Back from the Embededded Linux Conference: selection of talks #1

As we wrote in a previous blog post, 11 engineers from Bootlin attended the Embedded Linux Conference in Seattle in April. We have a tradition after such an event to share with you a selection of talks that we have found useful. In order to achieve this, we ask each of our engineers who participated to the conference to pick one talk they would like to highlight, and write a short summary/feedback about the talk. In this first installment of this series of blog posts, we’ll share our selection of 4 first talks.

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Linux 6.9 released, Bootlin contributions inside!

Linux 6.9 was released last Sunday, and as usual we refer our readers to the excellent LWN.net coverage of the Linux 6.9 merge window (part 1 and part 2) to get a good overall picture of the improvements and new features brought by this release.

On our side, we contributed a total of 119 commits authored by Bootlin engineers, but we also merged a total of 95 patches from other contributors, as several Bootlin engineers as also maintainers of various drivers/subsystems in the Linux kernel.

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Bootlin engineer Louis Chauvet at Linux Display hackfest

2024 Display Next HackfestFrom May 14 to May 16, Igalia is organizing the 2024 Display Next Hackfest, an event where talented developers will gather to explore the latest technologies and trends in the Linux Display Stack.

As explained on the event website:

It has an unconference format where participants propose topics for presenting, roadmapping, discussing and examining together. It aims to unblock bottlenecks, design solutions, raise pitfalls and accommodate the needs of each layer of the display stack. Participants should feel free to propose any topic which interests them. Some topics from the previous edition include: HDR and color management, frame timing and variable refresh rate (VRR), atomic flips, testing and CI, etc.

Bootlin engineer Louis Chauvet, who has started contributing to the Linux kernel VKMS driver, and is starting to work on IGT and the latest version of the Chamelium CI testing hardware, will participate to this hackfest, together with many developers from Igalia, Redhat, Intel, Google, RaspberryPi, AMD, ARM, Collabora and more. This will allow us to discuss current developments and topics, and meet the relevant developers of the Linux graphics/display community.

Yocto 5.0 Scarthgap released, Bootlin contributions inside

Yocto Project SummitThe latest release of the Yocto Project, version 5.0, code named Scarthgap has been published a few days ago. The release notes provide the best summary of what’s new in this release. Being a Long Term Support (LTS) release, it will be maintained during 4 years with bug fixes and security updates, which makes this release particularly important for a large number of embedded Linux projects and products.

At Bootlin, we are using Yocto for a large fraction of the Linux Board Support Packages that we develop, maintain and upgrade for our customers. But we’re not only users of Yocto: we’re also contributors and maintainers. In this blog post, we’ll highlight our contributions to this release, which take various forms.

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Our talks at Embedded Open Source Summit 2024

The Embedded Open Source Summit 2024 took place on Apr 16-18 in Seattle, with many talks on a wide range of embedded Linux topics. 11 engineers from Bootlin participated to this conference and four of us gave talks, for which we are happy to publish the slides and videos in this blog post.

Bootlin team at Embedded Open Source Summit 2024
Bootlin team at Embedded Open Source Summit 2024

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Getting started with Zephyr

Zephyr is an open-source real-time operating system, used mainly in embedded devices, with a focus on small systems, thanks to its very small footprint.

This post is a quick startup guide to show how to run Zephyr on two different boards, from two different vendors:

In this post, we will show how to install all the tools needed to build and run Zephyr, then run some samples, until we get access to the Zephyr shell over USB.

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Welcome to Richard Genoud!

Welcome on board!We are very happy to welcome in our team Richard Genoud, who joined us at the beginning of April, and already participated to his first conference with Bootlin by attending the Embedded Linux Conference this week.

Richard started using Linux in 1998, and his journey working with embedded Linux started in 2001, so Richard brings to our team over 20 years of experience working on embedded Linux systems. In his previous positions, Richard has worked on all aspects of embedded Linux, from porting and improving bootloaders, porting the Linux kernel to various hardware platforms, using build systems such as Buildroot, developing user-space applications. Richard helped ship and maintain products in the field for many years.

Richard is also an open-source contributor: he contributed support for the NAND ECC controller on Microchip platforms, contributed improvements to the UART driver for Microchip platforms, for which he is the official Linux kernel maintainer, but Richard also made contributions to U-Boot, dnsmasq, msmtp, Buildroot, connman, Busybox or mtd-utils.

For more details, see Richard’s profile on our site.

Linux 6.8 released, Bootlin contributions

The Linux 6.8 kernel has been released on March 10 by Linus Torvalds. As usual, we definitely recommend the coverage by LWN of the merge window for this release cycle to get a good grasp on the most important new features: first half and second half. Some work from Bootlin is briefly mentioned in those articles, such as the support for Lantiq PEF2256 (FALC56) framers, Lantiq PEF2256 (FALC56) pin controllers, and Techwell TW9900 video decoders.

With a total of 135 commits contributed by Bootlin engineers during this release cycle, we have been much more active than for the previous 6.7 release. This allows Bootlin to show in the recently published Development statistics for 6.8, as the 17th contributing company by number of commits, and 13th contributing company by number of changed lines.

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ext2 filesystem driver now marked as deprecated

31 years after the start of its career in 1993, it’s time for ext2 to retire. Here we are talking about the driver for this filesystem, not exactly the filesystem itself. Continue reading to understand the subtle difference.

It’s the ext2 filesystem driver that will be marked as deprecated in the upcoming 6.9 Linux kernel. The main issue is that even if the filesystem is created with 256 byte inodes (mkfs.ext2 -I 256), the filesystem driver will stick to 32 bit dates. Because of this, the driver does not support inode timestamps beyond 03:14:07 UTC on 19 January 2038.

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Updated Buildroot support for STM32MP1 platforms, ST BSP v5.0

We continue the support of the buildroot-external-st project as presented in our first announce, which is an extension of the Buildroot build system with ready-to-use configurations for the STMicroelectronics STM32MP1 platforms. We already published several updates of this support, with the LTS 2022.02 and version 4.0 of ST BSP version update and the LTS 2022.02.7 and version 4.1 of ST BSP version update.

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/2023.02.10 at https://github.com/bootlin/buildroot-external-st. This new version brings a number of additional features:

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