Tag: linux

Linux 5.4 released, Bootlin contributions inside

LinuxThis time around, we’re quite late to the party, but Linux 5.4 was indeed released a number of weeks ago, and once again, Bootlin contributed a number of patches to this Linux kernel release. As usual, the most useful source of information to learn about the major features brought by Linux 5.4 are the LWN articles (part 1, part 2) and the KernelNewbies Wiki.

With a total of 143 patches contributed to this release, Bootlin is the 17th contributing company by number of commits acccording to the Linux Kernel Patch Statistic.

Here are the highlights of our contributions:

  • Antoine Ténart contributed support for IEEE 1588 Precision Time Protocol (PTP) to the Microsemi Ocelot Ethernet switch driver, which Bootlin developed and upstreamed in 2018 (see our blog post)
  • In the MTD subsystem, a number of contributions to the spi-nor support, written originally by Boris Brezillon, made their way upstream.
  • In the support of Microchip (formerly Atmel) platforms, Kamel Bouhara, who joined Bootlin in September 2019, sees his first kernel contribution merged as a Bootlin engineer: dropping useless support for platform_data from the Atmel PWM driver.
  • In the support of Allwinner platforms
    • Maxime Ripard contributed a brand new driver for the Allwinner A10 camera interface driver, a driver that we started at Bootlin for the CHIP platform back in the days, and that we finished more recently.
    • Maxime Ripard contributed a significant number of improvements to the sun4i-i2s audio interface driver, especially TDM support, which was developed as part of a customer project at Bootlin.
    • Maxime Ripard also contributed numerous enhancements to Allwinner platform Device Tree files, especially in the area of using YAML schemas.
  • In the support for Marvell platforms
    • Grégory Clement added cpufreq support to the Marvell Armada 7K/8K platform by extending some of its clock drivers.
    • Miquèl Raynal contributed improvements to the Marvell CP110 COMPHY driver, which is used to control SERDES lanes on the Marvell Armada 7K/8K platforms, and added the description of the SERDES lanes used by various IP blocks in those processors.
  • Alexandre Belloni, as the RTC subsystem maintainer, did a number of fixes and improvements in several RTC drivers (mainly pcf2123 and pcf8563)
  • For the LPC3250 platform, for which Bootlin delivered a modern BSP to a customer last year, Alexandre Belloni fixed an issue in the lpc_eth network driver, which was preventing the system from booting if the network had been initialized by the bootloader.

In addition to being contributors, some Bootlin engineers are also maintainers of various parts of the Linux kernel, and as such review and merge code from other contributors:

  • As the RTC subsystem maintainer and Microchip platform co-maintainer, Alexandre Belloni merged 47 patches from other contributors
  • As the MTD subsystem co-maintainer, Miquèl Raynal merged 33 patches from other contributors
  • As the Marvell platform co-maintainer, Grégory Clement merged 11 patches from other contributors

Here are the details of all our contributions to Linux 5.4:

Linux 5.3 released, Bootlin contributions inside

Penguin from Mylène Josserand
Drawing from Mylène Josserand, based on a picture from Samuel Blanc (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Manchot_royal_-_King_Penguin.jpg)
The 5.3 version of the Linux kernel was released recently. As usual, we recommend our readers to look at the LWN coverage for this release merge window: part 1 and part 2. Together with the KernelNewbies page, these articles give a very nice overview of the major features and improvements of this new release.

For this release, Bootlin is the 16th contributing company by number of commits, with 143 patches merged in the Linux kernel. Our significant contributions this time were:

  • Support for Allwinner processors
    • The support for H264 video decoding, from Maxime Ripard, was finally merged in the cedrus VPU driver that we have developed thanks to the funding of our Kickstarter campaign last year. The last missing piece is H265 video decoding, which we have submitted several times and we hope to get merged soon.
  • Support for Marvell platforms
    • Antoine Ténart contributed a number of bug fixes and updates to the inside-secure crypto driver, which is used for the cryptographic hardware accelerator found on Marvell Armada 3700 and Marvell Armada 7K/8K.
    • Maxime Chevallier contributed many improvements to the mvpp2 network driver, used on the Marvell Armada 375 and Armada 7K/8K systems. His patches improve the traffic classification offloading capabilities, a topic he will present in detail at the next Embedded Linux Conference Europe.
    • Miquèl Raynal added PHY support for the PCIe Armada 8K driver, and adjusted a few things in the Marvell Armada 7K/8K Device Tree files.
  • Support for Microchip MPU (formerly Atmel) platforms
    • Alexandre Belloni converted the remaining SoCs (SAM9x5, SAM9G45, SAM9RL and SAMA5D3) to the new slow clock controller bindings.
    • Antoine Ténart contributed a few small improvements to the macb driver, for the Cadence network controller used on Microchip platforms.
  • Maxime Ripard contributed numerous YAML Device Tree schemas, to help the effort of converting many Device Tree bindings to the new YAML format, which can be used to validate Device Trees against their bindings.
  • Maxime Ripard contributed numerous patches to the core DRM subsystem: a complete rewrite of the command line parser that parses the DRM-related options of the kernel command line, and support for new options. This was done as part of an effort to make sure the upstream Linux kernel can support all the possible options that the downstream RaspberryPi kernel+firmware combination provides to configure the display.
  • Paul Kocialkowski contributed a few improvements to the RaspberryPi vc4 display controller driver, related to buffer allocation.

Also, several of Bootlin engineers are also kernel maintainers, so they review and merge patches from other contributors:

  • Miquèl Raynal as the NAND subsystem maintainer and MTD subsystem co-maintainer, reviewed and merged 51 patches from other contributors
  • Maxime Ripard as the Allwinner platform co-maintainer, reviewed and merged 38 patches from other contributors
  • Alexandre Belloni as the RTC maintainer and Microchip platform co-maintainer, reviewed and merged 36 patches from other contributors
  • Grégory Clement as the Marvell EBU platform co-maintainer, reviewed and merged 9 patches from other contributors

Here is the details of all our contributions, patch by patch:

Linux 5.0 released, Bootlin contributions

Linux 5.0 was released two weeks ago by Linus Torvalds, and as it is now always the case, Bootlin has contributed a number of patches to this release. For an overview of the new features and improvements brought by Linux 5.0, we as usual recommend to read the LWN articles: merge window summary part 1, merge window summary part 2. The KernelNewbies.org page about this kernel release is also nicely documented.

In terms of contribution to Linux 5.0, according to the LWN statistics, Bootlin is the 12th contributing company by number of commits (261 commits), and 8th contributing company by number of changed lines. Bootlin engineer Maxime Ripard is 11th contributing developer by number of commits, and former Bootlin engineer Boris Brezillon is 12th contributing developer by number of commits, and 8th by number of changed lines. In this release, we are also happy to see numerous contributions from Paul Kocialkoswki who joined Bootlin in November 2018 after his internship working on the Linux kernel support for the Allwinner VPU.

Here are the main highlights of our contributions to Linux 5.0:

  • After 1.5 years of work, the I3C subsystem was finally merged and visible in drivers/i3c in your favorite kernel tree! We are proud to have pioneered the Linux kernel support for this new MIPI standard, which aims at providing an alternate solution to I2C and SPI, with interesting new features (higher speed, device discovery and enumeration, in-band interrupts, and more). See also our initial blog post about I3C, and our blog post about I3C being upstream.
  • In the RTC subsystem, Bootlin engineer and RTC kernel maintainer Alexandre Belloni reworked the way nvmem devices are handled, allowing for multiple nvmem devices to be registered for a single RTC as some have both battery-backed RAM and an on-chip EEPROM. devm_rtc_device_register() has been reimplemented to use the new registration path and is now deprecated. Its counterpart, devm_rtc_device_unregister() has been removed.
  • In the MTD subsystem
    • Boris Brezillon contributed a number of patches to the support for raw NAND mainly related to refactoring the subsystem. For example, some of the patches make the ->select_chip() of nand_chip a legacy hook, and removes its implementation from a number of drivers. All those patches do not bring any new feature per-se, but are part of a larger effort to clean up and modernize the MTD subsystem.
    • Boris Brezillon also contributed to the SPI NOR support a mechanism to fixup the information provided in the BFPT table of SPI NOR flashes. This is used to ensure that some Macronix SPI NOR flashes are properly recognized as supporting 4-byte opcodes.
  • Maxime Ripard contributed a number of improvements to the OV5640 camera sensor driver, especially to remove the hardcoded initialization sequence by a much more flexible initialization code, which allowed to support 60fps and more resolutions.
  • Maxime Ripard extended the PHY subsystem with two new functions, phy_configure() and phy_validate(), which allow to pass configuration details to PHY drivers. This was then used by Maxime to implement MIPI D-PHY drivers, which need a significant number of configuration parameters. See this commit and this commit for details. MIPI D-PHY are typically used in video display or capture HW pipelines.
  • As part of our work on RaspberryPi display support, Boris Brezillon contributed a number of fixs to the VC4 display controller driver.
  • For the support of Microchip MPU (Atmel) platforms, Alexandre Belloni migrated the AT91SAM9260, AT91SAM9261, AT91SAM9263, AT91SAM9RL, AT91SAM9x5, SAMA5D2 and SAMA5D4 platforms to the new clock Device Tree binding that he introduced in Linux 4.20.
  • For the support of Microchip UNG (formerly Microsemi) platforms, Alexandre Belloni added support for the Jaguar2 platform to the pinctrl driver already used for the Ocelot platform.
  • For the support of Allwinnner platforms:
    • Maxime Ripard did a huge amount of Device Tree cleanups and improvements, fixing DTC warnings, but generally making sure those Device Tree files are consistent.
    • Paul Kocialkowski implemented support for YUV planes in the Allwinner display controller driver. This allows to display a video decoded by the VPU directly into a display controller plane, and let the hardware compose it with other display planes, without CPU intervention.
    • Paul Kocialkowski enabled the VPU (for hardware-accelerated video decoding) on the Allwinner H5 and A64. This work was part of our crowdfunding campaign around the Allwinner VPU support.
  • For the support of Marvell platforms
    • Miquèl Raynal added support for suspend/resume to the SATA support on Armada 3720 (the SoC used for the popular EspressoBin platform), as part of a larger effort of bringing full suspend/resume support on Armada 3720
    • Miquèl Raynal implemented support for the thermal overheat interrupt on Armada 7K/8K.

Here is the detailed list of commits we contributed to Linux 5.0:

Free seats in embedded Linux and kernel training sessions (Mar 2019)

Student penguinsAt Bootlin, we owe a lot to the Free Software community, and we’re doing our best to give back as much as we can.

One way of doing that is welcoming community contributors in our public training sessions organized in France. We’ve done that multiple times several years back, and this allowed us to meet very interesting people (who even had very valuable experience and points of view to share with the other course participants), while of course giving them extra knowledge that they can use for further contributions.

Here are the next sessions in which we can offer a free seat:

See our Free training seats page for practical details about how to apply.

Don’t hesitate to apply to this free seat. In past editions, we didn’t have so many people applying, and therefore you have a real chance to get selected!

Allwinner VPU support in mainline Linux end of the year status update

The end of 2018 is approaching, which is the right time to provide an update on where we stand with the Allwinner VPU support in Linux. The promise of our Kickstarter campaign was to deliver all funded stretch goals by the end of 2018. As we’ll explain below, all the goals have been met, and only the upstreaming process is not completely finished for some features.

With the Linux 4.20 release happening just a few days ago, the core of the Cedrus driver and the media Requests API that supports it are finally available through Linus Torvalds’ tree! They provide the required interface for hardware-accelerated MPEG-2 decoding on the A13, A20, A33 and H3 Allwinner SoCs.

Cedrus driver in staging

Discussions regarding the details of the stateless video decoding interface offered by the V4L2 API are still taking place, which explains why our driver was integrated as a staging media driver. It was also decided to hide the associated interface for MPEG-2 decoding from the public kernel headers for now. This way, the interface is not considered stable and can keep evolving as discussions are still taking place. Because the kernel has a policy of never breaking backward compatibility, these interfaces will hardly evolve once they are declared stable, so it is crucial to ensure they are ready when that happens. This is especially true given the level of complexity associated with video decoding and the various pitfalls paving that road.

Status of H264 and H265 decoding support

The code for H264 and H265 decoding is already developed and functional, has already been submitted for upstream inclusion but it hasn’t been merged yet. However, with the decoding interfaces considered unstable for now, it should become easier to bring-in H.264 and H.265 decoding support to mainline. Support for these two codecs in the API and our driver is still under review and we will continue sending new iterations for them, with the suggested changes and fixes as well as adaptations for the still-evolving decoding interface. More specifically, our series need to be updated to the latest proposal for identifying reference frames, which is now based on the timestamps of the buffers.

Platform support: H5, A64 and A10 on the horizon

Regarding the platforms supported by our driver, the patches for H5 and A64 support were accepted since our last update and they will make it to Linux 4.21! We are also looking to send out support for the A10, which was missing from our previous series (but shouldn’t cause any particular trouble).

DRM driver improvements

The adaptations for the DRM driver allowing to display the raw decoded frames from the VPU on older platforms were also finalized, with the first half of the series already queued for 4.21. Subsequent changes in the series are still waiting for more reviews as they affect common parts of the framework.

Conclusion

Overall, we are slowly closing down on this project and hoping to get the remaining pieces of our work integrated in mainline Linux as soon as possible, as there seems to be very few obstacles left in the way.

MIPI I3C support is now in upstream Linux

MIPI I3C specification publishedBack in August 2017, we wrote in a blog post about the first iteration of the Linux kernel subsystem we proposed to support the brand new MIPI I3C bus. Almost a year and half later, there are some really good news:

  • The Linux I3C support now has its own Git repository on kernel.org
  • The Linux I3C community has its mailing list.
  • Besides the first I3C controller driver we wrote for the Cadence I3C Master, Synopsys has contributed a second driver for their I3C master IP: i3c: master: Add driver for Synopsys DesignWare IP. This definitely helped show that there is interest in I3C beyond our contributions, and also helped validate that the subsystem was working fine for a different I3C controller.
  • The Linux I3C tree has been part of linux-next since November 6, 2018: linux-next: Tree for Nov 6.
  • The Linux I3C subsystem has received a Reviewed-by: Arnd Bergmann and later on a Acked-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman, which were two key approvals to move forward with the merging of I3C support.
  • I3C subsystem maintainer Boris Brezillon has therefore sent a pull request to get this subsystem merged in the upcoming 4.21 (or 5.0 ?) Linux kernel: [GIT PULL] i3c: Initial pull request, and this pull request has been merged by Linus Torvalds, so the I3C subsystem is now visible in Linus Git tree: drivers/i3c. The merge commit has been done on December 25, so it arrived as a very nice Christmas present!

It has been a long process, but we are proud and happy to have pioneered the support for I3C in the Linux kernel, from the design of the subsystem based on the I3C specifications all the way to its merging in the upstream Linux kernel and the creation of a small (but hopefully growing) community of developers around it.

Linux 4.19 released, Bootlin contributions

Penguin from Mylène Josserand
Drawing from Mylène Josserand,
based on a picture from Samuel Blanc under CC-BY-SA

With the 4.19 released last week by Greg Kroah-Hartman (and not Linus), it’s time to have a look at our contributions for this release.

As always, LWN.net did an interesting coverage of this release cycle merge window, highlighting the most important changes: the first half of the 4.19 merge window and the rest of the 4.19 merge window. For 4.19 only, Bootlin contributed a total of 295 patches, which puts us at the 10th place in the ranking of most contributing companies according to KPS.

Also according to LWN statistics, Bootlin’s engineer Boris Brezillon is the 16th most active developer in terms of commits for this release with a total of 85.

The main highlights of our contributions are:

Bootlin engineers are not only contributors, but also maintainers of various subsystems in the Linux kernel, which means they are involved in the process of reviewing, discussing and merging patches contributed to those subsystems:

  • Maxime Ripard, as the Allwinner platform co-maintainer, merged 93 patches from other contributors
  • Boris Brezillon, as the MTD/NAND maintainer, merged 38 patches from other contributors
  • Miquèl Raynal, as the NAND co-maintainer, merged 110 patches from other contributors
  • Alexandre Belloni, as the RTC and Microsemi maintainer and Atmel platform co-maintainer, merged 38 patches from other contributors
  • Grégory Clement, as the Marvell EBU co-maintainer, merged 16 patches from other contributors

Here is the commit by commit detail of our contributions to 4.19:

Linux 4.15 released, Bootlin contributions

Penguin from Mylène Josserand
Drawing from Mylène Josserand,
based on a picture from Samuel Blanc under CC-BY-SA

After a month of February busier than usual, with the renaming of our company from Free Electrons to Bootlin, our participation to FOSDEM and the welcoming of Maxime Chevallier, the latest addition to our engineering team, our article on the latest release of the Linux kernel arrives a bit late, more than a month after Linux 4.15 has been released by Linus Torvalds.

As usual, LWN.net did an interesting coverage of this release cycle merge window, highlighting the most important changes: The first half of the 4.15 merge window and The rest of the 4.15 merge window. Due to the now well-known Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities and the resulting effort to try to mitigate them, 4.15 required a -rc9, which happened the last time back in 2011 with the 3.1, Torvalds said.

According to Linux Kernel Patch statistics, Bootlin (now Bootlin) contributed 150 patches to this release, making it the 16th contributing company by number of commits.

The main highlights of our contributions are:

  • In the RTC subsystem, Alexandre Belloni made a number of improvements to various drivers, mainly making them use the nvmem subsystem where appropriate, and use the recently introduced rtc_register_device() API.
  • In the MTD subsystem, both Boris Brezillon and Miquèl Raynal made a number of contributions, mainly fixes.
  • For Marvell platforms
    • Antoine Ténart contributed a few fixes to the inside-secure crypto accelerator driver, used on Marvell Armada 3700 and Armada 7K/8K
    • Antoine Ténart also contributed fixes and improvements to the mvpp2 network driver, used for the Ethernet controller on the Marvell Armada 7K/8K. His improvements include preparation work to support Receive Side Scaling (RSS).
    • Antoine Ténart enabled more networking ports and features in some Armada 7K/8K boards, especially SFP ports on Armada 7040 DB and Armada 7040 DB.
    • Boris Brezillon contributed a few fixes to the Marvell CESA crypto accelerator driver, used on the older Orion, Kirkwood, Armada 370/XP/38x processors. He migrated the driver to use the skcipher interface of the Linux kernel crypto framework.
    • Grégory Clement enabled NAND support on Armada 7K, and contributed a number of fixes around MMC support for some Marvell boards.
    • Thomas Petazzoni contributed a few minor Device Tree enhancements for Marvell platforms: fixing MPP muxing on an older Kirkwood platform, enabling more PCIe ports on Armada 8040 DB, etc.
    • Miquèl Raynal contributed support for more advanced statistics in the mvpp2 network driver.
    • Miquèl Raynal added support for the extended UART for the Marvell Armada 3720 processor, both in the UART driver and in the Device Tree.
  • For the RaspberryPi platform, Boris Brezillon contributed a few fixes to the vc4 display driver, and added support for the new DRM_IOCTL_VC4_GEM_MADVISE ioctl, which can be used to ask the userspace applications to purge inactive buffers when allocations start to fail in the kernel.
  • For Allwinner platforms
    • Mylène Josserand contributed a fix for the Allwinner A83 clock driver, fixing I2C bus clocks.
    • Quentin Schulz contributed a few fixes to the sun4i-gpadc-iio.c driver, which is used for the ADCs on several Allwinner processors.
    • Maxime Ripard made a number of fixes to the sun8i-codec driver, fixing clock issues, left/right channels inversion, etc.
    • Maxime Ripard made a number of improvements to the sun4i DRM display driver.
    • Maxime Ripard improved the support for the A83 processor (described the UART1 controller, the MMC1 controller, added support for display clocks) and added the Device Tree for a new A83 device.
    • Maxime Ripard also did a number of cleanups and misc improvements in a significant number of Device Tree files for Allwinner platforms.
  • Thomas Petazzoni made a few fixes to the sh_eth network driver, used on several Renesas SuperH platform, as part of a recent project Bootlin did on SuperH 4.

Bootlin engineers are not only contributors, but also maintainers of various subsystems in the Linux kernel, which means they are involved in the process of reviewing, discussing and merging patches contributed to those subsystems:

  • Maxime Ripard, as the Allwinner platform co-maintainer, merged 108 patches from other contributors
  • Boris Brezillon, as the MTD/NAND maintainer, merged 34 patches from other contributors
  • Alexandre Belloni, as the RTC maintainer and Atmel platform co-maintainer, merged 50 patches from other contributors
  • Grégory Clement, as the Marvell EBU co-maintainer, merged 24 patches from other contributors

Here is the commit by commit detail of our contributons to 4.15:

Bootlin contributes Linux support for Microsemi MIPS SoC

VSC7513 Block Diagram
Microsemi VSC7513 Block Diagram
Earlier this month, Bootlin engineer Alexandre Belloni posted a patch series (in its second version) adding initial support for Microsemi Ocelot SoCs, the VSC7513 and VSC7514. These SoCs are used for switches, so the biggest part of the chip is a switch fabric, built around a MIPS core and a few basic peripherals. While Bootlin generally works on ARM platforms and has contributed support for numerous ARM processors in the Linux kernel, for this project we are contributing the support for a MIPS processor.

Alexandre’s initial patch series contains the basic support for the SoC:

All in all, this patch series only adds support to boot the platform up to a shell, with interrupts, pin-muxing, GPIOs and UARTs enabled. Additional features will be contributed later, especially support for the switch fabric in the form of a switchdev driver.

We are happy to be working on Microsemi platforms, and to bring the support for yet another hardware platform to the official Linux kernel.

Linux 4.14 released, Bootlin contributions

Penguin from Mylène Josserand
Drawing from Mylène Josserand,
based on a picture from Samuel Blanc under CC-BY-SA
Linux 4.14, which is going to become the next Long Term Supported version, has been released a week ago by Linus Torvalds. As usual, LWN.net did an interesting coverage of this release cycle merge window, highlighting the most important changes: The first half of the 4.14 merge window and The rest of the 4.14 merge window.

According to Linux Kernel Patch statistics, Bootlin contributed 111 patches to this release, making it the 24th contributing company by number of commits: a somewhat lower than usual contribution level from our side. At least, Bootlin cannot be blamed for trying to push more code into 4.14 because of its Long Term Support nature! 🙂

The main highlights of our contributions are:

  • On the RTC subsystem, Alexandre Belloni made as usual a number of fixes and improvements to various drivers, especially the ds1307 driver.
  • On the NAND subsystem, Boris Brezillon did a number of small improvements in various areas.
  • On the support for Marvell platforms
    • Antoine Ténart improved the ppv2 network driver used by the Marvell Armada 7K/8K SoCs: support for 10G speed and TSO support are the main highlights. In order to support 10G speed, Antoine added a driver in drivers/phy/ to configure the common PHYs in the Armada 7K/8K SoCs.
    • Thomas Petazzoni also improved the ppv2 network driver by adding support for TX interrupts and per-CPU RX interrupts.
    • Grégory Clement contributed some patches to enable NAND support on Armada 7K/8K, as well as a number of fixes in different areas (GPIO fix, clock handling fixes, etc.)
    • Miquèl Raynal contributed a fix for the Armada 3700 SPI controller driver.
  • On the support for Allwinner platforms
    • Maxime Ripard contributed the support for a new board, the BananaPI M2-Magic. Maxime also contributed a few fixes to the Allwinner DRM driver, and a few other misc fixes (clock, MMC, RTC, etc.).
    • Quentin Schulz contributed the support for the power button functionality of the AXP221 (PMIC used in several Allwinner platforms)
  • On the support for Atmel platforms, Quentin Schulz improved the clock drivers for this platform to properly support the Audio PLL, which allowed to fix the Atmel audio drivers. He also fixed suspend/resume support in the Atmel MMC driver to support the deep sleep mode of the SAMA5D2 processor.

In addition to making direct contributions, Bootlin is also involved in the Linux kernel development by having a number of its engineers act as Linux kernel maintainers. As part of this effort, Bootlin engineers have reviewed, merged and sent pull requests for a large number of contributions from other developers:

  • Boris Brezillon, as the NAND subsystem maintainer and MTD subsystem co-maintainer, merged 68 patches from other developers.
  • Alexandre Belloni, as the RTC subsystem maintainer and Atmel ARM platform co-maintainer, merged 32 patches from other developers.
  • Grégory Clement, as the Marvell ARM platform co-maintainer, merged 29 patches from other developers.
  • Maxime Ripard, as the Allwinner ARM platform co-maintainer, merged 18 patches from other developers.

This flow of patches from kernel maintainers to other kernel maintainers is also nicely described for the 4.14 release by the Patch flow into the mainline for 4.14 LWN.net article.

The detailed list of our contributions: