conference – Page 4

Seminar “Porting Linux on an ARM board”, materials available

On December 10th 2015, Bootlin engineer Alexandre Belloni gave a half-day seminar on the topic of Porting Linux on an ARM board in Toulouse, France. This seminar covers topics like porting the bootloader, understanding the concept of the Device Tree, writing Linux device drivers and more. With ~50 persons from various companies attending and lots of questions from the audience, this first edition has been very successful, which shows an increasing interest for using Linux on ARM platforms in the industry.

We are now publishing the 220 slides materials from this seminar, available in PDF format. Like all our training materials, this material is published under the Creative Commons BY-SA 3.0 license, which allows everyone to re-use it for free, provided the derivative works are released under the same license. We indeed re-used quite extensively parts of our existing training materials for this half-day seminar.

We plan to give this half-day seminar in other locations in France in 2016. Contact us if you are interested in organizing a similar seminar in your area (we are happy to travel!).

Bootlin at FOSDEM and the Buildroot Developers Meeting

The FOSDEM conference will take place on January 30-31 in Brussels, Belgium. Like every year, there are lots of interesting talks for embedded developers, starting from the Embedded, Mobile and Automotive Devroom, but also the Hardware track, the Graphics track. Some talks of the IoT and Security devrooms may also be interesting to embedded developers.

Thomas Petazzoni, embedded Linux engineer and CTO at Bootlin, will be present during the FOSDEM conference. Thomas will also participate to the Buildroot Developers Meeting that will take place on February 1-2 in Brussels, hosted by Google.

Bootlin at the Linux Kernel Summit 2015

The Linux Kernel Summit is, as Wikipedia says, an annual gathering of the top Linux kernel developers, and is an invitation-only event.

In 2012 and 2013, several Bootlin engineers have been invited and participated to a sub-event of the Linux Kernel Summit, the “ARM mini-kernel summit”, which was more specifically focused on ARM related developments in the kernel. Gregory Clement and Thomas Petazzoni went to the event in 2012 in San Diego (United States) and in 2013, Maxime Ripard, Gregory Clement, Alexandre Belloni and Thomas Petazzoni participated to the ARM mini-kernel summit in Edinburgh (UK).

This year, Thomas Petazzoni has been invited to the Linux Kernel Summit, which will take place late October in Seoul (South Korea). We’re happy to see that our continuous contributions to the Linux Kernel are recognized and allow us to participate to such an invitation-only event. For us, participating to the Linux Kernel Summit is an excellent way of keeping up-to-date with the latest Linux kernel developments, and also where needed, give our feedback from our experience working in the embedded industry with several SoC, board and system vendors.

Bootlin talks at the Embedded Linux Conference Europe

The Embedded Linux Conference Europe 2015 will take place on October 5-7 in Dublin, Ireland. As usual, the entire Bootlin engineering team will participate to the event, as we believe it is one of the great way for our engineers to remain up-to-date with the latest embedded Linux developments and connect with other embedded Linux and kernel developers.

The conference schedule has been announced recently, and a number of talks given by Bootlin engineers have been accepted:

Thomas Petazzoni will be teaching a 2 hours long Buildroot tutorial. If you want to get started with Buildroot, definitely a good opportunity! It will take place on Tuesday October 6 from 2 PM to 3:50 PM.
For the first time, a Bootlin engineer will be giving a keynote at the Embedded Linux Conference: Thomas will be talking about Linux Kernel SoC Support Mainlining Tips (By a Bunch of Other French People) also on Tuesday October 6, at 5:50 PM
Alexandre Belloni will be giving a talk Supporting Multi-Function Devices in the Linux Kernel: A Tour of the mfd, regmap and syscon APIs on Wednesday OCtober 7 at 10:30 AM.
Finally, Grégory Clément will be giving a talk about Kernel Maintainership: An Oral Tradition, giving some feedback from his experience as a co-maintainer of the mach-mvebu ARM platform.

We submitted other talks that got rejected, probably since both of them had already been given at the Embedded Linux Conference in California: Maxime Ripard’s talk on dmaengine and Boris Brezillon’s talk on supporting MLC NAND (which we regret since Boris is currently actively working on this topic, so we are expecting to have some useful results by the time of ELCE, compared to his ELC talk which was mostly a presentation of the issues and some proposals to address them). Interested readers can anyway watch those talks and/or read the slides.

In addition to the Embedded Linux Conference Europe itself:

Thomas Petazzoni will participate to the Buildroot developers meeting on October 3/4, right before the conference.
Alexandre Belloni will participate to the OEDEM, the 2015 OpenEmbedded Developer’s European Meeting, taking place on October 9 after the conference.

ELC 2015 videos available

The videos from the last Embedded Linux Conference that took place late March in San Jose, California, are now available on Youtube! This represents a lot of interesting and useful content about embedded Linux topics.

You’ll find below the videos of the three talks given by Bootlin engineers at this Embedded Linux Conference.

An Overview of the kernel DMAEngine subsystem, Maxime Ripard

MLC/TLC NAND Support: Challenges for MTD/NAND Subsystem, Boris Brezillon

The Device Tree as a Stable ABI: A Fairy Tale?, Thomas Petazzoni

Embedded Linux Conference schedule announced, several talks from Bootlin

The schedule for the upcoming Embedded Linux Conference, which takes place on March 23-25 in San Jose, has been announced and is available publicly at http://elcabs2015.sched.org/, together with the Android Builders Summit schedule. As usual, there are lots of talks that look very interesting, so we can expect a very useful conference once again.

This time around, there will be three talks given by Bootlin engineers:

Maxime Ripard will give an Overview of the Kernel DMAEngine Subsystem, to which he made some contributions recently, especially the writing of a documentation for it.
Boris Brezillon will talk about MLC/TLC NAND Support: (New?) Challenges for the MTD/NAND Subsystem. Boris is Bootlin MTD and NAND expert. He has recently contributed to the official Linux kernel a driver for the NAND controller available in Allwinner processors, and made some improvements to the NAND controller driver for Freescale i.MX28 processors.
Thomas Petazzoni will talk about The Device Tree as a Stable ABI: A Fairy Tale?, a thought on whether giving the Device Tree the position of a stable ABI is a realistic and useful thing.

So, book your tickets, and join us for the Embedded Linux Conference at the end of March!

Bootlin at FOSDEM 2015

For many open-source developers based in Europe, the FOSDEM is probably the most useful, interesting and exciting conference. Once again this year, several Bootlin engineers will attend the conference:

Maxime Ripard, mainly involved in Allwinner related kernel development, as well as more recently OpenWRT support for Marvell platforms
Antoine Ténart, involved in Marvell Berlin related kernel development, and one of the developers of our Yocto Project and OpenEmbedded training course
Alexandre Belloni, involved in Atmel processors related kernel development, and also one of our Yocto expert.
Thomas Petazzoni, involved in Marvell EBU processors related kernel development, and doing a lot of Buildroot contributions.

If you are attending, and want to know more about Bootlin, or discuss career or project opportunities, do not hesitate to contact us prior to the conference. Many of us will probably attend a significant number of talks from the Embedded track, so it should be easy to find us.

Last but not least, Alexandre Belloni will be giving a talk about Starting with the Yocto Project, which will take place on Sunday, at 3 PM in room Lameere.

Finally, Thomas Petazzoni has organized and will participate to the Buildroot Developers Meeting organized right after FOSDEM, and sponsored by Google and Mind.

Call for participation for the FOSDEM Embedded developer room

The FOSDEM is by far the largest and most vibrant open-source event in Europe. With 5000+ participants, 400+ talks in just two days, a completely free entrance with no registration required, and many topics covered, it has become over the years a major meeting event of open-source developers.

The 2015 edition will take on January 31 and February 1st in Brussels. Like most years, a specific track dedicated to embedded systems is on the schedule, called the “Embedded Developer Room”. A call for participation has been published, and proposals are expected by December, 1st.

It is worth mentioning that the scope of the FOSDEM Embedded Developer Room goes much beyond Embedded Linux: it covers all types of embedded systems, including micro-controller based development, fun hacking or do-it-yourself projects, and much more. Looking at last year’s schedule of the Embedded Devroom is a good way of getting a feeling of the topics that are covered.

Also, FOSDEM has many other tracks that can be interesting to embedded Linux developers: last year there was a track about Tracing and debugging, a track about Memory and Storage, a track about Hardware, a developer room about Graphics, etc.

So, save the date, and join FOSDEM 2015 in Brussels!

Videos of XDC2014 and Kernel Recipes 2014

Recently, two interesting conferences took place in France: the X.org developer conference (in Bordeaux, October 8th-10th) and the Kernel Recipes conference (in Paris, September 25th-26th).

Both conferences have now published videos and slides of the different talks:

for the XDC 2014 conference, they are available in the program page
for the Kernel Recipes conference, they are available from the schedule page

It also means that the video of the talk given by Bootlin engineer Maxime Ripard about the support for Allwinner processors in the kernel is now available: video, slides.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJmZkzq651Q

Call for participation for the Embedded Linux Conference 2015

The Embedded Linux Conference Europe is just over that it’s already time to think about the Embedded Linux Conference 2015, which will take place on March 23-25 in San Jose, California.

The call for participation has been published recently, and interested speakers are invited to submit their proposals before January, 9th 2015. The notifications of whether your talk is accepted or not will be sent on January, 16th and the final schedule is planned to be published on January, 23th.

At Bootlin, we really would like to encourage developers who are working on interesting embedded Linux related projects to submit a talk about what they are doing: talking about a specific open-source project, feedback on some experience doing an embedded Linux based product, etc. The scope of topics covered by the Embedded Linux Conference is fairly broad, so do not hesitate to submit a proposal. Giving a talk at this conference is really a great way of getting feedback about what you’re doing, raising awareness about a particular project or issue, and generally meeting other developers interested in similar topics.

It is worth mentioning that for those people whose talk is accepted, the entrance ticket is free. For hobbyists working on their own on open-source projects, the Linux Foundation also has the possibility of funding travel to the conference.