1. Slide 1 of 30 Status of Embedded Linux Embedded Linux Community News December 2010 Tim Bird CELF Architecture Group Chair

2. Slide 2 of 30 Agenda Technology quick update Embedded Linux Summit report CE flag version Yocto Upcoming conferences Miscellaneous news

3. Slide 3 of 30 Technology status (quick updates) Stable tracing APIs TTY-based group scheduling Checkpoint/restart for applications Bootchart2

4. Slide 4 of 30 Stable tracing APIs Goal is to designate certain tracepoints as stable, and make them available long-term to user space Some people want stable API and others don’t Decided at Kernel Summit to do it, but then negative feedback was received on kernel mailing list

5. Slide 5 of 30 TTY-based group scheduling Automatically places processes in control groups, based on controlling TTY Then implements “fairer” scheduling between control groups Prevents a kernel compile from interfering too much with interactive tasks Uses a scheduling mechanism that has been in the kernel for a long time (control groups) – Which, IMHO, demonstrates that there’s a lot of technology in the kernel that is going unused in embedded

6. Slide 6 of 30 Checkpoint/Restart Ability to checkpoint and restart (like suspend and resume) an application System retains open files, memory maps, signals, and other kernel-managed resources Primary goals are robustness (recovery) and runtime application migration I want to use it to improve boot-up time (on a per-application basis) – I can’t help it, I instinctively look for boot time improvements

7. Slide 7 of 30 Bootchart 2 Rewrite of most bootchart elements: – Capture is in C instead of shell script – Visualizer is in python instead of Java – Lots of bugfixes and improvements to visualization example: transparency for CPU utilization – in original bootchart this showed 0 utilization lots of times when it was not appropriate Looking at using trace events instead of polling – Should improve performance and accuracy (Note – would be nice to have stable tracepoints)

8. Slide 8 of 30 Syslink Interprocessor communication mechanism Would be really nice to have a standard system in Linux for IPC between cores in multi-core systems TI willing to donate syslink, but it needs a lot of modification to be accepted into mainline – Much discussion at Plumbers about alternatives and possible solutions Is something to watch

9. Slide 9 of 30 Embedded Linux Summit Meeting of CE vendors, semi-conductor vendors, Linux vendors, community leaders Held one in Japan – September 30, after LinuxCon Held one in Cambridge, UK – October 26, before ELCE

10. Slide 10 of 30 Embedded Linux Summit (cont.) Some key initiatives – Legal wording for IP procurement, to promote open source driver availability – CE Flag Version – a longterm maintained version of the Linux kernel – Information base of IP blocks and corresponding drivers – Projects to decrease embedded Linux distro and tools fragmentation

11. Slide 11 of 30 IP procurement language Some companies saying that not enough customers were asking for open source drivers to justify cost of writing them CE and semi-conductor companies will try to use language in their procurement contracts which encourages suppliers to provide open source drivers – HP has done this successfully – Language is not binding – Supplier has to “opt out”, which means they have received the message that open source drivers are desirable

12. Slide 12 of 30 CE Flag Version Problem: – Embedded groups have lots of different kernel versions – Some versions are supplied by semiconductor vendors, and it is hard to change because porting drivers would be required – Would decrease integration cost to CE companies if supply chain used fewer kernel versions Solution: – Designate specific kernel version for a period of time, and try to focus supply chain on that version

13. Slide 13 of 30 Flag Version details Decided to promote kernel version 2.6.35 Strange confluence of many players at once: Android, Linaro, Meego, Sony Andi Kleen is the maintainer of the branch See http://lkml.org/lkml/2010/12/3/35http://lkml.org/lkml/2010/12/3/35 To be called “longterm” (not “stable”) – GregKH making some changes to how stable is maintained Longterm branches use same rules as stable See Documentation/stable_kernel_rules.txt

14. Slide 14 of 30 Yocto project Intel /Linux Foundation publicly announced Yocto project at ELCE Attempt to consolidate effort on a single build system, and other development tools – Chose Poky, which is an Open Embedded derivative OpenEmbedded seems to have critical mass – TI, Palm/WebOS, Dell – MontaVista, Wind River, Mentor Graphics Important Yocto meeting held – Some issues with governance and relationship with Open Embedded – Look for LWN.net article soon

15. Slide 15 of 30 Upcoming conferences Embedded Linux Conference 2011 – April 11-13 - in San Francisco – CFP should go out soon Had to delay because of web site transition with Linux Foundation LinuxCon Japan 2011 – June 1-3 - in Yokohama ELC Europe 2011 – October 26-28 - in Prague

16. Slide 16 of 30 Consortia Linaro – Released Linaro 10.11 – Have a nice roadmap of technical features they want to accomplish – Tool and Kernel highlights: Support for valgrind on ARM Support for Neon instructions Assist in mainlining Android patches Are working to get ARM device trees mainlined (shooting for 2.6.39) CELF and Linux Founding are merging – Lots of legal details being taken care of Agreements from all contractors

17. Slide 17 of 30 Miscellaneous News Mentor Graphics acquires CodeSourcery Sony ships Sony Internet TV – First non-phone Android product endorsed by Google Google ships Android Gingerbread SDK

18. Slide 18 of 30 Status of CELF work

19. Slide 19 of 30 Agenda (CELF work) CELF contract work Open Project Proposal Hardware donations

20. Slide 20 of 30 Contract work completed this year ARM enhancements for U-boot Smemcap in busybox Bootchart in busybox Most of function-sections work mainlined SquashFS LZO support (not a CELF contract, but an LG kernel contribution) Flash filesystem testing – Was presented and discussed at ELCE

21. Slide 21 of 30 Contract work of interest YAFFS mainline Trace format standard RT-preempt online training

22. Slide 22 of 30 Mainline YAFFS2 Description: – YAFFS2 is a popular NAND flash filesystem Is used by Android – Add support for YAFFS2 to mainline kernel Contractor: Aleph One Ltd Google is Co-Sponsoring this project Status: – Several patch sets have been submitted to mainline – Were reviewed by IBM Linaro rep (Arnd Bergman) – Are still hoping for acceptance by end of the year.

23. Slide 23 of 30 Trace format standard Description: – Create a single trace format standard for the embedded industry Contractor: Efficios (Matthieu Desnoyers) Status: – Matthieu published several drafts of the Trace Format document. – It was reviewed by Steve Rostedt, and feedback was provided – Latest draft was reviewed and approved (Dec. 8) by the Tool Infrastructure Work Group of the MultiCore Association

24. Slide 24 of 30 RT-preempt tutorial Description – Create training and tutorial materials for using RT-preempt patchset and feature On-line course to be put on eLinux wiki – Free for public use Contrator: K Computing (Kevin Dankwardt) Status: – Expect completion by December 31

25. Slide 25 of 30 CELF Open Project Proposal You can suggest projects to fund for 2011 Just opened proposal period on Tuesday For a submission, think about… – What did you spend your time working on, on Linux, in the last year? – What would have saved you time and effort? Don’t have to be a member of CELF or the Linux Foundation See http://elinux.org/CELF_Open_Project_Proposal_2011 http://elinux.org/CELF_Open_Project_Proposal_2011

26. Slide 26 of 30 Contract work notes This year, because of merger, CELF has double its regular contractor budget Some possible projects were discussed at the Embedded Linux Summit, and at the Kernel summit

27. Slide 27 of 30 Candidate contract projects Add fastboot support to Linux Fast symbol resolution for module loading UBIL/UBI checkpointing – scalable UBI-attach time – Discussed with Thomax Gleixner at kernel summit Mainline RT-preempt patch set Link-time optimization (for size) – Support for ‘whole-program’ compiler option Help with MIPI spec availability Kexec applet in busybox IP block driver database

28. Slide 28 of 30 More Candidate projects Watchdog framework for the Linux kernel – Repeat from last year – This barely missed funding, but this year we have more money! Binary analysis tool enhancements Boot parameter caching Continued Flash Filesystem testing BTRFS on UBI Sparse IRQs on ARM Unified ARM version support (Linaro?) Improved defconfig

29. Slide 29 of 30 Hardware donations Donation for developer doing BKL removal paid off – We bought him a board, and he submitted several patches with BKL lock removals Have approved donation for Android developer – Plan is to use bootchart2 and document results

30. Slide 30 of 30 Thanks for your time