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.
Weiterführende Links
More Conferences in September: Yocto Project Developer Day and KiCon Europe
September 2024 brings a wide variety of conferences: Pengutronix will present talks at the ELCE, Linux Plumbers Conference and All Systems Go. Additionally we will attend two more conferences: The Yocto Project Developer Day in Vienna and the KiCon Europe in Bochum.
Pengutronix at All Systems Go!
This years All Systems Go! will take place on 25. and 26.09.2024 in Berlin. The ASG is a conference about low-level user-space topics. We are happy to contribute a talk about updating systems using RAUC and composefs:
Pengutronix at the Linux Plumbers Conference
The Linux Plumbers Conference 2024 will take place in Vienna from 18. to 20.09.2024. Luckily this does not overlap with the ELCE. Pengutronix will attend the LPC with six colleagues - so watch out for our T-shirts and hoodies and and feel free to chat with us.
Pengutronix at FrOSCon 2024
Am 17. und 18. 08. 2024 ist es wieder soweit: Die FrOSCon findet an der Hochschule Bonn-Rhein-Sieg in Sankt Augustin statt - und Pengutronix ist wieder als Partner dabei.
Pengutronix auf der Embedded World 2024
Treffen Sie uns auf der Embedded World 2024 in Nürnberg! Sie finden uns wieder in Halle 4, Stand 4-261. Wie üblich zeigen wir auf unserem Messestand Demonstratoren zu aktuellen Themen.
FrOSCon 2023
In ein paar Stunden beginnt die 18. FrOSCon an der Hochschule Bonn-Rhein-Sieg. Pengutronix ist wieder mit einem kleinen Team vor Ort. An einem der Partner-Stände zeigen wir wieder einige unserer Aktivitäten in der Open Source Community. Dafür bringen wir unseren labgrid Demonstrator und die FPGA Demo mit.
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.