Open Source Firmware Conference 2018
At September 12-15 the first conference focusing exclusively on open source firmware took place in Erlangen, Germany - the OSFC 2018. The mission of this conference is to provide an appropriate platform to bring together as many Open Source projects, hardware manufacturers and developers as possible, in order to collaborate, share knowledge and push the firmware development in an Open Source manner.
Different topics related to the open firmware developments mostly targeting different bootloader or payload variants were presented at the conference. LinuxBoot, coreboot, U-Boot and TianoCore and ARM Trusted Firmware related topics were intensively covered in different talks.
Pengutronix and the barebox bootloader project were represented by Sascha Hauer and Oleksij Rempel. While we didn't do any presentation ourselves we had a chance to communicate with many developers representing different projects with open or even closed nature.
From different talks I would note the following:
- many vendors do things and not always contribute back to initial open source projects - (this is not new)
- some vendors are looking for open source alternatives, for example for BIOS, because government related customers forbid usage of closed software for security reasons.
- almost all companies make their own variants of bootloaders, with special use case covering specific hardware.
All in all, it was an interesting conference, with many good talks and insights into other firmware projects' motivation.
Further Readings
Pengutronix at Embedded World 2024
Meet Pengutronix at the Embedded World 2024 in Nurnberg! You find us, as always, in hall 4, booth 4-261. As usual, we will be showing demonstrators on current topics at our exhibition stand.
Chemnitzer Linux-Tage 2024
Pengutronix war auch in diesem Jahr wieder auf den Chemnitzer Linux Tagen dabei. Wie jedes Jahr sind die CLT eine willkommene Gelegenheit Freunde zu treffen und sich über Linux, Open Source und den Rest der Welt auszutauschen.
FrOSCon 2023
In a few hours, the 18th FrOSCon will begin at the Bonn-Rhein-Sieg University of Applied Sciences. Pengutronix will be there again with a small team. At one of the partner booths we will show some of our activities in the open source community. We will bring our labgrid demonstrator and the FPGA demo.
Embedded Linux Conference Europe 2023: Our Recommendations
Last month Pengutronix was present at the Embedded Open Source Summit (EOSS) in Prague. Thanks to all to all speakers for sharing your knowledge! In this blog post we want to shine a spotlight at a few talks that we found especially interesting. (Links to recordings will be added once the recordings are available.)
DjangoCon Europe 2023
Django is Pengutronix' framework of choice for internal applications that handle our business processes. These internal tools are also a great opportunity to try out current developments in the Django universe.
Chemnitzer Linux-Tage 2023
After the Corona break, the Chemnitzer Linux-Tage will actully take place in real life again, and the Pengutronix team will have eight (!) talks there.
DSA in Barebox
The v2022.05.0 Release of barebox introduced initial support for the Distributed Switch Architecture (DSA) Framework. DSA is originally a subsystem from the Linux Kernel, which exposes the individual ports of a network switch IC as virtual network interfaces.
Foster mvebu Support in barebox
barebox works great on NXP's i.MX platforms. While there is some support for Marvell's mvebu platform, it is not even near being complete. The main limitation is in my eyes that there is no code to initialize RAM settings on these machines.
Bootstrapping Arria10 with OpenOCD and barebox
The Arria10 SoCFPGA can boot from multiple sources: SD Card, NAND flash, QSPI flash and eMMC, that can be selected via the BSEL pins. If the bootrom can not find a valid bootloader on that medium, it will fall back to JTAG. So for developing and testing, the BSEL pins can just be set to a medium that is non-existent. In case of bootstrapping, the bootrom falls back to JTAG anyway, as there is no valid bootloader, yet.