Embedded Linux Conference 2012 Schedule

The Embedded Linux Conference (ELC 2012) will take place on February 15 – 15, 2012 at Hotel Sofitel in San Francisco.

ELC consists of 3 days of presentations, tutorials and sessions. There will be over 50 sessions during those 3 days. I’ll highlight a few sessions that I find particularly interesting.

February 15

10:30 – 11: 30 – Profiling and Performance Measurement Techniques Using Linux Kernel Tools by Govindraj Raja, Software Engineer at Texas Instruments and Partha S Basak, Technical Manager at Texas Instruments.
With ever growing features and functionality of Linux kernel, one needs methods to trace and profile parts of Linux kernel for various reasons like performance analysis, debugging etc. This presentation aims at providing an insight into few of these tools and their salient features. Supporting use case data as captured on open source OMAP4 pandaboard is also provided.
14:00 – 15:00 – The Yocto Project Overview and Update by Saul Wold, Intel
The Yocto Project is a joint project to unify the world’s efforts around embedded Linux and to make Linux the best choice for embedded designs. The Yocto Project is an open source starting point for embedded Linux development which contains tools, templates, methods and actual working code to get started with an embedded device project. In addition, the Yocto Project includes Eclipse plug-ins to assist the developer. This talk gives a walk-through of the key parts of the Yocto Project for developing embedded Linux projects. In addition, features will be described from the latest release of Yocto. At the end of the talk, developers should be able to start their own embedded project using the Yocto Project and use it for developing the next great embedded device.
16:15- 17:15 – Multiarch and Why You Should Care: Running, Installing and Cross-building with Multiple Architecture by Wookey, Linaro.
The Linux Foundation did not provide a summary for this session yet, but I suppose he’ll discuss about the MultiArch work he’s done with Debian. http://wiki.debian.org/Multiarch/Implementation
17:15 – 18:30 – Experiences with Device Tree Support Development for ARM-Based SoCs by Thomas Abraham, Samsung Electronics
The use of device tree on ARM based platforms allows leaner and reusable platform code and acts as a stepping stone for single kernel image for multiple ARM platforms which is required for Linux distributions. Some of the ARM based platforms have added considerable support for device tree based hardware discovery, solving critical challenges while migrating to device tree, experiences of which would be useful for other SoC platforms that are considering adopting device tree support. In this presentation, Thomas will discuss about the current status of device tree support for ARM platforms and tips on solving the common challenges while adding device tree support such as designing the bindings for device drivers, describing dependencies of different hardware blocks on each other, retrieving platform data from device tree, describing audio and video hardware configurations and restricting Linux specific configurations from spilling into device tree.

February 16

10:30 – 11:30 – Optimizing I/O Scheduler for Flash Devices and Benchmarking by Venkatraman S, Texas Instruments
Currently the I/O schedulers in Linux Kernel are oriented more towards rotational hard disks, and have a reasonable trade off between fairness and throughput. Low end flash devices and their usage in mobile and embedded devices provide a completely different I/O workload. The current I/O schedulers are not aware of the device characteristics and they can be enhanced to provide better support for low end flash devices. This paper provides the profiling data on the current I/O schedulers (CFQ, Deadline and NOOP), and compares it against a modified deadline scheduler which shows improvements during usage on low end flash devices (like SD cards and thumb drives).
11:30 – 12:30 – GStreamer 1.0 : No Longer Compromise Flexibility for Performance by Edward Hervey, Collabora
The now-5-year-old 0.10 series of the GStreamer multimedia framework has been used on numerous platforms and has proven to be a viable option for offering a common system for multimedia usages. However, a number of its limitations have made vendors introduce non-standard changes to some elements, in order to leverage the best performance from the underlying hardware, at the cost of no longer being 100% compatible with other applications and elements. During this talk Edward Hervey will introduce the changes and new API available in the GStreamer 1.0 series. Through some targeted examples he will explain how this allows for better power and memory usage, and how elements can better leverage underlying hardware and library features. All of that in a widely compatible way, allowing easier re-use of other existing elements and applications. This presentation is for developers who wish to understand what GStreamer can help them achieve and how.
16:15 – 17:15 – Linux on eMMC: Optimizing for Performance by Ken Tough, Intrinsyc
Embedded devices are increasingly choosing eMMC instead of raw NAND flash as their main storage, for increased independence from component vendors and changing storage densities. This presentation examines Linux configuration for eMMC, how to effectively measure your eMMC performance, and tips to improve it. Topics covered include: filesystem bearing on MMC/SD performance, IO scheduler configuration, and optimal partition layout. Target audience is embedded systems developers or users interested in getting the most out of their eMMC/SD card.
17:15 – 18:30 –Yocto Project Community BoFs by Jeff Osier-Mixon, Intel
The Yocto project is an embedded Linux ecosystem project under the guidance of the Linux Foundation. Yocto enables developers to create custom Linux-based systems for embedded projects regardless of architecture. This BoF is a gathering place for those interested in the Yocto project, the Poky Linux distribution, and the related BitBake and OpenEmbedded projects. The BoF consists of a short overview of each of its major points, and then open discussion. This BoFs is for embedded Linux developers who are either involved with or interested in the Yocto project. Attendees can expect an overview, some hands-on experience with the tools, and lively discussion with Yocto engineers.

February 17

09:00 – 10:00 – Userland Tools and Techniques For Linux Board Bring-Up and Systems Integration by Hunyue Yau,HY Research LLC
Given the popularity of SoC in embedded systems with vendor provided BSPs, features unique to a given hardware becomes more important in system bring ups and integrations. Linux offers a wide assortment of drivers but utilizing the driver on custom unproven hardware during bring up can be challenging. For hardware without Linux drivers, userland tools can be a major asset in evelopment and analysis/evaluation of new hardware. Linux offers a variety of userland tools that can be utilized for bring up. This sessions shows how such tools can be leveraged. This session is mainly for people bringing up custom hardware based on modifications of a reference design or evaluating/prototyping hardware regardless of the final choice of userland; session is applicable to Android and other Linux userland choices. Basic understanding of embedded hardware interfaces such as SPI, I2C, and GPIOs is suggested.
10:00 – 11:00 – Adapting Your Network Code for IPv6 Support by Mike Anderson, The PTR Group
IPv6 support is no longer a “sometime in the future” thing. We’ve exhausted the IPv4 address space and need to start transitioning our code to support IPv6. But, is this a big thing or a little thing? This presentation will outline the typical changes that need to be made to networking code to support IPv6 and describe transition strategies to enable use in a dual-stack environment. The target audience for this presentation is developers who want to take advantage of the new IPv6 address space. This presentation is targeted at intermediate-level developers with some understanding of the IP protocol stack.
11:30 – 12:30 – Producing the Beaglebone and Supporting It by Koen Kooi, lead developer of the Angstrom distribution,
During previous ELC(E) editions team beagleboard has presented about bits that went into the beaglebone software install like the systemd boot time efforts, javascript APIs for hardware access and OpenEmbedded. This talk is about how it all comes together and what users created with it. Koen will show how the boot is structured to accommodate launching all the webservices while keeping the “less than 10 seconds cold boot” goal. The JavaScript layer used in the factory examples to access things like GPIOs, LEDs and sensors hooked up to I2C, SPI, etc will also be looked into. Finally, several users project created with those building blocks will be showcased.
15:00 – 14:00 – Managing Kernel Modules with kmod by Lucas De Marchi, ProFUSION Embedded Systems
Kmod is a new project that aims to ease the management of kernel modules, replacing module-init-tools. Tasks such as loading, unloading and listing kernel modules are not restricted anymore to tools like modprobe because there’s a library called libkmod that does that job. Embedded systems can benefit from this library by operating directly on modules instead of forking new process every time an operation like that is needed. This presentation provides an overview how modules are handled in Linux, what was done in kmod to optimize querying and loading and how a system can use it to embed operation on modules into their initialization programs. Expected attendees are both those wanting to integrate embedded systems and programmers willing to use the new library or learning about managing kernel modules.

Those are just my choices among over 50 sessions. You can check the full schedule to find out which sessions suit you best.

You can register for ELC 2012 online.

There are two type of fees:

Professional Fee (If your company is paying for you to attend this event):
- 450 USD through 20 January (Standard)
- 550 USD thereafter (Late)
Hobbyist Fee: 70 USD

If you are particularly interested in Yocto Project, you can also attend Yocto Developer Day free of charge on the 14th of February 2012.

Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft)

Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.