Tag: training

Bootlin Embedded Linux course now available on BeaglePlay

BeaglePlayEarlier this year, the BeagleBoard.org foundation announced the availability of a new development board, the BeaglePlay, centered around the Texas Instruments AM625 ARM64 processor. Bootlin has for a long time supported the BeagleBone Black as one of the hardware platforms used in the practical labs of its training courses, and we are happy to announce today that we now have added support for the BeaglePlay to our most popular course, the Embedded Linux system development course.

This means that participants to our Embedded Linux system development course can now choose to perform the practical labs on the BeaglePlay, experiencing a new and modern hardware platform, based on an ARM64 processor. This applies not only to participants choosing to purchase our course, but also to everyone else in the world, as our training materials are all freely available and distributed under an open-source license. The materials are all available on our Embedded Linux system development training course page:

We would like to thank Clément Ramirez who has worked with us on this effort of porting this course to the BeaglePlay platform.

“Bootlin is a leading provider of high-quality, in-depth Linux education. What amazes me is how much they not only support open source with outstanding teaching, but how much they stand behind the principles of open source by sharing their teaching materials and contributing to the open source projects that drive them.” said Jason Kridner, founder of BeagleBoard.org. “BeagleBoard.org shares these principles and that is why I believe BeaglePlay is an excellent choice. BeaglePlay doesn’t just run open source software, the hardware itself is open source with detailed documentation on the board and associated Texas Instruments AM625 system-on-chip, with availability to enable hobbyists and professionals alike from prototype to production. I couldn’t be more excited.”

Bootlin’s Embedded Linux course, like all our training courses, is available in 3 different options:

  • Public on-line sessions, delivered by video-conference, with a per-participant registration, and sessions organized at dates scheduled by Bootlin. See this page for more details, dates and registration process
  • Private on-line sessions, also delivered by video-conference, organized privately for your team, at the date of your choice. See this page for more details
  • Private on-site sessions, where one of our experienced engineers and trainers travels to your location, to teach your team in person. See this page for more details

In both our private on-line sessions and private on-site sessions, our customers are free to chose, among our set of supported platforms, the HW platform they would like to use for the practical labs, and this now includes the BeaglePlay. In our public on-line sessions, the trainer demonstrates the practical labs on one particular platform, but participants are able to reproduce the labs on the platform of their choice among our supported platforms.

With this new development, we look forward to continue our mission of helping the broader engineering community get trained on embedded Linux technology and expand the number of users and contributors to open-source technologies and communities.

New training course: Embedded Linux Audio

Embedded Linux Audio training course
Image from flaticon.com
We are very happy to announce the availability of a new training course in our portfolio: Embedded Linux audio.

Over the past years, Bootlin has helped more and more of its customers with numerous audio aspects on embedded Linux systems: development of Linux kernel drivers for audio components, description of audio hardware in Device Tree, support of unusual audio hardware setups, integration of user-space audio frameworks and servers such as PipeWire, and more. We have seen an interest from our customers and the broader community in getting trained on those topics, so we have built a brand new training course covering the following:

  • Digital Audio Representation
  • Audio hardware
  • Linux kernel ASoC subsystem
  • Linux kernel helpers for audio
  • Audio routing
  • More kernel audio components
  • Audio troubleshooting and debugging
  • User-space configuration for audio hardware
  • User-space configuration for audio controls
  • User-space APIs to play and capture audio
  • PipeWire
  • GStreamer

The detailed agenda of course is available for on-line sessions (4 half-days of 4 hours each) and on-site sessions (2 days). As usual with Bootlin, our training materials will be published for free under an open-source license in the next few weeks.

This course has been developed and is taught by Bootlin expert Alexandre Belloni.

We have a first public on-line session scheduled on September 11-14 2023, with a possible extra session on September 15. Sessions take place from 2 PM to 6 PM UTC+2 on each day. Seats are offered at 619 EUR per participant, with a discount at 519 EUR per participant under conditions. You can book your seat now, beware that only 12 seats are available.

This new training course is the 9th training course we offer in our portfolio, with all courses centered around embedded Linux development. We aim at developing more of those specific courses in the next few years, to continue to help engineers working on embedded Linux grow their skills and expertise.

Embedded Linux and Yocto training courses now available in Italian

Flag of ItalyBuongiorno!

For many years, we have been offering our training courses in both English and French. We are happy to announce that we are now expanding our offering towards our Italian customers: we are now able to deliver our very popular Embedded Linux system development and Yocto Project and OpenEmbedded development training courses in Italian. Those courses are delivered by a native Italian speaker, Bootlin engineer Luca Ceresoli. Luca has 20 years of experience working with embedded systems, including 15 years on embedded Linux.

Thanks to this offering, our Italian customers can enjoy a training course delivered in their native language, which obviously facilitates communication, understanding and interaction. We can offer our Embedded Linux course and Yocto course in Italian through either private on-site sessions or private on-line sessions. Contact us at training@bootlin.com for details and pricing!

Ti aspettiamo!

New training course: Linux debugging, profiling, tracing and performance analysis

Since its inception, Bootlin has offered training courses on technical topics related to the use of Linux in embedded systems, with freely accessible training materials, and trainers with in-depth and real-life experience in their field. Based on these ideas, we have progressively extended our training portfolio over the years.

Today, we are extremely happy to announce a brand new course: Linux debugging, profiling, tracing and performance analysis. Many of our customers working on embedded Linux systems have expressed interest in diving into these complex topics, so we’ve created this course to:

  1. Give enough background information about how Linux works to be able to have a solid reasoning when investigating performance issues or simply bugs. Our course therefore details how user-space vs. kernel-space works, scheduling, and memory management, as a prerequisite to understanding better how Linux works.
  2. Give a strong introduction to the most important debugging, profiling and tracing tools in Linux, which are often not easy to get started with. We cover a very large spectrum of tools: strace, gdb, perf, ftrace, LTTng, kgdb, kmemleak, and many more. All these tools are illustrated through practical examples.

See the complete agenda for this course: debugging-online-agenda.pdf. The complete training materials will be freely available after the first session has been delivered, end of November 2022.

This course is currently being prepared by Bootlin engineer Clément Léger, who will also be teaching this course. Clément has a deep knowledge of how CPUs work and how Linux runs on a given CPU architecture, by having ported the Linux kernel to a brand new CPU architecture.

While the first session of this course will be delivered to a private customer, we have already scheduled a first public session which will take place on January 30, 31, Feb 1, 2, 2023, plus an extra session on Feb 3, 2023 if needed to cover all topics/questions. This session will take place each day from 14:00 to 18:00 UTC+1 (Paris time). Registration takes place directly online: the pricing is 569 EUR per seat at the discounted rate, or at 669 EUR per seat at the normal rate.

We can also organize a private session of this course for your team/company, either on-line or on-site: contact us to request a quote if you’re interested.

Embedded Linux Boot time optimization: training and webinar

Bootlin has been helping its customers optimize the boot time of embedded Linux systems for many years, ensuring that these systems meet their startup time requirements. Thanks to this, Bootlin has accumulated a significant experience in this field.

Next week, Bootlin is organizing or participating to two events related to Embedded Linux boot time optimization:

In addition, if you need help and support to optimize the boot time of your Embedded Linux systems, do not hesitate to as we offer engineering services, thanks to which we can take your existing Embedded Linux system, and significantly reduce its startup time to meet your requirements.

Bootlin “Buildroot system development” course updated to Buildroot 2021.02

Bootlin has been offering for several years a Buildroot system development course, which allows engineers interested in learning and understanding the Buildroot embedded Linux build system to get up to speed very quickly.

In preparation for our public Buildroot system development course next week, we updated our training materials, both slides and labs to Buildroot 2021.02, which is the latest stable Buildroot release as of today, and is also a Long Term Support release.

Buildroot slide

In addition to updating to a newer Buildroot version, we also use newer U-Boot and Linux versions for the practical labs on BeagleBone Black Wireless. The slides were also updated to document some new features that appeared between 2020.02 and 2021.02. If you’re interested, check out the materials on the training page.

We have one seat left for this training course next week, which will be taught by long-time Buildroot contributor and developer Thomas Petazzoni. Register now and take the last seat!

New training course: embedded Linux boot time optimization

For many embedded products, the issue of how much time it takes from power-on to the application being fully usable by the end-user is an important challenge. Bootlin has been providing its expertise and experience in this area to its customers for many years through numerous boot time optimization projects, and we have shared this knowledge through a number of talks at several conferences over the past years.

We are now happy to announce that we have a new training course Embedded Linux boot time optimization, open for public registration. This training course was already given to selected Bootlin customers and is now available for everyone.

Embedded Linux boot time optimization

The training course will be lead by Michael Opdenacker, Bootlin’s founder, and author of several publications on the topic of boot time optimization. The course is organized over 4 sessions of 4 hours, with a significant fraction of time spent on practical demonstrations showing on a real-life example the techniques to measure and reduce the boot time of an embedded Linux system.

As usual with Bootlin, the training materials are fully available: Agenda, Slides and Practical lab instructions.

Boot time optimization slide

Our first course open for public registration will take place from April 6th to April 9th, 2021, from 14:00 to 18:00 UTC+2 (Paris time) on each day. The session cost is 519 EUR if you take advantage of the early bird price available until March 9th. Otherwise, the regular rate is 619 EUR. You can register now for this course on Eventbrite.

Also, if you’re interested in organizing a dedicated session for your company, do not hesitate to contact us.

Bootlin training courses for beginning of 2021

It’s the beginning of 2021, and Bootlin’s offering of online training courses continues. We have dates available for our 5 training courses, at an affordable cost, and with the same quality characteristics of all Bootlin courses: trainers with proven in-field experience, fully open-source training materials and worldwide recognized training contents.

Here are the dates of our upcoming sessions:

See our training page for more details about all our training courses!

Covid-19: Bootlin proposes online sessions for all its courses

Tux working on embedded Linux on a couchLike most of us, due to the Covid-19 epidemic, you may be forced to work from home. To take advantage from this time confined at home, we are now proposing all our training courses as online seminars. You can then benefit from the contents and quality of Bootlin training sessions, without leaving the comfort and safety of your home. During our online seminars, our instructors will alternate between presentations and practical demonstrations, executing the instructions of our practical labs.

At any time, participants will be able to ask questions.

We can propose such remote training both through public online sessions, open to individual registration, as well as dedicated online sessions, for participants from the same company.

Public online sessions

We’re trying to propose time slots that should be manageable from Europe, Middle East, Africa and at least for the East Coast of North America. All such sessions will be taught in English. As usual with all our sessions, all our training materials (lectures and lab instructions) are freely available from the pages describing our courses.

Our Embedded Linux and Linux kernel courses are delivered over 7 half days of 4 hours each, while our Yocto Project, Buildroot and Linux Graphics courses are delivered over 4 half days. For our embedded Linux and Yocto Project courses, we propose an additional date in case some extra time is needed to complete the agenda.

Here are all the available sessions. If the situation lasts longer, we will create new sessions as needed:

Type Dates Time Duration Expected trainer Cost and registration
Embedded Linux (agenda) Sep. 28, 29, 30, Oct. 1, 2, 5, 6 2020. 17:00 – 21:00 (Paris), 8:00 – 12:00 (San Francisco) 28 h Michael Opdenacker 829 EUR + VAT* (register)
Embedded Linux (agenda) Nov. 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 9, 10, 12, 2020. 14:00 – 18:00 (Paris), 8:00 – 12:00 (New York) 28 h Michael Opdenacker 829 EUR + VAT* (register)
Linux kernel (agenda) Nov. 16, 17, 18, 19, 23, 24, 25, 26 14:00 – 18:00 (Paris time) 28 h Alexandre Belloni 829 EUR + VAT* (register)
Yocto Project (agenda) Nov. 30, Dec. 1, 2, 3, 4, 2020 14:00 – 18:00 (Paris time) 16 h Maxime Chevallier 519 EUR + VAT* (register)
Buildroot (agenda) Dec. 7, 8, 9, 10, and 11, 2020 14:00 – 18:00 (Paris time) 16 h Thomas Petazzoni 519 EUR + VAT* (register)
Linux Graphics (agenda) Dec. 1, 2, 3, 4, 2020 14:00 – 18:00 (Paris time) 16 h Paul Kocialkowski 519 EUR + VAT* (register

* VAT: applies to businesses in France and to individuals from all countries. Businesses in the European Union won’t be charged VAT only if they provide valid company information and VAT number to Evenbrite at registration time. For businesses in other countries, we should be able to grant them a VAT refund, provided they send us a proof of company incorporation before the end of the session.

Each public session will be confirmed once there are at least 6 participants. If the minimum number of participants is not reached, Bootlin will propose new dates or a full refund (including Eventbrite fees) if no new date works for the participant.

We guarantee that the maximum number of participants will be 12.

Dedicated online sessions

If you have enough people to train, such dedicated sessions can be a worthy alternative to public ones:

  • Flexible dates and daily durations, corresponding to the availability of your teams.
  • Confidentiality: freedom to ask questions that are related to your company’s projects and plans.
  • If time left, possibility to have knowledge sharing time with the instructor, that could go beyond the scope of the training course.
  • Language: possibility to have a session in French instead of in English.

Online seminar details

Each session will be given through Jitsi Meet, a Free Software solution that we are trying to promote. As a backup solution, we will also be able to Google Hangouts Meet. Each participant should have her or his own connection and computer (with webcam and microphone) and if possible headsets, to avoid echo issues between audio input and output. This is probably the best solution to allow each participant to ask questions and write comments in the chat window. We also support people connecting from the same conference room with suitable equipment.

Each participant is asked to connect 15 minutes before the session starts, to make sure her or his setup works (instructions will be sent before the event).

How to register

For online public sessions, use the EventBrite links in the above list of sessions to register one or several individuals.

To register an entire group (for dedicated sessions), please contact training@bootlin.com and tell us the type of session you are interested in. We will then send you a registration form to collect all the details we need to send you a quote.

You can also ask all your questions by calling +33 484 258 097.

Questions and answers

Q : Should I order hardware in advance, our hardware included in the training cost?
R : No, practical labs are replaced by technical demonstrations, so you will be able to follow the course without any hardware. However, you can still order the hardware by checking the “Shopping list” pages of presentation materials for each session. This way, between each session, you will be able to replay by yourself the labs demonstrated by your trainer, ask all your questions, and get help between sessions through our dedicated Matrix channel to reach your goals.

Q: Why just demos instead of practicing with real hardware?
A: We are not ready to support a sufficient number of participants doing practical labs remotely with real hardware. This is more complicated and time consuming than in real life. Hence, what we we’re proposing is to replace practical labs with practical demonstrations shown by the instructor. The instructor will go through the normal practical labs with the standard hardware that we’re using.

Q: Would it be possible to run practical labs on the QEMU emulator?
R: Yes, it’s coming. In the embedded Linux course, we are already offering instructions to run most practical labs on QEMU between the sessions, before the practical demos performed by the trainer. We should also be able to propose such instructions for our Yocto Project and Buildroot training courses in the next months. Such work is likely to take more time for our Linux kernel course, practical labs being closer to the hardware that we use.

Q: Why proposing half days instead of full days?
A: From our experience, it’s very difficult to stay focused on a new technical topic for an entire day without having periodic moments when you are active (which happens in our public and on-site sessions, in which we interleave lectures and practical labs). Hence, we believe that daily slots of 4 hours (with a small break in the middle) is a good solution, also leaving extra time for following up your normal work.

Yocto Project training course available on STM32MP1 platform

Back in May 2019, we announced the availability of our Embedded Linux system development course on the STMicroelectronics STM32MP1 platform, in addition to the already supported Microchip SAMA5D3 Xplained board.

In the context of our partnership with STMicroelectronics, we are now happy to announce the availability of our Yocto Project and OpenEmbedded development training also on the STM32MP1 platform for the practical labs. We now support either the BeagleBoneBlack Wireless or the STMicroelectronics STM32MP1 platforms for this training course.

The complete training materials are available: detailed agenda, slides and practical labs. The complete source code of the training materials is also available in our Github repository.

Bootlin Yocto course on STM32MP1
Slides of Bootlin’s Yocto course for the STM32MP1

This will hopefully help customers around the world to get started with using Yocto on the STM32MP1 system-on-chip. The Yocto experts at Bootlin are available to deliver this 3-day course anywhere in the world, at your location. The first edition of this new variant of the course is going to be given this week to one of our customers in Spain. Contact us if you’re interested by having this course organized at your location!