Fosdem
2006 Edition Free and Open Source Software Developer's European Meeting






Dev-Room

Embedded softwares room News

[ Schedule ]

News [ 24-02-2006 ]
Embedded track schedule 2006 *Updated with abstract information*

Well this is what we all have been waiting for. There have been some unfortunate changes but this should be it! The full schedule for the embedded track at Fosdem for this year! See you all at Fosdem!

Saturday

13u30-14u30 SETR LiveCD : A live tool for embedded development, by Hector Oron

In a educational enviroment, i decided a while ago to build a Debian LiveCD distribution, so students could play/demo a little with free software tools for embedded systems. As a result of my work, it was born SETR LiveCD, it is built into a CD-R and it has :
  • Cross-compiler toolchain for m68k and arm.
  • ARMulator and XCopilot: ARM & m68k emulators. With uClinux demo included.
  • GDB, ddd debuggers.
This was my first built, afterwards, i've been working, not so hard, on the distro, trying to add scratchbox, uClinux sources, and probably latest development on Emdebian project, but this is not ready to release, yet. So, this educational distro, is trying to become a utility for professional embedded people, and it is an open project where everybody is welcome to add, or ask for the tools that they use or need. Due to a hardware failure, i have lost my site, where all development was taking place,and i'm hopping to have some time available to put it up again. Site url: http://setr.shows.it/

14u30-15u30 Optimizing the Linux kernel and applications for speed, space, ram, power and cost, by Michael Opdenacker

Once the implementation of a system is complete, it is still possible to optimize its speed, size, RAM usage, power consumption and cost, without having to make costly changes to its design or implementation. This presentation will review most techniques and resources that system developers can use. Some of them are well known by experienced developers, but some others have been developed recently, in particular by the CE Linux Forum, in its efforts to improve the suitability of Linux for Consumer Electronics (CE) devices.

15u30-16u30 Lock-Free Data Exchange for Real-time applications, by Peter Soetens

The disadvantages of classical lock-(mutex-)based critical section protection in multi-threaded programs are well known. Mutex based protection is subject to priority inversion, dead-lock and induces scheduler overhead to cope with these situations. Lock-free data sharing is a new paradigm which allows thread-safe data exchange without any scheduler intervention. It only requires a common processor instruction 'Compare And Swap' (CAS). Previous work proved that lock-free algorithms are suitable for hard real-time programs and are even superior in time determinism in comparison to lock-based approaches. This presentation shows the results of experiments comparing lock-free and lock-based data exchange in real-time programs running in RTAI/Linux, but conclusions apply to all (embedded) real-time operating systems such as eCos, RTEMS, etc. Lock-free algorithms for variable size buffers, shared data, queues and single linked lists have been developed and designed towards hard real-time systems. The methodology used can be applied to any data container type for lock-free data access. These algorithms are part of the Open Robot Control Software (OROCOS) project (http://www.orocos.org) and used in industrial grade controllers.

16u30-17u30 Alsa SoC layer , by Liam Girdwood

The Alsa SoC layer is designed to provide better audio support for portable and cellular devices running Linux. It provides a framework that allows codec driver independence, dynamic power managment of machine audio components (including internal codec blocks), machine specific audio controls and external audio events (e.g. headphone insertion)
It is also designed to simplify the addition of new codecs and SoC platforms to Alsa and supports I2S, PCM and AC97 digital audio interfaces.
This talk will describe the problem areas specific to embedded audio and the features that Alsa SoC provides to address them. It will also discuss the Alsa SoC archictecture.

More info on: http://www.rpsys.net/openzaurus/patches/alsa/info.html

Sunday

9u30-10u30 Linux@Newtec a case study to demonstrate eLinux in a multi processor, FPGA and dsp semi hard realtime environment, by Kristof Geilenkotten

At Newtec (www.newtec.be), we envisage elinux as one of the many key tools to achieving our high quality and robust professional equipment in a relatively short time to market. We made a conscious decision to develop the use of elinux and open source knowledge in house. This presentation will focus on the added value provided by elinux for the development cycle of a semi-hard, real-time application. This can best be explained using a real life example. The case study will focus on the following issues:

  1. Project issues (out source/ in house/ package retail)
  2. Reaching real time requirements
  3. Good/ bad practice
  4. Writing device drivers
  5. The complete project life cycle
  6. Where to find help

The objective of this short presentation, is not to elaborate on elinux as a stand alone real time operating system, but to demonstrate the position of elinux in a complete solution.

10u30-11u30 Building and supporting distributions with openembedded, by Koen Kooi (familiar release manager)

Building a complete Linux distribution is a complex and tedious task. You have to deal with a variety of toolchains, upstream locations, source formats, build systems, dependencies, packages not very suitable for cross compiling, different package and image output requirements, and more.

The BitBake build system and the OpenEmbedded build classes and metadata greatly simplify this task. They have been designed to handle different hardware architectures, to support multiple releases for those architectures, and to utilize tools for speeding up the process of recreating a complete distribution after changes have been made.

This talk will give an overview on how to use OE for building packages, rootfs'es, doing QA and how to handle tasks OE can't or won't do for you like bugtracking, source management and documentation. Questions about the familar 0.8.3 release are also welcome

11u30-12u30 Towards a common embedded power management solution, by David Weinehall & Sampsa Fabritius

Power management is an essential element of almost any embedded system, but Linux kernel was not ready for run-time power management when development of Nokia 770 device started. Thus, improvements like clock framework and dyntick were done with community during the project. In addition, at that time, there was no suitable user space device management solution for embedded devices - thus tailored solution. In this talk, we discuss solutions used in Nokia 770 and provide an initiative for future discussion.

13u10-14u00 Optimizing boot time for embedded systems by Vitaly Wool

One of the main targets for Linux-powered embedded devices is optimization of size consumed and time to start. Although the efforts in this direction have been made for several years, some effective new techniques to enhance the speed with which Linux-powered embedded devices may start up have been developed recently, along with the extensions for the well-known ones. This talk will cover mostly these new techniques which concern not only reduction of the time needed to initialize the core kernel and drivers but address also application-level concerns and other areas of the kernel that may limit the speed by which products are started up, such as new approach to the Execute-In-Place (XIP) kernel that also saves flash space, linear flash access and time-optimized module insertion.

14u-15u Real-time patches voor Linux, by Klaas van Gend

Back in October 2004, MontaVista launched an initiative to enhance the hard real-time features of the Linux kernel. This was met with great enthusiasm within *some* parts of the kernel community and with less enthusiasm in other parts, e.g. Linus didn't see the direct benefits.

Ingo Molnar did integrate most of the efforts of MontaVista over a weekend in his Real-time Preemption patch. And this patch has seen a lot of development ever since. Parts of the patch are by now also accepted in the mainline kernel.

Klaas will go into details on what exactly is the technology that is in the Real-time Preemption patch and how it works practice. He will also discuss why Linux had to become hard real time, what has happened since the initial announcements and what the Real Time Linux kernel is currently used for.

15-16u SLIND a small Debian for embedded systems, by Benjamin Collar

SLIND is a small Linux distribution targeted at embedded devices. What differentiates SLIND from other solutions is the Debian package management both on target and on host--therefore, dpkg and apt-get may be used directly on the target device, providing impressive upgrade facilities. This talk will introduce the architecture of SLIND and provide a working demo.

16-17u Openocd, the Open On-Chip Debugger by Dominic Rath

The Open On-Chip Debugger (OpenOCD) allows ARM7 and ARM9 based systems to be debugged using JTAG, and supports several interfaces like Wigglers, PLD download cables and a USB based solution. It interfaces to the GNU debugger (GDB) using the GDB remote serial protocol, and additionally provides a telnet command line interface to handle low-level tasks like flash writing or in-system programming of programmable logic devices. This presentation is going to give an overview on on-chip debugging for ARM7/9 cores, and will show how OpenOCD integrates in an open source toolchain to program embedded devices. Future enhancements like support for additional ARM7/9 family members, open JTAG interfaces and other microcontroller families will be discussed.

Addditional information is available on the project site at http://openocd.berlios.de/web/





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