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?