ISEE working on IGEPv5 board with OMAP5

Our partner ISEE is famous for their IGEPv2 board that we use in our embedded Linux course. This board is both powerful (running at 1 GHz) and featureful (on-board WiFi and Bluetooth, many connectors and expansion capabilities).

The good news is that ISEE has started to develop a new IGEPv5 board, which will be based on the new OMAP5 processor from Texas Instruments. This processor features in particular 2 ARM Cortex A15 cores running at up to 2 GHz, DDR3 RAM support, USB3, full HD 3D recording, and supporting 4 displays and cameras at the same time. Can you imagine what systems you could create with such a CPU?

If you are interested in such a board, it is still time for you to give them your inputs and expectations.

What should a perfect OMAP5 board be like? Don’t hesitate to leave your comments on this blog post. Be sure that ISEE will pay attention to them.

ELCE 2012 slides: porting Linux to new ARM SoC

We are just returning from Barcelona, Spain, after participating to the 2012 edition of the Embedded Linux Conference Europe. My colleague Thomas Petazzoni has delivered the below presentation:

Your New ARM SoC Linux Support Check-List

Since Linus Torvalds raised warnings about the state of the ARM architecture support in the Linux kernel, a huge amount of effort and reorganization has happened in the way Linux supports ARM SoCs. From the addition of the device tree to the pinctrl subsystem, from the new clock framework to the new rules in code organization and design, the changes have been significant over the last one and half year in theARM Linux kernel world.

Based on the speaker’s experience on getting the new Marvell Armada 370 and Armada XP SoC supported in the mainline Linux kernel, we will give an overview of those changes and summarize the new rules for ARM Linux support. We aim at helping developers willing to add suppot for new ARM SoCs in the Linux kernel by providing a check-list of things to do.

Thomas Petazzoni is an embedded Linux engineer and trainer at Bootlin since 2008. He has been involved with multiple projects around the Linux kernel, especially the mainlining of Marvell Armada 370/XP SoCs support. He is also a major contributor to the Buildroot embedded Linux build system with more than 1100 patches merged.

The presentation slides and their sources are now available here. We have also shot a video of Thomas’ talk and it should be available in the next weeks. Stay tuned!

Do not hesitate to contact us if you are looking for engineers to port Linux to new hardware.

Software patents: letter to European MPs

The software patent threat is back in the European Union, through the “Unitary Patent” project currently reviewed by the Legal Affairs Committee (JURI) of the European Parliament. In a few words, the idea is to let the European Patent Office (EPO) define what can be patented and what cannot be. The problem is the EPO is well known for supporting software patents, and in addition, there is no democratic control over it.

You will find more details on the unitary-patent.eu and on the Stop Software Patents websites.

After the latest battles against software patents in 2005, it was time for me to take my pen again and try to warn our representatives about the threats from software patents. The below letter was sent last week to each of the JURI committee, in English or in French version.

It doesn’t constitute any in-depth legal study on software patents, because I am only an engineer, without any advanced legal knowledge. It is rather a testimonial of my worries about these patents. These worries are justified by multiple deviances that software patents caused over the years in the whole world, and by the constant pressure faced by our representatives to make such patents legal in the European Union.

It may not be too late to write to your representatives at the European Parliament, but in any case, it isn’t too late to sign the petition that many companies and individuals already signed.

Dear Member of the European Parliament,

I am the creator and General Manager of Bootlin, a young European engineering company specializing in embedded software, supporting worldwide companies in designing embedded systems, on a rapidly growing market.

It’s the availability of a great number of Open-Source building blocks that allowed our company to experience continuous growth since its inception in 2004. Many industrial and consumer electronics products are designed with these building blocks. These blocks are developed by a vibrant community of software developers in the whole world, which our company participates to.

This dynamism would have been reduced if software patents had been legal in the E.U., as they are in the U.S.A. and in Japan. Because of their great number and because they are often trivial, such patents constitute a real “minefield” for inventors creating software and systems embedding software. For a company with limited resources, it is indeed impossible to make sure that the ideas that they implement by programming, or the software components that they reuse, do not step on a method already patented by someone else. The creator of an innovative product including software then runs the risk of having his/her investment ruined by a bigger competitor threatened by this invention. This competitor, if it owns a sufficiently big patent pool, could always find a trivial software patent that the competing product would infringe, and have the distribution of this product stopped. Another danger comes from “Patent troll” companies that do not create any product and only hunt for companies with products that could that infringe the patents they own.

We are also worried by the fact that at least in the software industry, patents are deviated from their primary purpose of fostering innovation. It is the exact opposite that happens, and it seems that patents today are only instruments for giant corporations to fight against competitors, big or small, and to prevent them from distributing competing products. In addition, the first patents granted a temporary monopoly in exchange for revealing a secret manufacturing process. For many software patents, like the famous “double click” patent owned by Microsoft, there is no more secret to reveal, as their effects are very easy to reproduce. However, we continue to grant a monopoly to their owners.

Therefore, our company is worried about the current plans to set up a unitary patent with a flanking unified patent court.

We are concerned that the regulation on the unitary patent, as agreed in December 2011 by the negotiators of the Council, the Commission, and the Committee on Legal Affairs of the European Parliament, leaves any and every issue on the limits of patentability to the European Patent Office (EPO)’s case law, without any democratic control or review by an independent court.

However, in spite of the rejection of software patentability by the European Parliament, through its vote on September 24th, 2003 and July 6th, 2005, the EPO continued to grant software patents, under the deceiving term of “computer-implemented inventions”. That’s perhaps because the EPO has a financial interest in granting as many patents as possible, and therefore fuel an increase in the number of litigation cases, for the profit of attorney offices but discouraging innovation, which is the main driver for our modern economy.

The regulation on the unitary patent is an opportunity for the EU legislators to harmonize substantive patent law in the EU institutional and jurisdictional framework, and to put an end to the EPO’s self-motivated practices extending the realm of patentability to software. Failing to do so, this unitary patent will do more harm than good to the EU ICT firms.

For these reasons, we urge MEPs to adopt amendments which clearly state that the EPO’s decisions are subject to a review from the Court of Justice of the European Union, and which reaffirm the rejection of software patentability, as voted by the European Parliament.

Don’t hesitate to contact me if you wish.

Kind regards,

Michael Opdenacker

Free Android training materials

Android robotAfter months of preparation, and after completing our first Android system development training session, we are proud to release our complete training materials under the Creative Commons Attribution – Share Alike 3.0 license.

Our course targets engineers who need to develop embedded systems with Google Android, customizing Android to support specific hardware and product requirements.

Here are the main topics that we cover:

  • Introduction to Android
  • Android source code and compiling
  • Linux kernel, configuration, compiling and booting
  • Bootloaders for Android
  • Android changes to the Linux kernel
  • Supporting new hardware
  • Development and debugging with ADB
  • Android’s build system
  • The Android filesystem
  • Android native layer and calling a C program from Android
  • Android framework and applications
  • Application development
  • The apk standard
  • System customization
  • Advise and resources

See the detailed agenda.

Just like the materials for our Embedded Linux system development and Embedded Linux kernel and driver development courses, this new courseware is meant to be be a useful resource for product developers around the world. It could also be used by engineers with sufficient Android experience to train their colleagues without having to spend months preparing slides and practical labs as we did.

Devkit8000 board from EmbestPractical labs are conducted on the Devkit8000 embedded board from Embest, with a TI OMAP3 CPU and an LCD touchscreen. As we use Linaro Android in our labs, it should be relatively easy to make these labs on other development boards with a Linaro supported CPU (TI OMAP, Freescale i.MX53 and i.MX6, ST Ericsson Nova and Samsung Exynos).

LaTeX sources for these materials are available on Bootlin’spublic git server.

To build these documents from source, you may need to install several packages (thanks to Huy, Bui Quang, for contributing the package list):

sudo apt-get install git-core inkscape texlive-latex-base \
texlive-latex-extra texlive-font-utils dia python-pygments \
texlive-fonts-recommended

You can then build the latest version as follows:

git clone git://github.com/bootlin/training-materials.git
cd training-materials
make full-android-labs.pdf
make full-android-slides.pdf

The LaTeX format and the git repository make it easy to identify changes made since the last time you accessed the materials. We even have a training-materials-updates mailing list to receive notifications for updates to all our training materials. Compared to the Open Document Format that we used in the past, this should also make it considerably simpler to translate these documents and keep translations up to date.

As usual, comments, suggestions and translations are welcome. You can write to the feedback address available on our contact page.

Embedded Linux, kernel and Android engineer job openings (2012)

Home based jobs in Europe or at one of our offices in France

Penguin worksTo meet increasing demand for its Embedded Linux, kernel and Android engineering services, Bootlin is looking for developers:

  • With experience developing embedded Linux systems
  • With experience developing device drivers for the Linux kernel, and porting Linux on new hardware
  • With visible contributions to Free Software used in embedded systems, such as the Linux kernel, BusyBox, build systems, compilers…
  • With technical writing skills and an interest for training

Experience with Android low-level development, allowing to teach our Android System Development course would also be a strong advantage, though not mandatory.

A first possibility is be hired in France. Being able to join one of our offices in France (Toulouse or Orange) will be an advantage, but working from home in other parts of France will be possible too. We are also open to people living in a country with the Euro currency, working from home, and able to work as full time contractors.

We have a first opening that we would like to fill between September and December 2012. If demand continues to grow, we expect to hire more engineers with the same profile in the following months. We also hope to expand the home based jobs to countries outside Europe in the next years, but it will take a bit more time.

See our careers page for a full description.

Bootlin at the Libre Software Meeting

In a previous post, we detailed all the talks of the Embedded Systems and Open Hardware track of the Libre Software Meeting, taking place in Geneva in early July.

Bootlin will have a quite important presence at this event, with three talks and one tutorial given by Bootlin engineers. You’ll find below the descriptions of the talks given by Bootlin. Both my colleague Maxime Ripard and myself will be present at Libre Software Meeting, and we will be happy to meet you there to discuss Embedded Linux and Android topics!

A look through the Android Stack

Android has established itself in the past years as a major player in the mobile market, outperforming any other mobile systems.

To do so, Google relied both on well established open-source components, such as the Linux Kernel, and munching them together in a brand new userspace environment. This talk will detail the most important components of Android userspace and the interactions between them that allow developers to face a consistent API for their applications.

This talk will be given on Tuesday 9th July 2012, at 14:00, by Maxime Ripard, embedded Linux and Android engineer at Bootlin. Maxime is also teaching our newest training course on Android system development.

Buildroot: a nice, simple and efficient embedded Linux build system

Started in late 2001 by uClibc developers, Buildroot has grown over its 10 years history from a testing tool for the uClibc C library to a complete, vendor-neutral, embedded Linux build system. Until early 2009, the project was mostly unmaintained and the quality slowly decreased, frustrating many Buildroot users. Fortunately, since early 2009, Peter Korsgaard took over the maintainership of Buildroot, and the project has considerably evolved since then: stable releases are published every three months, the user and developer community has grown significantly, the existing features have been cleaned up, many other new features have been added, the project is no longer uClibc-specific and the quality has been vastly improved. Buildroot now offers a nice, simple and efficient mechanism to build small to medium sized embedded Linux systems, such as the ones found in many industrial systems or highly dedicated systems. Many users are amazed about how easy it is to get started with Buildroot, especially compared to other build systems. This presentation will show how Buildroot can be used to build embedded Linux systems, highlighting the new features and improvements made over the last few years, and detailing how the simplicity of Buildroot allows you to focus on developing the applications for your system. A quick overview of the future Buildroot developments will also be provided.

This talk will take place on Wednesday 10th July at 17:00 and will be given by Thomas Petazzoni, embedded Linux engineer at Bootlin, and long time Buildroot contributor.

Linux kernel on ARM: consolidation work

In Spring 2011, Linus Torvalds asked the ARM Linux maintainers to clean up the contents of arch/arm/ in the Linux kernel code by doing more consolidation between ARM sub-architectures.

More than a year later, a lot of work has been accomplished in this area, especially thanks to the introduction of the device tree for the ARM architecture, the pinctrl subsystem and the clock framework into the Linux kernel.

Through this talk, we will present the challenges the ARM architecture creates in terms of Linux kernel support, and then describe from a technical point of view how the device tree, the pinctrl subsystem and the clock subsystem work and how they can improve the consolidation between different ARM sub-architectures.

The talk will be designed to be accessible to an audience having only a moderate knowledge of kernel programming and internals, and will therefore provide enough context for such audience to understand the issues that those different mechanisms are striving to solve.

This talk will take place on Thursday 11th July at 10:00 and will be given by Thomas Petazzoni, embedded Linux engineer at Bootlin.

Tutorial on using Buildroot, a nice, simple and efficient embedded Linux build system

Started in late 2001 by uClibc developers, Buildroot has grown over its 10 years history from a testing tool for the uClibc C library to a complete, vendor-neutral, embedded Linux build system. Until early 2009, the project was mostly unmaintained and the quality slowly decreased, frustrating many Buildroot users. Fortunately, since early 2009, Peter Korsgaard took over the maintainership of Buildroot, and the project has considerably evolved since then: stable releases are published every three months, the user and developer community has grown significantly, the existing features have been cleaned up, many other new features have been added, the project is no longer uClibc-specific and the quality has been vastly improved. Buildroot now offers a nice, simple and efficient mechanism to build small to medium sized embedded Linux systems, such as the ones found in many industrial systems or highly dedicated systems. Many users are amazed about how easy it is to get started with Buildroot, especially compared to other build systems.

This workshop follows the Buildroot presentation proposed in the same topic. During one half-day participants will be introduced on how to efficiently use Buildroot for their own projects:

  • Basic usage of Buildroot: generate the first system, boot it on a hardware platform
  • Add packages to Buildroot
  • Customize Buildroot for real-life projects: how to integrate project specific patches, configuration and customization

Participants are invited to come with their own laptop, installed with a sufficiently recent GNU/Linux distribution. Participants are recommended to attend the Buildroot talk by the same speaker before attending the workshop, as the talk will give an overall introduction on Buildroot.

This tutorial will take place on Thursday 11th July from 14:00 to 17:00 and will be given by Thomas Petazzoni, embedded Linux engineer at Bootlin, and long time Buildroot contributor.

Embedded topics at the Libre Software Meeting, Geneva, July 9-11

Libre Software Meeting, Geneva
Libre Software Meeting, Geneva

The Libre Software Meeting is a community-driven free software event that exists since 2000, composed of talks and workshops. Its 2012 edition will take place from July 7th to July 12th in Geneva, Switzerland.

In the context of this conference, I was responsible with Florian Fainelli from the OpenWRT project to organize the Embedded systems and open hardware track. This track will offer an interesting selection of talks related to embedded topics, concentrated between July 9th and July 11th:

Geneva
Geneva

In the Operating Systems track, some other conferences might be of interested to Embedded Linux developers as well:

The entrace to the Libre Software Meeting is free, so don’t hesitate to book your train or flight tickets, and join us at this event!

Bootlin Quarterly – 2012 Q2

This is the second Bootlin newsletter for 2012. We are happy to share with you the latest news about our projects, training courses and contributions.

New “Android system development” training

As announced in our previous newsletter, we have created a new Android system development training course.

This course targets engineers who need to develop embedded systems with Google Android. In four days, through theory and practical labs, the course makes you familiar with compiling and booting Android, with adapting Android to support a new embedded board (assuming that it is already supported by the Linux kernel), and with building a real system through accessing specific hardware, customizing the filesystem and using debugging techniques. More details and the complete agenda.

The first public session of this training will take place on June 11-14 2012 in Toulouse, France (session taught in English). There are still seats available for this session.

We will start giving on-site sessions of this course in July 2012. Do not hesitate to contact us if you want to organize on-site sessions.

Opening our training materials source code

Since Bootlin’screation in 2004, we have been releasing our training materials under the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license, a free license that allows anyone to share, improve and use our embedded Linux and Linux kernel training materials. Since that time, our training materials were available as PDF files, and as OpenDocument files for the source code, but we were only updating their online version from time to time.

Now, we are proud to announce that our training materials are being converted to the LaTeX language, and their latest version is available at any time from our public Git repository.

For the moment, our embedded Linux slides have been published (about 500 slides) in this Git repository, as well as the instructions for the practical sessions of our embedded Linux and Linux kernel courses. In the near future, we will also publish in LaTeX the slides of our Linux kernel training (which remain available under PDF and OpenDocument formats) as well as the materials of our new “Android system development” course.

The creation of this public Git repository is a strong sign of our commitment for open training materials.

The LaTeX format and the public Git repository now make it easy for everyone to follow updates on our materials, to keep one’s knowledge up to date, and even to teach a training session using our materials (commercial use of our materials is welcome, as it helps to spread knowledge about Free and Open Source Software for embedded systems).

Upcoming public training sessions

Our next public training sessions dates and locations are:

  • Embedded Linux kernel and driver development
    June, 4-8 2012
    Toulouse, France
    Session given in French
    Details
  • Android system development
    June, 11-14 2012
    Toulouse, France
    Session given in English
  • Embedded Linux system development
    June, 18-22 2012
    Avignon, France
    Session given in French
    Details
  • Embedded Linux kernel and driver development
    July 2-6, 2012
    Avignon, France
    Session given in French
    Details
  • Embedded Linux kernel and driver development
    October, 8-12 2012
    Avignon, France
    Session given in English
    Details
  • Embedded Linux system development
    October, 15-19 2012
    Toulouse, France
    Session given in French
    Details
  • Embedded Linux system development
    December, 3-7 2012
    Avignon, France
    Session given in English
    Details
  • Embedded Linux system development
    February, 4-8 2013
    Lyon, France
    Session given in French
    Details

Projects

Since the beginning of the year, we have been involved in the following projects for various customers:

  • Boot time optimization and power management evaluation for a MIPS-based platform used in a payment terminal;
  • Filesystem size optimization, embedded Linux build system integration, Ethernet PHY driver development for an AT91 ARM platform used in satellite video processing;
  • Embedded Linux build system integration and generic embedded Linux debugging and support for an AT91 ARM platform used as a gateway between medical devices;
  • Starting in April, we will be working with a major ARM SoC vendor to help mainlining support for their latest SoC in the official Linux kernel sources;
  • Continued the creation of materials for our new “Android system development” course.
  • Continued our work on the Linux kernel driver for the Analog-to-Digital converters of the AT91 ARM SoC (see ‘Contributions’, below);
  • Continued our work on real-time Linux evaluation on AT91 ARM SoC (see ‘Contributions’, below.).

Career opportunities

Bootlin is looking for a kernel developer in the the French Riviera, to be hired with a permanent contract. The job is open to English speaking people who do not speak French, but are ready to settle in the area of Nice, and be hired through a French contract. See details.

Conferences and contributions

Embedded Linux Conference and Android Builders Summit

Three engineers of Bootlin attended the Embedded Linux Conference 2012 and Android Builders Summit 2012 in Redwood Shores, near San Francisco in California, on February. This strong participation of our engineers to technical conferences is a key factor to make sure we remain up to date on embedded Linux technologies and keep a close contact with the community.

During the conference, we have published daily reports about the various talks that we thought were interesting:

After the conference, we also posted videos of the talks:

Our scripts to encode videos to the royalty-free VP8 codec and add a title sequence to the videos are now available on on our public git server.

At this conference, our engineer Thomas Petazzoni has given a talk titled “Buildroot, a nice, simple and efficient embedded Linux build system”. Here are the slides and the video.

FOSDEM conference

Two of our engineers participated to the FOSDEM conference, a community-driven open-source conference, in early February.

Our engineer Maxime Ripard gave a talk on his work around the IIO kernel subsystem, which he used to write an ADC driver for the AT91 SoC. Here are the slides.

Our engineer Thomas Petazzoni gave a talk about “Using Qt for non-graphical applications”. Here are the slides.

AT91 Analog-to-Digital converter drivers

Details about the driver for the AT91 Analog-to-Digital converters driver written by Maxime Ripard from Bootlin have been published on the Atmel Linux4Sam wiki. This driver relies on the IIO framework, and we are in the process of getting this driver merged upstream. See the Atmel Linux4Sam wiki page.

Real-time Linux benchmarks

A report of extensive real-time benchmarks conducted by Gregory Clement from Bootlin on AT91 platforms has been published on the Atmel Linux4Sam Wiki. This report compares a vanilla Linux kernel, the PREEMPT-RT patches and the Xenomai co-kernel approach through timer-based and GPIO-based benchmarks. See the Atmel Linux4Sam wiki page.

Buildroot

Bootlin’sinvolvement in Buildroot is still strong:

  • Maxime Ripard and Thomas Petazzoni participated to the Buildroot Developer Day organized in Brussels before the FOSDEM conference. A report of this meeting, which gathered several other Buildroot developers, is available at the Buildroot mailing list archives.
  • Since the beginning of the year, Thomas Petazzoni has contributed 64 patches that have been merged: support for the LTT-ng Linux tracing solution, support to represent host utilities in the menuconfig, many updates and fixes to external toolchain support and many other fixes.
  • In the same time-frame, Maxime Ripard has contributed 13 patches that have been merged: support for systemd, improvements to the package infrastructure and various fixes.
  • Thomas Petazzoni has implemented a Web interface that publicly shows the result of our random configuration builds, available at http://autobuild.buildroot.org. The Buildroot community is doing random configuration builds 24/7 on three machines, with various configurations. This Web interface collects the build results and sends a summary every day on the Buildroot mailing-list. This has already allowed to fix many build issues, and will help to improve Buildroot’s quality in the future.

Linux kernel course

Participants to our Embedded Linux kernel and driver development course have also started contributing to the Linux kernel sources during the course itself. Here are the patches which have been merged so far:

During our git lab, instead of asking people to make dummy code changes, we ask them to make real improvements to the Linux sources, and send them for real to the right maintainers and mailing lists. This way, people get a better understanding of how they can interact with the Linux kernel developers to merge their changes and contributions.

See our slides and practical lab instructions for our git lectures and lab.

Blog posts

Bootlin has published several blog posts:

You can follow Bootlin’snews by reading our blog and by following our quick news on Twitter.

By the way, the right column of the Bootlin blog now lists the most popular posts and pages. This can help you to find useful content that you may have missed.

Bootlin remains available to help you in your embedded Linux projects, either through its development and support services or through its training sessions. Do not hesitate to contact us!

Gregory, Maria, Maxime, Michael and Thomas – Bootlin

Linux kernel engineer job in Nice

Penguin worksBootlin is looking for a embedded Linux and kernel engineer in the area of Nice in France (on the French Riviera). The contract will be home based, but will also involve working at customer locations in the same area, possibly for long periods of time.

A detailed job description is available on our careers page.

For this particular job opening, we absolutely need someone with prior experience with kernel and driver development, and contributions to the official Linux kernel sources will be a strong advantage. This is because a customer of ours is looking for an engineer to develop new drivers and port the Linux kernel to pre-silicon and silicon platforms.

Once we find a candidate with the expected skills and profile, and once the customer agrees to contract this person for this initial project, the engineer will be hired by Bootlin under a permanent contract, and will work on the customer site for at least 6 months.

Once the initial assignment is over, our engineer will continue to work on projects for other Bootlin customers, and will also give embedded Linux and kernel training sessions to customers throughout the world.

Note that this position is open to people who do not speak French, but are ready to settle in the French Riviera and to be hired through a French contract.

If you are interested in this position, see our job description for details about how to apply.

Report on extensive real-time Linux benchmarks on AT91

The real time page I wrote for Atmel was finally released on the Linux4Sam Atmel Wiki. The purpose of this page was to help new comers to use real time features with Atmel CPUs and to present the state of the real time support.

Here are some figures associated to this work:

  • On this page I present the results of more than 300 hours of benchmarks!
  • During the setup and the tuning tests ran for more than 600 hours.
  • Analysis and formatting took a few dozen hours of work.
  • The benchmarks have been run on 3 boards, 3 flavors of Linux (vanilla, PREEMPT-RT patches, Xenomai co-kernel approach), and 2 kinds of tests (timer-based and GPIO-based)