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...

Updated Buildroot support for STM32MP1 platforms

Back in December 2021, we had announced the buildroot-external-st project, which is an extension of the Buildroot build system with ready-to-use configurations for the STMicroelectronics STM32MP1 platforms.

More specifically, this project is a BR2_EXTERNAL repository for Buildroot, with a number of defconfigs that allows 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/2022.02 at https://github.com/bootlin/buildroot-external-st. This new version brings the following changes:

  • Updated to work with Buildroot 2022.02, the current LTS version of Buildroot
  • Updated to use the 4.0 “ecosystem” from ST, which means we’re using updated BSP components from ST, namely Linux 5.15, U-Boot 2021.10, TF-A 2.6 and OP-TEE 3.16
  • New defconfigs have been added to support all variants of the STM32MP157 Discovery Kits: STM32MP157A-DK1 and STM32MP157D-DK1, as well as STM32MP157C-DK2 and STM32MP157F-DK2.
  • The minimal defconfigs now use OP-TEE as BL32 instead of the minimal monitor provided by TF-A, called SP-MIN
  • The minimal defconfigs now have mdev enabled, to benefit from automatic kernel module loading
  • The demo defconfigs now have the Dropbear SSH server enabled

The document available on the Github page details how to use this work, but here is a quick start in just a few steps:

  1. Retrieve Buildroot itself, a branch containing a few patches on top of upstream 2022.02 is needed
    $ git clone -b st/2022.02 https://github.com/bootlin/buildroot.git
  2. Retrieve buildroot-external-st
    $ git clone -b st/2022.02 https://github.com/bootlin/buildroot-external-st.git
  3. Go into the Buildroot directory
    $ cd buildroot/
  4. Configure Buildroot, for example here the demo configuration for the STM32MP157F-DK2
    $ make BR2_EXTERNAL=../buildroot-external-st st_stm32mp157f_dk2_demo_defconfig
  5. Run the build
    $ make
  6. Flash the resulting SD card image available at output/images/sdcard.img and boot your board!

If you have any question or issue, feel free to use the Github issue tracker to contact us. Bootlin is an ST Authorized Partner, and can provide engineering and training services around embedded Linux on STM32MP1 platforms.

Linux 5.18 released, Bootlin contributions inside

Linux 5.18 has been released a bit over a week ago. As usual, we recommend the resources provided by LWN.net (part 1 and part 2) and KernelNewbies.org to get an overall view of the major features and improvements of this Linux kernel release.

Bootlin engineers have collectively contributed 80 patches to this Linux kernel release, making us the 28th contributing company according to these statistics.

  • Alexandre Belloni, as the RTC subsystem maintainer, continued to improve the overall subsystem, and migrate drivers to new features and mechanisms introduced in the core RTC subsystem
  • Clément Léger contributed a new RTC driver that allows to use the RTC exposed by the OP-TEE Trusted Execution Environment, as well as a few other fixes
  • Hervé Codina and Luca Ceresoli contributed some fixes: Hervé to the dw-edma dmaengine driver, and Luca to the Rockchip RK3308 pinctrl driver
  • Miquèl Raynal, as the MTD subsystem co-maintainer, contributed the remainder of his work to generalize the support of ECC handling, and allow both parallel and SPI NAND to use either software ECC, on-die ECC, or ECC done by a dedicated controller. Included in this work is a new driver for the Macronix external ECC engine, in drivers/mtd/nand/ecc-mxic.c
  • Miquèl Raynal also made a few contributions to the 802.15.4 part of the networking stack, and we have more contributions in this area coming up.
  • Paul Kocialkowski contributed a small fix to Allwinner Device Tree files, and another attempt at fixing an issue with the display panel detection/probing in the DRM subsystem

Bootlin at Live Embedded Event, 3rd edition

Live Embedded EventTomorrow, on May 18, the third edition of Live Embedded Event will take place. Live Embedded Event is a free and fully online conference, dedicated to embedded topics at large. One can register directly online to receive a link to attend the conference.

Bootlin will be participating to this third edition, with 3 talks from 3 different Bootlin engineers:

  • Michael Opdenacker on LLVM tools for the Linux kernel, at 12:00 UTC+2 in Track 3. Details: Recent versions of Linux can be compiled with LLVM’s Clang C language compiler, in addition to Gcc, at least on today’s most popular CPU architectures. This presentation will show you how. Cross-compiling works differently with Clang: no architecture-specific cross-compiling toolchain is required. We will compare the Clang and Gcc compiled kernels, in terms of size and boot time. More generally, we will discuss the concrete benefits brought by being able to compile the kernel with this alternative compiler, in particular the LLVM specific kernel Makefile targets: clang-tidy and clang-analyzer.
  • Grégory Clement on AMP on Cortex A9 with Linux and OpenAMP, at 15:30 UTC+2 in Track 2. Details: While, usually, the Cortex A9 cores are used in SMP, one could want use one of the core to run an other OS. In this case the system becomes AMP. Typically, it allows running a dedicated real time OS on a core. This presentation will show the step that allow having this support using open sources stacks. First we will see what OpenAMP is, then how the Linux kernel can communicate with external OS using remote proc message, and finally what to adapt in the Linux kernel and OpenAMP in order to support the usage of a Cortex A9. This was experimented on an i.MX6 but the solution presented has the advantage to be easily adapted on any SoC using Cortex A9.
  • Thomas Perrot on PKCS#11 with OP-TEE at 15:00 UTC+2 in Track 2. Details:
    PKCS#11 is a standard API that allows to manage cryptographic tokens, regardless of the platform such as Hardware Security Modules, Trusted Plaform Modules or smart cards. Moreover, modern processors offer a secure area, named Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) that allows the isolation of some operations, datas and devices to guarantee their integrity and confidentiality. OP-TEE is an open source implementation of Trusted Execution Environment that runs in parallel with the operating system, as a companion. In this talk, we will first introduce PKCS#11, then OP-TEE, and finally look at how PKCS#11 operations can be performed through OP-TEE, and what are the benefits. Our presentation will be illustrated with examples based on the NXP i.MX8QXP platform, but should be applicable to other platforms that have OP-TEE support.

Join us at Live Embedded Event, and discover our talks as well as the many other talks from other speakers!

Bootlin at Embedded Recipes and Kernel Recipes 2022, Paris

After 2 editions cancelled due to the pandemic, the famous Embedded Recipes and Kernel Recipes conferences are back: they will take place end of May and beginning of June in Paris!

Bootlin will be present at this event, with several engineers from the team participating:

We look forward to meeting you at this event! If you want to discuss business or career opportunities with Bootlin, do not hesitate to meet Paul, Michael, Kamel or Grégory during Embedded and/or Kernel Recipes!

Bootlin at the Embedded Linux Conference North America 2022

Bootlin CEO Thomas Petazzoni and COO Alexandre Belloni will both be attending the next Embedded Linux Conference North America, on June 21-24 in Austin, Texas.

In addition, both Thomas and Alexandre will be speaking at the event:

  • Thomas Petazzoni will give a talk Buildroot: what’s new?, providing an update on the improvements and new features in the Buildroot build system that have been integrated over the past two years
  • Alexandre Belloni will give a talk Yocto Project Autobuilders and the SWAT Team, during which he will explain what’s happening behind in the scenes in the Yocto Project to review and validate contributions before they are integrated.

Thomas and Alexandre will also naturally be available during the event to discuss business or career opportunities, so do not hesitate to get in touch if you’re interested.

Finally, prior to the event, Thomas Petazzoni will be in the Bay Area on June 13-15, also available for meetings or discussions.

Linux 5.17 released: Bootlin contributions

Linux 5.17 has been released last Sunday. As usual, the best coverage of what is part of this release comes from LWN (part 1 and part 2), as well as KernelNewbies (unresponsive at the time of this writing) or CNX Software (for an ARM/RISC-V/MIPS focused description).

Bootlin contributed just 34 patches to this release, which isn’t a lot by the number of patches, but in fact includes a number of important new features. Also, we have many more contributions being discussed on the mailing lists or in preparation. For this 5.17 release here are the highlights of our contributions:

  • Alexandre Belloni, as the maintainer of the RTC subsystem, contributed one improvement to an RTC driver
  • Clément Léger improved the Microchip Ocelot Ethernet switch driver performance by implementing FDMA support. This allows network packets that are going from the switch to the CPU, or from the CPU to the switch to be received/sent in a much more efficient fashion than before. The Microchip Ocelot Ethernet switch driver was developed and upstreamed several years ago by Bootlin, see our previous blog post.
  • Clément Léger also contributed smaller fixes: a bug fix in the core software node code, and one PHY driver fix.
  • Hervé Codina implemented support for GPIO interrupts on the old ST Spear320 platform.
  • Maxime Chevallier contributed mqprio support to the Marvell Ethernet MAC mvneta driver, which was the topic of a previous blog post
  • Miquèl Raynal contributed a brand new NAND controller driver, for the NAND controller found in the Renesas RZ/N1 SoC. We expect to contribute to many more aspects of the Renesas RZ/N1 Linux kernel support in the next few months.
  • Miquèl Raynal contributed a few Device Tree changes enabling the ADC on the Texas Instruments AM473x platform, after contributing the driver changes a few releases ago.
  • Miquèl Raynal started contributing some improvements to the 802.15.4 Linux kernel stack, and we also have many more changes in the pipe for this Linux kernel subsystem.
  • Thomas Perrot added support for the Sierra EM919X modem to the existing MHI PCI driver.

Here is the full list of our contributions:

Luca Ceresoli joins Bootlin team

Welcome on board!The entire team at Bootlin is extremely happy to welcome Luca Ceresoli, who started working with us on March 1, 2022. Based in Italy, Luca is the first employee of Bootlin based outside of France, and we plan to continue to expand our hiring in a similar way in the future.

Luca brings a vast amount of embedded and embedded Linux expertise to the Bootlin team. Luca has been working on embedded products since 2002, and embedded Linux products since 2008. He has helped design, develop and ship products based on a large number of embedded processors, developing complete BSPs, developing Linux kernel drivers, integrating complete systems using Buildroot or Yocto. Luca has also contributed to the Linux kernel, Buildroot, and several open-source projects, and has spoken several times at FOSDEM, the Embedded Linux Conference, and other events.

Luca’s arrival at Bootlin not only means that we have more capacity to help our customers with their embedded Linux projects, but also that we have more capacity to deliver training courses, and a new ability to deliver some of our training courses in Italian.

Once again, welcome on board Luca!

Bootlin contributions to OP-TEE 3.15 and 3.16

OP-TEE logoLast year, Bootlin started contributing to the OP-TEE project, which is an open source Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) implemented using the Arm TrustZone technology. We published a blog post about our contribution of a generic clock framework to OP-TEE, and also presented a talk OP-TEE: When Linux Loses Control (slides, video).

As part of this work, Bootlin engineer Clément Léger contributed to the OP-TEE project, and many of his contributions have already been merged, and released as part of the 3.15 and 3.16 OP-TEE releases. In this blog post, we present some details of our contributions to OP-TEE so far, and our next steps.

Summary

Since then, we contributed a number of features and improvements to OP-TEE. First, a number of generic, HW-agnostic contributions:

The Microchip SAMA5D2 platform support was also greatly improved with the following improvements:

  • Cleanup of existing SAMA5D2 support
  • Rework of the memory layout
  • Device Tree support
  • Board support for sama5d27-som1-ek1
  • Clock tree support: includes drivers for all the clocks available on sama5d2 SoC
  • TRNG driver
  • Reset and shutdown controller drivers
  • PSCI support for reset and shutdown

Contribution details

We contributed 11 commits to OP-TEE 3.15.0:

We contributed 48 commits to OP-TEE 3.16.0. This level of contribution makes Bootlin engineer Clément Léger the second most active contributor by number of commits for this OP-TEE release.

Next steps

We will continue our effort on sam5d2 support on OP-TEE and as part of this, there will be contributions on several generic subsystems as well as SAMA5D2 support:

  • Watchdog support
    • Generic watchdog API
    • OP-TEE Watchdog service compatible with arm,smc-wdt Linux driver
    • Sama5d2 watchdog driver
  • RTC support
    • Generic RTC API
    • OP-TEE RTC PTA to expose RTC to Linux
    • sama5d2 RTC driver
    • Linux driver for OP-TEE RTC
  • SAMA5D2 suspend support
    • Support forULP0, ULP1, ULP0 Fast and backup modes
    • PSCI support
  • SAMA5D2 interrupt controller support

Do not hesitate to contact us if you need help and support to integrate or deploy OP-TEE on your platform, either Microchip platforms, but also other ARM32 or ARM64 platforms.

Linux kernel drivers and Yocto public online courses now available for US/America time zones

Since the start of the pandemic in March 2020, we have been offering our popular training courses online to our customers, in both public sessions (opened to individual registration) and dedicated sessions (organized on-demand for our customers, at their choice of date/time).

Our public sessions were initially all organized in the afternoon of Europe (14:00 to 18:00 Paris time), but we started in late 2021 proposing our Embedded
Linux system development training course for customers in the US/America, especially on the West Coast. Thanks to the success of this, we have decided to also start offering at times convenient for US/America customers the following courses:

The chosen time is ideal for US/America customers, but also works for participants in Europe who would like to attend our courses outside of their normal working hours.

Of course, we have plenty of other training sessions scheduled, for all our 7 different training courses, covering a wide range of time zones. Check our training page for all the details, and contact us if you have specific needs: a dedicated training course for your company, a session organized at a different date/time, etc.

Linux 5.16 released: Bootlin contributions

Linux 5.16 has been released on January 9. As usual, our recommended reading to learn more about this release is the corresponding Kernelnewbies.org page and the two articles from LWN covering the 5.16 merge window: part 1 and part 2.

As usual, Bootlin contributed a number of patches to this release, with a total of 117 commits, making Bootlin the 22th contributing company according to statistics (Unknown and Hobbyists not counting as companies).

Here are the main highlights of our contributions to 5.16:

  • Alexandre Belloni, as the maintainer of the RTC subsystem, continued to improve the core subsystem and RTC drivers. He added a new user-space interface to RTC to allow getting/settings RTC parameters. It is used to get the features of an RTC from user-space, to get/set the RTC correction or to configure Backup Switch Mode. In addition, Alexandre made various improvements to several RTC drivers, such as adding Backup Switch Mode, and general refactoring.
  • Clément Léger did a small fix in the clock drivers for Microchip ARM platforms, fixing an issue discovered as part of his work porting OP-TEE to Microchip ARM platforms.
  • Hervé Codina made some fixes to the fsmc NAND controller driver, which is used on a number of old platforms from ST. They fix support of certain NAND chips on those platforms. These issues were discovered as part of the development of a Linux BSP for an old ST Spear320 platform.
  • Maxime Chevallier fixed a deadlock in the network stack, that was causing the kernel to stop booting when using a root filesystem over NFS combined with the network interface using a SFP module.
  • Miquèl Raynal contributed many improvements to the max1027 ADC driver in the IIO subsystem, supporting hardware triggers.
  • Miquèl Raynal contributed support for the ADC found on Texas Instruments AM437x platforms. This required significant changes in the MFD driver that is used to support the multiple features of this ADC, as well as improvements in the existing IIO driver for TI ADCs.
  • Paul Kocialkowski contributed a small addition enabling the Rockchip VPU on Rockchip PX30 platforms, and merged the Device Tree bindings for the logiCVC display controller (but not yet the driver itself).

And now, the complete list of commits: