We are happy to announce a new Embedded Linux training course on July 7-11, in Madrid, Spain.
It is organized by our partners ISEE (the makers of the IGEPv2 board that we are using in this course), and Silica, a well known component is distributor who is welcoming the session in its offices in Madrid.
The course will be instructed in English by our trainer Marcin Bis. 
The registrations are directly handled by ISEE. See details.
Bootlin is happy to share some news about the latest training and contribution activities of the company.
Bootlin engineers merged 121 patches in the 3.13 release of the Linux kernel, making Bootlin the 17th contributing company. In the recently released 3.14, we have also merged 121 patches, making Bootlin the 21st contributing company.
Thanks to these contributions, we have gained significant expertise in supporting ARM platforms in the Linux kernel, allowing us to efficiently help our customers for kernel porting and device driver development activities.
We expect these contributions to significantly increase in the future, and we have already more than 210 patches lined-up for the upcoming 3.15 kernel, making Bootlin the 14th contributing company for 3.15.
Bootlin contributions to Linux 3.13
Linux 3.14 released, Bootlin contributions inside!
Some of our contributions to this release are quite important: introduction of an infrastructure to better support Python packages, and introduction of a mechanism to more easily allow companies using Buildroot to keep their own package recipes separated from the Buildroot core, addition of the support for the musl C library.
In order to help companies interested in using Yocto for their products, our new 3-day training course mixing lectures and practical labs, gives all the necessary details to build one’s own system, customize its image, add more packages, and generally understand how to use Yocto.
This training course can be delivered on-site upon request, and we will also be offering public sessions starting this fall.
As usual, our training materials will be made freely available under a Creative Commons license.
Bootlin welcomes Boris Brezillon and Antoine Ténart
As demand for our Linux kernel mainlining services is growing in a strong way, we plan to announce new job openings for Q4 2014.
If you are interested in joining Bootlin, don’t hesitate to contact us early. This way, we will already know you and your interest in working with us when the job openings are confirmed.
In addition to attending the conference, Bootlin engineers gave a total of seven talks during this conference:
We are happy to announce that our engineering team has recently welcomed two new embedded Linux engineers: Boris Brezillon and Antoine Ténart. Boris and Antoine will both be working from the Toulouse office of the company, together with Maxime Ripard and Thomas Petazzoni. They will be helping Bootlin to address the increasing demand for its development and training services.
Antoine started his professional experience with Embedded Linux and Android in 2011. Before joining Bootlin in 2014, he started with low level Android system development at Archos (France), and worked on Embedded Linux and Android projects at Adeneo Embedded (France). He joined Bootlin early March, and has already been involved in kernel contributions on the Marvell Berlin processors and the Atmel AT91 processors, and is also working on our upcoming Yocto training course.
Boris joined Bootlin on April, 1st, and brings a significant embedded Linux experience that he gained while working on home automation devices at Overkiz (France). He was maintaining a custom distribution built with the Yocto. Boris also has already contributed many patches to the mainline Linux kernel sources, in particular for the Atmel AT91 ARM SoCs. Boris is also developing the NAND controller driver for the Allwinner ARM processors and has proposed improvements to the core Linux MTD subsystem (see this thread and this other thread).
One of the most important conference of the Embedded Linux community will take place at the end of this month in California: the Embedded Linux Conference will be held in San Jose from April, 29th to May, 1st, co-located with the Android Builders Summit. The schedule for both of these events has been published, and it is full of interesting talks on a wide range of embedded topics.
As usual, Bootlin will participate to this conference, but this participation will be the most important ever:
If you are interested in embedded Linux, we highly advise you to attend this conference. And if you are interested in business or recruiting opportunities with Bootlin, it will also be the perfect time to meet us!
Linus Torvalds has just released the 3.14 version of the Linux kernel. As usual, it incorporates a large number of changes, for which a good summary is available on the KernelNewbies site.
This time around, Bootlin is the 19th company contributing to this kernel release, by number of patches, right between Cisco and Renesas. Six of our engineers have contributed to this release: Maxime Ripard, Alexandre Belloni, Ezequiel Garcia, Grégory Clement, Michael Opdenacker and Thomas Petazzoni. In total, they have contributed 121 patches to this kernel release.
pxa3xx_nand driver and extend it to cover the specificities of the Armada 370/XP NAND controller. And these specificities were quite complicated, involving a large number of changes to the driver, which all had to also be validated on existing PXA3xx hardware to not introduce any regression.IRQF_DISABLED flag.In detail, our contributions were:
Embedded World is the world’s largest trade show about embedded systems. In 2013, it attracted around 900 exhibitors, over 22,000 visitors and almost 1,500 congress participants.
This year, Bootlin will be represented by our CEO Michael Opdenacker. This should be a great opportunity for us to understand our customers better, by meeting embedded system makers, by seeing what their needs are and what technologies they use. It will also be an opportunity to meet well known members of the technical community. In particular, here are a few well know people who are going to speak at the congress:
Don’t hesitate to contact us if you are attending this event too and are interested in knowing Bootlin better, for business, partnership or even career opportunities!
As we discussed in a recent blog post, two of our engineers participated to the FOSDEM conference early February in Brussels, Belgium. For those interested, many videos are available, such as several videos from the Lameere room, where the embedded related talks were given.
Thomas Petazzoni also participated to the two days Buildroot Developers Meeting after the FOSDEM conference. This meeting gathered 10 contributors to the Buildroot project physically present and two additional remote participants. The event was sponsored by Google and Mind, thanks a lot to them! During those two days, the participants were able to discuss a very large number of topics that are often difficult to discuss over mailing lists or IRC, and a significant work to clean up the oldest pending patches was done. In addition to this, these meetings are also very important to allow the contributors to know each other, as it makes future online discussions and collaborations much easier and fruitful. For more details, see the complete report of the event.
Also, if you’re interested in Buildroot, the project has applied to participate to the next edition of the Google Summer of Code. Two project ideas are already listed on the project wiki, feel free to contact Thomas Petazzoni if you are a student interested in these topics, or if you have other proposals to make for Buildroot.
Version 3.13 of the Linux kernel was released by Linus Torvalds on January, 19th 2014. The kernelnewbies.org site has an excellent page that covers the most important improvements and feature additions that this new kernel release brings.
As usual Bootlin contributed to this kernel: with 121 patches merged in 3.13 on a total of 12127 patches contributed, Bootlin is ranked 17th in the list of companies contributing to the Linux kernel. We also appeared on Jonathan Corbet kernel contribution statistics at LWN.net, as a company having contributed 1% of the kernel changes, right between Renesas Electronics and Huawei Technologies.
Amongst the contributions we made for 3.13:
IRQF_DISABLED, as well as other janitorial tasks such as removing unused Kconfig symbols. Work done by Michael Opdenacker.In detail, the patches contributed by Bootlin are:
This week-end is the first week-end of February, which on the schedule of all open-source developers is always booked for a major event of our community: the FOSDEM conference in Brussels. With several hundreds of talks over two days, this completely free event is one of the biggest event, if not the biggest of the open-source world.
For embedded Linux developers, FOSDEM has quite a few interesting tracks and talks this year: an embedded track, a graphics track (with many embedded related talks, such as talks on Video4Linux, the status of open-source drivers for 2D and 3D graphics on ARM platforms, etc.), and several talks in other tracks relevant to embedded developers. For example, there is one talk about the Allwinner SoCs and the community behind it in one of the main track. Our engineer Maxime Ripard is the Linux kernel maintainer for this family of SoC.
Two Bootlin engineers will attend FOSDEM: Maxime Ripard and Thomas Petazzoni. Do not hesitate to get in touch with them if you want to discuss embedded Linux or kernel topics!
Also, right after FOSDEM, the Buildroot community is organizing its Developers Meeting, on Monday, 3rd and Tuesday 4th February. This event is sponsored by Google (providing the meeting location) and Mind (providing the dinner), and will take place in the offices of Google in Brussels. Ten Buildroot developers will participate to the meeting in Brussels, as well as a number of others remotely. On Bootlin side, Thomas Petazzoni will be participating to the meeting. If you are interested in participating, either physically or remotely, do not hesitate to contact Thomas to register. For more details, see the wiki page of the event.
Bootlin is happy to announce its first public training session outside of France.
Of course, we deliver training courses on customer sites all around the world, but this will be the first one open to individual registration that we organize outside of France.
We are starting with an Android system development session in Southampton, UK.
You will enjoy the newest version of our Android course, based on Android 4.x, and using the BeagleBone Black as the development platform for the practical labs. As always in our training sessions, participants walk away with the board used during the practical labs (in this case the BeagleBone Black and its LCD cape), allowing them to continue their learning and experiments well after the end of the course.
Being a popular cruising destination, Southampton is easy to reach from other cities in the UK and in the world.
The Android robot picture is copyrighted by Google. It is licensed under the Creative Commons 3.0 Attribution Unported license. The British robot version has been derived by Bootlin, and is available under the same license. Feel free to reuse it and improve it as long as you keep the original author!