We will also be giving two talks this year:

• My colleague Maxime Ripard will be giving a talk about IIO, a new subsystem for I/O devices. In short, IIO is a new subsystem in the kernel to write drivers for devices like Analog-to-Digital converters. Maxime has worked on a driver inside the IIO subsystem for the internal ADCs of the AT91 processors from Atmel, and will base his talk mostly on the experience developing this driver. This talk will take place on Saturday, 12:00 AM to 1:00 PM in the Lameere room.
• I will be giving a talk on Using Qt for non-graphical applications. It is a talk that has already been given at the Embedded Linux Conference Europe, but the audience of FOSDEM and ELCE being quite different, we have chosen to propose it for FOSDEM as well, and it got accepted. This talk will take place on Sunday, 1:00 PM to 2:00 PM in the Lameere room.

There are also other talks that are worth noting: a SoC power management talk from Jean Pihet who works on OMAP power management support in the Linux kernel, a talk about OpenCores and OpenRISC, a talk about Safe Upgrade of Embedded Systems by Arnout Vandecappelle, who contributes a lot to Buildroot, and also other talks about OpenWRT, Yocto, licensing issues in Android, the EFL libraries, and more.

We will also be carrying our camcorder to video record those talks. We are trying to see with the FOSDEM organization team if it possible to record the audio directly from the room sound systems in order to provide better audio quality in our videos.

If you happen to be at FOSDEM, we’d be very happy to meet you!

In Prague at the last Embedded Linux Conference Europe in October 2011, we had a very interesting meeting that gathered developers from other build systems (OE-lite, OpenBricks and PXTdist), and we published a report of this meeting.

The next Buildroot Developer Day will take place on Friday, 3rd February, just before the FOSDEM conference, in Brussels. This is the first meeting that will gather such a number of Buildroot developers: Peter Korsgaard (Buildroot maintainer), Arnout Vandecapelle (developer from Essensium/Mind, who has been contributing a lot to Buildroot lately), Thomas De Schampheleire (also a big contributor in the last year or so), Luca Ceresoli, Yann E. Morin (developer of Crosstool-NG), my colleague Maxime Ripard (who contributed package enhancements and improvements of the package infrastructure) and myself.

This meeting is open to all Buildroot developers and users, and will take place in a location easily accessible in the center of Brussels. Do not hesitate to contact me at if you want to take part to this meeting.

In agreement with the speakers, these videos are released under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 license.

Here are the videos that we have (unfortunately, the FOSDEM team doesn’t collect and publish the slides from the speakers) :

• Enlightenment Foundation Libraries – for developing shiny, fast, and light applications on embedded targets, Cedric Bail, Leandro A.F. Pereira
  video (195M)
• Cold boot attacks on RAM readout, Carl-Daniel Hailfinger
  video (105M)
• Really fast x86 boot, Rudolf Marek
  video (100 M)
• Linaro, Loïc Minier
  video (255M)
• MeeGo: A solid platform for hackable mobile devices, Carsten Munk
  video (200M)
• DaVinci dm365 for home automation, Raffaele Recalcati
  video (211M)
• Booting and upgrading a flashless system, Ulf Samuelsson
  video (205M)
• Advanced Experiments with XMOS Multicore Embedded Hardware, Christophe Scholliers
  video (206M)
• Qt tales from the embedded trenches, Igor Trindade Oliveira, Adenilson Cavalcanti, Bruno de Oliveira Abinader
  video (310M)
• Creating secure web based user interfaces for Embedded Devices, Arnout Vandecappelle
  video (180M)
• Flukso – Community Metering, Bart Van Der Meerssche
  video (192M)
• Arduino/AVR: interactive development on the controller with amforth, Erich Wälde
  video (246M)
• Introduction to OpenBricks, an Embedded Linux Framework, Benjamin Zores
  video (239M)

Peter Korsgaard presenting Buildroot in the Cross build systems workshop at FOSDEM 2010

Like every year, the Free and Open Source Developer European Meeting took place early February in Brussels, and Thomas Petazzoni, from Free Electrons, attended and recorded a few talks from the embedded session. However, contrary to previous years, I haven’t been able to record all talks from the embedded session, since I attended talks from other sessions which were already being recorded by others.

• Openintents: Android intents mechanism, by Friedger Müffke
  video (31 minutes, 150M)
• Embedded software development best practices, by Gian-Carlo Pascutto
  video (42 minutes, 236M)
  note: the video introduction slide says that the speaker is Adrien Ampelas, as it was announced on the FOSDEM website. However, it’s really Gian-Carlo Pascutto who gave this very interesting talk. We apologize for the mistake.
• LiMo Platform and Mobile Linux, by Andrew Savory
  video (33 minutes, 132M)

Gian-Carlo Pascutto presenting Embedded software development best practices at FOSDEM 2010

• Cross Build Systems: Present & Future, by Yann E. Morin, Robert Schwebel, Peter Korsgaard, Florian Fainelli, etc.
  video (42 minutes, 226M)
• ARM and DSP talking to each other in OMAP3: the dspbridge, by Víctor Manuel Jáquez Leal
  video (27 minutes, 75M)

We also attended talks from the X.org and Coreboot developer roooms : videos for the X.org developer room can be found at http://video.fosdem.org/2010/devrooms/xorg/ and videos for the Coreboot developer room can be found at http://video.fosdem.org/2010/devrooms/coreboot/.

Here are the available videos, with my personal comments. Of course, except the talk about CMake, all of them come from the embedded devroom. Thanks to the speakers for sharing their knowledge and presenting their projects !

• Wt, a C++ web toolkit, for rich web interfaces to embedded systems, by Pieter Libin (Noesis Solutions)
  Video (44 minutes, 124M)
  Presentation of a Web application generator, which generates a Web application including a web server from a C++ description. The C++ design is based on many ideas coming from Qt, which eases the creation of the graphical application. Certainly a very interesting tool for embedded systems.
• Hacking with modular hardware: the BUG, by Ken Gilmer (Bug Labs)
  Video (43 minutes, 129M)
  The BUG is a set of hardware modules that can be combined together. A base module contains the CPU, memory and other basic components, while additional modules can provide GPS, Wifi, webcam, I/O lines and many others. Of course, it comes with a completely free software SDK. Can be an interesting starting point for prototyping or hobbyist embedded hacking, even though the hardware is quite expensive.
• Building Embedded Linux Systems with PTXdist, by Robert Schwebel (Pengutronix)
  Video (68 minutes, 151M)
  A very good presentation on why system building tools are needed for Embedded Linux systems (cross-compiling issues, etc.), and how PTXdist fits this need. Even though I’m personally quite fan of Buildroot, PTXdist’s competitor, the presentation was very interesting.
• Development on the OpenMoko with hackable:1, by Pierre Pronchery (Bearstech)
  Video (55 minutes, 189M)
  A hands-on lab on the OpenMoko, which unfortunately was too short to be really interesting, and restricted to only the 10-12 people at the front of the room. Interesting for the people who did it, probably not so interesting to watch afterwards.
• Development and Certification of Linux-Based Fire Safety & Security Systems, by Baurzhan Ismagulov (Siemens)
  Video (47 minutes, 124M)
  The topic of the talk was really appealing, because the use of free software in environments where human life is in danger has always caused many debates and discussions. Unfortunately, the talk completely misses the point : the speaker spent the whole talk discussing Germany-specific rules and laws for the certification of fire safety and security systems, almost without saying a word on how Linux can match these rules.
• Maemo on BeagleBoard, by Juha Kallionen (Nokia)
  Video (20 minutes, 51M)
  Good talk, but not a lot of content, outside of « Hey, we run Maemo on BeagleBoard, try it !». A kind of announcement talk, I would say.
• Advanced power management for OMAP3, by Peter De Schrijver (Nokia)
  Video (49 minutes, 169M)
  A very interesting, in-depth, technical talk about the power management features of the OMAP3 CPU and how these features can be used by the Linux kernel.
• Emdebian 1.0 release – small and super small Debian, by Neil Williams (Debian)
  Video (86 minutes, 257M)
  Again, another interesting talk about the status of Emdebian, which has just reached 1.0. Neil described both Emdebian Crush and Emdebian Grip, that are two different approaches for making Debian more suitable for embedded systems. Very good progress has been made, and Emdebian is certainly something that should now be considered as a distribution for embedded systems.
• CMake – what can it do for your project, by Alexander Neundorf
  Video (45 minutes, 167M)
  A general introduction to CMake, with lots of examples and demonstrations. Very nice for those who never had the opportunity to look at CMake.

See our conference videos page for more videos.

Of course, I’ll be particularly interested by the Embedded Devroom, and will record videos of the talks that will be posted on Free Electrons website after the conference, as usual.

If you happen to come to FOSDEM, I’ll be happy to meet you!