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 bei der Embedded Testing 2025
Unser Spin-Off Linux Automation ist in diesem Jahr Aussteller auf der Embedded Testing und ist dort sowohl mit einem Stand als auch mit einem Vortrag dabei. Für Pengutronix als Dienstleister für Embedded-Geräte in verschiedenen Industriebereichen ist Testing selbstverständlich. Dies kann in der Form von Tests in den jeweiligen Upstream-Projekten oder in der Form von Integrationstests eines vollständigen Embedded-Linux-Systems auf der Kunden-Hardware geschehen.
Pengutronix at FOSDEM and OE Workshop 2025
On 1. and 2. February 2025 it is time for waffles, Belgian beer and Open Source: FOSDEM will take place at ULB in Brussels. With over 8k hackers, FOSDEM is the biggest and most important Open Source conference in Europe. One other event riding on the wave of FOSDEM is the the OE Workshop (See the list of other events here.) We are participating in both FOSDEM and OE Workshop and are looking forward to many interesting discussions with developers of different Open Source software components - be it the Linux kernel, Yocto, Labgrid, Debian, KiCAD, ...
Pengutronix at Electronica 2024 in Munich
Electronica trade fair in Munich, Germany is just around the corner and Pengutronix is currently gearing up to showcase some of our latest topics and developments. You find us in Hall B4 Booth 102 (map).
Bringing Barebox into OE-Core (Yocto)
This blog post chronicles the multi-year journey to get Barebox accepted into OE-Core—from the early attempts to the eventual success in October 2024. Along the way, we’ll explore the technical hurdles we faced, the community discussions that shaped the process, and the improvements we added to both OE and Barebox.
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 FrOSCon 2024
On August 17th and 18th, 2024, it's that time again: FrOSCon will take place at the Bonn-Rhein-Sieg University of Applied Sciences in Sankt Augustin - and Pengutronix will be there again as a Partner.
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.
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.