, and should be within the 1 and 500Hz range when using an ACME.

For example, to sample at 20Hz and display the power consumption measured by our probe P1:

# sigrok-cli --driver=baylibre-acme --channels=P1_ENRG_PWR \
      --continuous --config samplerate=20
FRAME-BEGIN
P1_ENRG_PWR: 1.000000 W
FRAME-END
FRAME-BEGIN
P1_ENRG_PWR: 1.210000 W
FRAME-END
FRAME-BEGIN
P1_ENRG_PWR: 1.210000 W
FRAME-END

Of course there are many more options as shown in the Sigrok CLI manual.

Beta image

A new image is being developed and will change the way to use the ACME. As it’s already available in beta we tested it (and didn’t come back to the stable image). This new version aims to only use IIO to provide the probes data, instead of having a custom Sigrok driver. The main advantage is many software are IIO aware, or will be, as it’s the standard way to use this kind of sensors with the Linux kernel. Last but not least, IIO provides ways to communicate over the network.

A new webpage is available to find information on how to use the beta image, on https://baylibre-acme.github.io. This image isn’t compatible with the current stable one, which we previously described.

The first nice thing to notice when using the beta image is the Bonjour support which helps us communicating with the board in an effortless way:

$ ping baylibre-acme.local

A new tool, acme-cli, is provided to control the probes to switch them on or off given the needs. To switch on or off the first probe:

$ ./acme-cli switch_on 1
$ ./acme-cli switch_off 1

We do not need any additional custom software to use the board, as the sensors data is available using the IIO interface. This means we should be able to use any IIO aware tool to gather the power consumption values:

  • Sigrok, on the laptop/machine this time as IIO is able to communicate over the network;
  • libiio/examples, which provides the iio-monitor tool;
  • iio-capture, which is a fork of iio-readdev designed by BayLibre for an integration into LAVA (automated tests);
  • and many more..

Conclusion

We didn’t use all the possibilities offered by the ACME cape yet but so far it helped us a lot when working on power consumption related topics. The ACME cape is simple to use and comes with a working pre-built image. The beta image offers the IIO support which improved the usability of the device, and even though it’s in a beta version we would recommend to use it.

Video and slides from Linux Conf Australia

Linux Conf Australia took place two weeks ago in Hobart, Tasmania. For the second time, a Bootlin engineer gave a talk at this conference: for this edition, Bootlin CTO Thomas Petazzoni did a talk titled A tour of the ARM architecture and its Linux support. This talk was intended as an introduction-level talk to explain what is ARM, what is the concept behind the ARM architecture and ARM System-on-chip, bootloaders typically used on ARM and the Linux support for ARM with the concept of Device Tree.

The slides of the talk are available in PDF format, and the video is available on Youtube. We got some nice feedback afterwards, which is a good indication a number of attendees found it informative.

All the videos from the different talks are also available on Youtube.

We once again found LCA to be a really great event, and want to thank the LCA organization for accepting our talk proposal and funding the travel expenses. Next year LCA, in 2018, will take place in Sydney, in mainland Australia.

Bootlin at FOSDEM and the Buildroot Developers Meeting

FOSDEM 2017Like every year, a number of Bootlin engineers will be attending the FOSDEM conference next week-end, on February 4 and 5, in Brussels. This year, Mylène Josserand and Thomas Petazzoni are going to FOSDEM. Being the biggest European open-source conference, FOSDEM is a great opportunity to meet a large number of open-source developers and learn about new projects.

In addition, Bootlin is sponsoring the participation of Thomas Petazzoni to the Buildroot Developers meeting, which takes place during two days right after the FOSDEM conference. During this event, the Buildroot developers community gathers to make progress on the project by having discussions on the current topics, and working on the patches that have been submitted and need to be reviewed and merged.

Bootlin at the Embedded Linux Conference 2017

The next Embedded Linux Conference will take place later this month in Portland (US), from February 21 to 23, with a great schedule of talks. As usual, a number of Bootlin engineers will attend this event, and we will also be giving a few talks.

Embedded Linux Conference 2017

Bootlin CEO Michael Opdenacker will deliver a talk on Embedded Linux size reduction techniques, while Bootlin engineer Quentin Schulz will give a talk on
Power Management Integrated Circuits: Keep the Power in Your Hands. In addition, Bootlin engineers Maxime Ripard, Antoine Ténart and Mylène Josserand will be attending the conference.

We once again look forward to meeting our fellow members of the embedded Linux and Linux kernel communities!

Linux 4.9 released, Bootlin contributions

Linus Torvalds has released the 4.9 Linux kernel yesterday, as was expected. With 16214 non-merge commits, this is by far the busiest kernel development cycle ever, but in large part due to the merging of thousands of commits to add support for Greybus. LWN has very well summarized what’s new in this kernel release: 4.9 Merge window part 1, 4.9 Merge window part 2, The end of the 4.9 merge window.

As usual, we take this opportunity to look at the contributions Bootlin made to this kernel release. In total, we contributed 116 non-merge commits. Our most significant contributions this time have been:

  • Bootlin engineer Boris Brezillon, already a maintainer of the Linux kernel NAND subsystem, becomes a co-maintainer of the overall MTD subsystem.
  • Contribution of an input ADC resistor ladder driver, written by Alexandre Belloni. As explained in the commit log: common way of multiplexing buttons on a single input in cheap devices is to use a resistor ladder on an ADC. This driver supports that configuration by polling an ADC channel provided by IIO.
  • On Atmel platforms, improvements to clock handling, bug fix in the Atmel HLCDC display controller driver.
  • On Marvell EBU platforms
    • Addition of clock drivers for the Marvell Armada 3700 (Cortex-A53 based), by Grégory Clement
    • Several bug fixes and improvements to the Marvell CESA driver, for the crypto engine founds in most Marvell EBU processors. By Romain Perier and Thomas Petazzoni
    • Support for the PIC interrupt controller, used on the Marvell Armada 7K/8K SoCs, currently used for the PMU (Performance Monitoring Unit). By Thomas Petazzoni.
    • Enabling of Armada 8K devices, with support for the slave CP110 and the first Armada 8040 development board. By Thomas Petazzoni.
  • On Allwinner platforms
    • Addition of GPIO support to the AXP209 driver, which is used to control the PMIC used on most Allwinner designs. Done by Maxime Ripard.
    • Initial support for the Nextthing GR8 SoC. By Mylène Josserand and Maxime Ripard (pinctrl driver and Device Tree)
    • The improved sunxi-ng clock code, introduced in Linux 4.8, is now used for Allwinner A23 and A33. Done by Maxime Ripard.
    • Add support for the Allwinner A33 display controller, by re-using and extending the existing sun4i DRM/KMS driver. Done by Maxime Ripard.
    • Addition of bridge support in the sun4i DRM/KMS driver, as well as the code for a RGB to VGA bridge, used by the C.H.I.P VGA expansion board. By Maxime Ripard.
  • Numerous cleanups and improvements commits in the UBI subsystem, in preparation for merging the support for Multi-Level Cells NAND, from Boris Brezillon.
  • Improvements in the MTD subsystem, by Boris Brezillon:
    • Addition of mtd_pairing_scheme, a mechanism which allows to express the pairing of NAND pages in Multi-Level Cells NANDs.
    • Improvements in the selection of NAND timings.

In addition, a number of Bootlin engineers are also maintainers in the Linux kernel, so they review and merge patches from other developers, and send pull requests to other maintainers to get those patches integrated. This lead to the following activity:

  • Maxime Ripard, as the Allwinner co-maintainer, merged 78 patches from other developers.
  • Grégory Clement, as the Marvell EBU co-maintainer, merged 43 patches from other developers.
  • Alexandre Belloni, as the RTC maintainer and Atmel co-maintainer, merged 26 patches from other developers.
  • Boris Brezillon, as the MTD NAND maintainer, merged 24 patches from other developers.

The complete list of our contributions to this kernel release:

Software architecture of Bootlin’s lab

As stated in a previous blog post, we officially launched our lab on 2016, April 25th and it is contributing to KernelCI since then. In a series of blog post, we’d like to present in details how our lab is working.

We previously introduced the lab and its integration in KernelCI, and presented its hardware infrastructure. Now is time to explain how it actually works on the software side.

Continuous integration in Linux kernel

Because of Linux’s well-known ability to run on numerous platforms and the obvious impossibility for developers to test changes on all these platforms, continuous integration has a big role to play in Linux kernel development and maintenance.

More generally, continuous integration is made up of three different steps:

  • building the software which in our case is the Linux kernel,
  • testing the software,
  • reporting the tests results;
KernelCI complete process
KernelCI complete process

KernelCI checks hourly if one of the Git repositories it tracks have been updated. If it’s the case then it builds, from the last commit, the kernel for ARM, ARM64 and x86 platforms in many configurations. Then it stores all these builds in a publicly available storage.

Once the kernel images have been built, KernelCI itself is not in charge of testing it on hardware. Instead, it delegates this work to various labs, maintained by individuals or organizations. In the following section, we will discuss the software architecture needed to create such a lab, and receive testing requests from KernelCI.

Core software component: LAVA

At this moment, LAVA is the only supported software by KernelCI but note that KernelCI offers an API, so if LAVA does not meet your needs, go ahead and make your own!

What is LAVA?

LAVA is a self-hosted software, organized in a server-dispatcher model, for controlling boards, to automate boot, bootloader and user-space testing. The server receives jobs specifying what to test, how and on which boards to run those tests, and transmits those jobs to the dispatcher linked to the specified board. The dispatcher applies all modifications on the kernel image needed to make it boot on the said board and then fully interacts with it through the serial.

Since LAVA has to fully and autonomously control boards, it needs to:

  • interact with the board through serial connection,
  • control the power supply to reset the board in case of a frozen kernel,
  • know the commands needed to boot the kernel from the bootloader,
  • serve files (kernel, DTB, rootfs) to the board.

The first three requirements are fulfilled by LAVA thanks to per-board configuration files. The latter is done by the LAVA dispatcher in charge of the board, which downloads files specified in the job and copies them to a directory accessible by the board through TFTP.

LAVA organizes the lab in devices and device types. All identical devices are from the same device type and share the same device type configuration file. It contains the set of bootloader instructions to boot the kernel (e.g.: how and where to load files) and the bootloader configuration (e.g.: can it boot zImages or only uImages). A device configuration file stores the commands run by a dispatcher to interact with the device: how to connect to serial, how to power it on and off. LAVA interacts with devices via external tools: it has support for conmux or telnet to communicate via serial and power commands can be executed by custom scripts (pdudaemon for example).

Control power supply

Some labs use expensive Switched PDUs to control the power supply of each board but, as discussed in our previous blog post we went for several Devantech ETH008 Ethernet-controlled relay boards instead.

Linaro, the organization behind LAVA, has also developed a software for controlling power supplies of each board, called pdudaemon. We added support for most Devantech relay boards to pdudaemon.

Connect to serial

As advised in LAVA’s installation guide, we went with telnet and ser2net to connect the serial port of our boards. Ser2net basically opens a Linux device and allows to interact with it through a TCP socket on a defined port. A LAVA dispatcher will then launch a telnet client to connect to a board’s serial port. Because of the well-known fact that Linux devices name might change between reboots, we had to use udev rules in order to guarantee the serial we connect to is the one we want to connect to.

Actual testing

Now that LAVA knows how to handle devices, it has to run jobs on those devices. LAVA jobs contain which images to boot (kernel, DTB, rootfs), what kind of tests to run when in user space and where to find them. A job is strongly linked to a device type since it contains the kernel and DTB specifically built for this device type.

Those jobs are submitted to the different labs by the KernelCI project. To do so, KernelCI uses a tool called lava-ci. Amongst other things, this tool contains a big table of the supported platforms, associating the Device Tree name with the corresponding hardware platform name. This way, when a new kernel gets built by KernelCI, and produces a number of Device Tree Blobs (.dtb files), lava-ci knows what are the corresponding hardware platforms to run the kernel on. It submits the jobs to all the labs, which will then only run the tests for which they have the necessary hardware platform. We have contributed a number of patches to lava-ci, adding support for the new platforms we had in our lab.

LAVA overall architecture

Reporting test results

After KernelCI has built the kernel, sent jobs to contributing labs and LAVA has run the jobs, KernelCI will then get the tests results from the labs, aggregate them on its website and notify maintainers of errors via a mailing list.

Challenges encountered

As in any project, we stumbled on some difficulties. The biggest problems we had to take care of were board-specific problems.

Some boards like the Marvell RD-370 need a rising edge on a pin to boot, meaning we cannot avoid pressing the reset button between each boot. To work out this problem, we had to customize the hardware (swap resistors) to bypass this limitation.

Some other boards lose their serial connection. Some lose it when resetting their power but recover it after a few seconds, problem we found acceptable to solve by infinitely reconnecting to the serial. However, we still have a problem with a few boards which randomly close their serial connection without any reason. After that, we are able to connect to the serial connection again but it does not send any character. The only way to get it to work again is to physically re-plug the cable used by the serial connection. Unfortunately, we did not find yet a way to solve this bug.

The Linux kernel of our server refused to bind more than 13 USB devices when it was time to create a second drawer of boards. After some research, we found out the culprit was the xHCI driver. In modern computers, it is possible to disable xHCI support in the BIOS but this option was not present in our server’s BIOS. The solution was to rebuild and install a kernel for the server without the xHCI driver compiled. From that day, the number of USB devices is limited to 127 as in the USB specification.

Conclusion

We have now 35 boards in our lab, with some being the only ones represented in KernelCI. We encourage anyone, hobbyists or companies, to contribute to the effort of bringing continuous integration of the Linux kernel by building your own lab and adding as many boards as you can.

Interested in becoming a lab? Follow the guide!

Buildroot 2016.11 released, Bootlin contributions

Buildroot LogoThe 2016.11 release of Buildroot has been published on November, 30th. The release announcement, by Buildroot maintainer Peter Korsgaard, gives numerous details about the new features and updates brought by this release. This new release provides support for using multiple BR2_EXTERNAL directories, gives some important updates to the toolchain support, adds default configurations for 9 new hardware platforms, and 38 new packages were added.

On a total of 1423 commits made for this release, Bootlin contributed a total of 253 commits:

$ git shortlog -sn --author=free-electrons 2016.08..2016.11
   142  Gustavo Zacarias
   104  Thomas Petazzoni
     7  Romain Perier

Here are the most important contributions we did:

  • Romain Perier contributed a package for the AMD Catalyst proprietary driver. Such drivers are usually not trivial to integrate, so having a ready-to-use package in Buildroot will really make it easier for Buildroot users who use hardware with an AMD/ATI graphics controller. This package provides both the X.org driver and the OpenGL implementation. This work was sponsored by one of Bootlin customer.
  • Gustavo Zacarias mainly contributed a large set of patches that do a small update to numerous packages, to make sure the proper environment variables are passed. This is a preparation change to bring top-level parallel build in Buildroot. This work was also sponsored by another Bootlin customer.
  • Thomas Petazzoni did contributions in various areas:
    • Added a DEVELOPERS file to the tree, to reference which developers are interested by which architectures and packages. Not only it allows the developers to be Cc’ed when patches are sent on the mailing list (like the get_maintainers script does), but it also used by Buildroot autobuilder infrastructure: if a package fails to build, the corresponding developer is notified by e-mail.
    • Misc updates to the toolchain support: switch to gcc 5.x by default, addition of gcc patches needed to fix various issues, etc.
    • Numerous fixes for build issues detected by Buildroot autobuilders

In addition to contributing 104 commits, Thomas Petazzoni also merged 1095 patches from other developers during this cycle, in order to help Buildroot maintainer Peter Korsgaard.

Finally, Bootlin also sponsored the Buildroot project, by funding the meeting location for the previous Buildroot Developers meeting, which took place in October in Berlin, after the Embedded Linux Conference. See the Buildroot sponsors page, and also the report from this meeting. The next Buildroot meeting will take place after the FOSDEM conference in Brussels.