Recently, I attended the Embedded Linux Conference (ELC) hosted by the Linux Foundation in San Francisco, wearing my other hat as Wiki maintainer of eLinux.org. As a new member of the MontaVista team and longtime member of the Embedded Linux and Open Source communities, I found myself thinking about both MontaVista and meld.org throughout. The ubiquitous professional conference question of “So, Bill, what do you do?” inevitably led to many conversations, especially with MontaVista Linux users, previous and current MontaVista employees, and members of the meld.org community. It was my pleasure to have had that opportunity at the event and now to share my impressions here.
The presence of the Yocto Project was strong, it started from the moment an attendee opened their conference goodies bag. A thumbdrive containing the toolchain needed to build an image from source and the pre-built images for ARM, MIPS, PPC, x86, and x86_64, along with the Poky Build System (Bernard 1.0 Release) was distributed to all attendees. Yocto Project t-shirts were given away, a Yocto Project Hospitality suite was available to all, and project leader, Dirk Hohndel, delivered the conference keynote with an overview of the Yocto Project. In total there were seven Yocto-specific presentations at the conference. This project has definitely gained considerable momentum since its formal announcement at ELC-Europe six months earlier.
The Yocto Project presence at ELC demonstrates the interest of the Embedded Linux community in tools and build systems necessary to ease the pain of bringing custom Linux distributions to market on consumer devices, the key target of the project. In addition to Yocto, Linaro project team members gave three presentations including a general overview of their work over the last year, a “power debugging” session, and automated validation session. The Meego project was present as well, with a “Birds of a Feather” session and an interesting power management presentation entitled, “Faster Resume For More Energy Savings on MeeGo,” the lessons from which could be applied to any project interested in porting Suspend-to-Disk (s2d) to a new device.
Not to be outdone by the software projects, embedded hardware also made had its share of ELC presentations. These presentations focused on the community-accessible development boards that have come to the fore over the last year. Texas Instruments ARM-based platforms dominated these presentations through the popularity of their BeagleBoard community and burgeoning PandaBoard community. Topics included experience gained while bringing up HDMI displays on the PandaBoard, high-level web interfaces to low-level I/O on the BeagleBoard, and a 3 hour hands-on training session for ARM SoC programming using the BeagleBoard. A particularly interesting presentation was given by a member of TI’s PandaBoard team, David Anders entitled Board BringUp: Open Source Hardware and Software Tools that described the various free and open tools available to independent developers who can’t afford expensive tools such as Logic Analyzers and Oscilloscopes. This presentation offered a call-to-action for Embedded Linux developers to work with open tools, report their successes and failures, and hack existing and new tools to make them better.
If one theme was to be taken from the 2011 Embedded Linux Conference it is that the majority of Embedded Linux development is being sponsored by large companies. I don’t personally see this as a bad thing at all but rather a result of the natural evolution of the Embedded Linux community and industry as the adoption of Linux for development of Consumer Embedded devices has become the default. The silicon vendors recognize that enabling Linux developers to work with their cores can only benefit them in the marketplace. This has resulted in large-scale sponsorship of big projects, such as Yocto, Linaro, and Meego. Similarly, the majority of kernel developers, and open hardware enthusiasts have joined forces with big companies through direct hires and partnerships, to move development forward more rapidly, benefiting everyone.
The 2011 Embedded Linux Conference was a qualified success given the many excellent technical presentations, and community interaction. I highly recommend anyone interested in Embedded Linux to make the effort to attend in the future.
Linux Foundation will hold a European version from October 26 – 28, 2011 in Prague, Czech Republic.
