Talks, Workshops, Time at the Beach - Embedded Recipes 2025
I was part of a small delegation of Pengutronixians at the Embedded Recipes conference this year in Nice, France. We had a great time there, so let's take a look back at the great talks we have seen, the labgrid workshop we held and our time in Nice in general.
Days -1 and 0 (Exploring the city)
I guess no one really travels by airplane with a completely clear conscience anymore, so to get the most out of our stay we decided to arive early in Nice and enjoy the city and beach for a bit.
This resulted in us spending the first one and a half days exploring the city by vibe-walking (taking turns at each intersection purely based on "vibe", a practice derived from vibe-coding, which we don't get to do at Pengutronix).
And we really liked what we found — beautiful blue water, a beach, and a landscape more hilly than what I am used to from the northern German flatlands!
Day 1 (Cyber Resilience, hardware failure, a bit of AI and Social Event)
After our short vacation it was time to attend some talks. If you want to watch one of the mentioned talks you are in luck: the talks are online at the Embedded Recipes Website.
Our personal highlights on the first day were:
- The CRA and what it means for us (Greg Kroah-Hartman)
The Cyber Resilience Act (CRA) is a piece of regulation that will affect us as embedded software consultants in the European Union a lot in the following years, mostly in a good way we think, because it encourages "Doing things the right way" and increases the need for solid software updating plans and software (ever heard of RAUC the safe and secure OTA updater?).
But there certainly is some uncertainity in the industry right now about what the CRA will and won't force us to do.
Greg helped us clear up a lot of uncertainty from the perspective of an open source developer.
The TL;DR for OSS developers was: provide a way for manufacturers using your software to contact you about security issues they have found (you should already have that) and report security fixes so they get a CVE assigned (you should already do that as well).
What Greg did not tell us in detail was how to behave as a manufacturer, so we will have to figure that out on our own for the Linux Automation GmbH, or maybe there will be a follow-up talk before 2027.
- Persistent Shutdown Reasons & Hardware Protection: Making Embedded Systems More Resilient (Oleksij Rempel)
My colleague Oleksij has encountered data loss and even complete hardware failure in his embedded Linux projects following power interruptions and resets.
It turns out that some components are unable to handle such events at all, and logging in these cases has so far been hardly possible. Oleksij presents solutions for controlled shutdown and logging that can prevent and help investigate such worst-case scenarios.
- AI-Accelerated Development (Christophe Conil)
Giving this talk to a group of rather AI-sceptic kernel and embedded developers was, to say the least, a bold move.
But for us that have not experienced AI-assisted software development on a level beyond prompting ChatGPT and copying results from its output it was a very interesting look at the state of the art.
Christophe has demonstrated what can be done with state-of-the-art cloud based development tools.
I would love to see a similar talk demonstrating the state of the art in local LLM coding assistants.
- Evening Social Event
After the talks, we enjoyed a great social evening at a beach bar, sharing food and stories with fellow developers.
Shout-out to everyone there for making this a very nice evening (no pun intended ;).
And last but not least the venue itself! Embedded Recipes 2025 was hosted at Parc Phoenix, a botanic garden and zoo. This means we got to spend our lunch breaks with Flamingos, Wallabies and even an Alligator — big thanks to the organizers at BayLibre for providing us with such a great location!
Day 2 (Profiling and Real-Time)
This day was filled with interesting talks as well. Our personal highlights on this day:
- Perfetto Profiling & Tracing (Zimuzo Ezeozue)
I don't have a lot of experience in using perf for performance optimizations, but now I know the tool I would use to visualize my perf traces: Perfetto!
Zimuzo's demo sold me on Perfetto — its SQL-backed approach is incredibly powerful.
If you know what you are looking for (like realtime hickups lasting for more than n milliseconds) you could just query for them using SQL and continue investigating them visually.
- Writing Linux Real-Time Applications (John Ogness)
I have been tasked with writing a demo application using PREEMPT_RT before, but did not have to bring it to production-readiness.
In his talk John has demonstrated how to walk the last mile and bring your realtime applications to perfection. Pinning them in memory, not using the wrong syscalls, doing locking correctly, all the little details that make or break a realtime application.
And best of all: he has demonstrated the Runtime Verifier that monitors RT applications for common realtime pitfalls — a huge aid in developing RT software.
- The Status of Embedded Linux and Closing Game (Tim Bird)
Tim knows how to speak in front of a crowd. The "Status of Embedded Linux" talk was densely packed with the most recent developments in Embedded Linux and beyond.
The Closing Game was great fun as well. I did not win anything though. This game is not fair!
Day 3 (labgrid Workshop)
The third day was the one Bastian and I were most anxious about, because, after Oleksij's talk on the first day and Ahmad's keysigning party on the second day it was now our turn to be active Embedded Recipes participants!
The third day was filled with workshops and we have used this opportunity to present the first half of our interactive labgrid workshop. A workshop you can book today, by the way, if you’d like.
Apart from a few smaller technical hickups (which have of course strengthened our debugging skills and those of the participants) everything went smoothly and we had a great time demonstrating labgrid, pytest and talking about the participant's usecases.
We can't wait to go on tour again — maybe your office will be our next stop?
Further Readings
Labgrid Hands-On Training at Embedded Recipes 2025
We are happy to announce that we are hosting a one-day version of our hands-on labgrid training at the Embedded Recipes in Nice, France. The workshop takes place on day three of the Embedded Recipes (16.05.2025) and is part of the workshop track. The workshop is free of charge, but registration is required.
Looking back at Embedded World 2025
An exciting week is over: Embedded World 2025 in Nuremberg! We had lots of interesting talks with our visitors and other exhitibors, and for me the most important result was: connected embedded Linux devices won't be possible anymore without a good maintenance strategy for the kernel, without secureboot and a solid updating concept, taken that companies have to fulfill the european regulations of the cyber resilience act!
Pengutronix auf den Chemnitzer Linux Tagen 2025
Wir freuen uns, auch in diesem Jahr bei den Chemnitzer Linux Tagen dabei sein zu können. Wie jedes Jahr sind die CLT eine willkommene Gelegenheit, Freunde zu treffen und sich über Linux, Open Source und den Rest der Welt auszutauschen. Auch in diesem Jahr stellen wir uns mit einem eigenen Stand vor und freuen uns, vier Vorträge zum Vortragsprogramm beitragen zu können.
Pengutronix at the embedded world 2025
Meet us at the embedded world 2025 in Nuremberg. Like every year you'll find us in hall 4, booth 4-261. As usual, we will be showing demonstrators on current topics at our exhibition stand. In addition, we are again inviting you to the RAUC and Labgrid community meetup and will be contributing to the embedded world conference with a talk on the use of Labgrid for integration tests.
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.
labgrid is going on a live tour!
labgrid makes it possible to remote-control embedded linux devices and to implement integration tests of a complete embedded Linux system on real hardware. The Pengutronix developers and other companies have been using labgrid as a centerpiece of their embedded software development infrastructure to great success for quite some time now.
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).
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.
Linux Automation Test Automation Controller: A one Device labgrid Exporter
Our subsidiary Linux Automation GmbH introduces the LXA TAC (Linux Automation Test Automation Controller): an all-in-one labgrid exporter. The LXA TAC offers the usual interfaces to control one or more embedded devices (DUTs, devices under test) interactively or automatically with labgrid.