Back from Embedded Linux Conference Europe 2011

As we announced in a previous blog post, a large part of the Bootlin team attended the 2011 edition of the Embedded Linux Conference Europe in Prague last week.

This was the first european edition of the conference to last three days, and this was much appreciated as it gave the opportunity to attend a lot more conferences and to spend more time talking with developers of the community. My colleagues Michael Opdenacker and Maxime Ripard as well as myself really enjoyed this conference. It really allows to connect with members of the community, learn a lot of new things, and bring home a huge motivation to work on various projects. Despite a few marketing-oriented keynotes, the conference has kept its highly-technical profile, which is great.

Prague

We have recorded all the talks of the three tracks of the Embedded Linux Conference Europe (unfortunately, there wasn’t a similar video crew for the LinuxCon Europe conference which was taking place at the same time). Many of those videos should have a much higher audio quality than what we had in the past, since we could capture the audio directly for the conference room sound system. Unfortunately, one of our camcorders generates a loud noise when connected both to the audio system of the conference room and to the power adapter (this noise disappears when the camcorder is on battery). Therefore, not all conferences could be recorded with this improved audio quality. The encoding and upload of those videos has started on Sunday evening, just a few hours after landing in Toulouse when coming back from ELCE. The process is running 24/24 on two machines in parallel, and we therefore hope to be able to provide those videos online by the end of the week, or at worst at the beginning of next week.

Kernel Developer Panel
Kernel Developer Panel. From left to right: Linus Torvalds, Paul McKenney, Alan Cox, Thomas Gleixner and the moderator, Lennart Poettring

As we also announced, I gave two talks at this Embedded Linux Conference Europe event. One on Buildroot, titled Using Buildroot for real projects, which slides are available on the elinux.org site. More than 50 persons attended the conference which seems to indicate that there is interest around Buildroot. I had a few questions but unfortunately had to stop the conference after just 2/3 questions since I had exhausted my time slot. My second conference was titled Qt for non-graphical applications, and the slides are also available on the elinux.org site. About 45-50 persons attended the conference and in this case as well, I had to speak quite fast to make the 40+ slides discussion fit within the time slot allocated for the conference, which gave only the time for a few questions at the end. Generally speaking, these talks have attracted a nice number of attendees compared to many other talks I’ve seen, so it seems that all the preparation work was not done needlessly.

Nicolas Deschene (TI) and Loïc Minier (Linaro)
Nicolas Deschene (TI) and Loïc Minier (Linaro)

If you couldn’t attend ELCE and are waiting for the videos, I’m sure you’ll also be interested by the date and locations of the next editions of the conference :

  • The next Embedded Linux Conference, US edition, will take place on February 14-16 2012 in Redwood City, near San Francisco in California. This is an unusual date for the ELC (which traditionally took place in April), but it allows the conference to match with the Linaro Connect event for the first quarter of 2012.
  • The next Embedded Linux Conference Europe will take place on November 6-9 2012 in Barcelona, Spain. This is a just a ~4h drive from Toulouse, so definitely, several Bootlin people should be there.

Author: Thomas Petazzoni

Thomas Petazzoni is Bootlin's co-owner and CEO. Thomas joined Bootlin in 2008 as a kernel and embedded Linux engineer, became CTO in 2013, and co-owner/CEO in 2021. More details...

3 thoughts on “Back from Embedded Linux Conference Europe 2011”

  1. Hi there,

    I just wanted to thank and congratulate for the job you are doing with embedded Linux. Not only with the valuable documents you are publishing here but also with the possibility of watching the videos you record from embedded linux conferences all over the world. Keep doing the good job.
    I didn´t know that Embedded Linux Conference Europe will take place in Barcelona next year, that’s where I’m from so I hope to attend the conference by then.

    Cheers.

    1. Thanks for your nice comment! It’s definitely great to see that our documents and videos are useful.

      Regarding the next edition of ELCE, the location has been announced during that edition of ELCE, so the information is quite fresh.

  2. By all accounts the event was a success, attracting more than 800 attendees — a number that threatened to overflow the meeting rooms of a few of the more popular sessions. In fact, the far-greater-than-expected turnout already prompted the Linux Foundation (LF) to look for a larger venue for the 2012 conference. The co-location of LKS and ELCE meant that a lot of talks dealt with the kernel itself (file systems, device drivers, kernel module development, etc.) and with embedded development, but there was plenty of other content as well — desktop environments, databases, license questions, and more.

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