Embedded Recipes is a conference held in Nice, France which focuses on open-source embedded systems. It’s organisers accurately describe the conference as “talks, workshops, discussions, food, friends and the beach”. The Good Penguin attended (and sponsored) the event and in this blog post we’ll share our highlights.
The CRA and what it means for us – Greg Kroah-Hartman, Linux Foundation
The Cyber Resilience Act (CRA), which came into force in December 2024, is regulation that introduces mandatory cybersecurity requirements for all products sold into the EU market. This has been a hot topic in recent times and one that has created uncertainty amongst open-source contributors. The focus of this talk was on the obligations that may apply to individual developers that contribute to or maintain open-source projects. The talk described how an individual developer may fall under the remit of the CRA and be considered an ‘open-source software steward’. However, the speaker’s message was that there is no need to panic as the obligations are very light and you may already be meeting them. The talk was informative with lots of pointers to further information.
Watch the talk here and see the schedule for slides (when they become available).
Perfetto profiling & tracing for Upstream Kernel Development – Zimuzo Ezeozue, Google
One of the benefits of attending a conference like Embedded Recipes is that you get to learn about useful things that you didn’t know existed – this talk was an example of that. In this talk the speaker introduced tooling made by Google named ‘Perfetto‘ which provides performance instrumentation and trace analysis. It’s comparable to tools like LLTng and KernelShark. Whilst it has it origins in Android, it’s a full class Linux citizen that even has a Yocto layer. The tool consists of a utility named tracebox which captures data and a web-based UI for processing and visualising captured data. The UI can be parse a variety of inputs besides the output from tracebox such as perf output. The talk walked through a variety of use interesting use cases.
The questions asked after the talk were also interesting, many of these centred around how it compares with other tooling (most people had only used a single tool, though it seems Perfetto may have advantages when tracing at scale) and the ability to self-host the UI (which you can) rather than use the Google hosted web UI.
Watch the talk here and see the schedule for slides (when they become available).
Writing Linux Real-Time Applications – John Ogness, Linutronix
This talk is a ‘must-watch’ for anyone attempting to write real time applications for the first time – And for many people, it will be a real eye-opener. Linux is capable of being used in real-time applications, it has been for a long time. It’s even easier since v6.12 as the required support has been included. But this doesn’t mean that any and every application will have real time properties – Linux is after all, a general purpose operating system. Building applications that meet real time requirements require careful development in terms of both their structure and the kernel features they use. This was a well presented talk that focused on the fundamental concepts of real time Linux from a user-space perspective. The highlight of this talk was learning of the existence of a new kernel Runtime Verifier (RV) named ‘rtapp’ that will log (via trace events or printk) when real-time applications do things they shouldn’t. This will be a very valuable tool for anyone validating or developing real time applications.
If this is an area you’re looking into, then it’s also worth watching a more detailed talk John presented a while back at The Embedded Linux Conference Europe – you can watch that here. The presenter has also recently published a blog post that provides additional details which can be found here.
Watch the talk here and see the schedule for slides (when they become available).
Yocto’s hidden gem: OTA and seamless updates with systemd-sysupdate – Martín Abente Lahaye, Igalia
It’s often difficult to keep up with the pace of systemd development and so you’d be forgiven for not being aware of a feature of systemd known as systemd-sysupdate. It was introduced in systemd 251 a few years ago and provides a means to “atomically update the host OS, container images, portable service images or other sources”. This ‘lighting talk‘ focused on how systemd-sysupdate can be combined with systemd-boot to implement a Yocto update mechanism. It’s an interesting idea and will be interesting to see this used in real products.
Watch the talk here and see the schedule for slides (when they become available).
libcamera: Past Present Future – Kieran Bingham, Ideas on Board
Making use of image sensors on an embedded system is increasingly complex, to take full advantage of the sensor and processing elements (which are often on the system-on-chip) your application may need to interface with a variety of kernel devices via the media controller, V4L2 video and subdev APIs. You’ll application may also need to develop absent image processing algorithms. The libcamera project provides a user-space library that abstracts these complexities and provides a clean API for applications to make use of. It supports Linux, Android and Chrome OS and has plugins to support Python, GStreamer, Pipewire and V4L2 based applications. This talk provided a brief summary of the project and where it is going next.
Watch the talk here and see the schedule for slides (when they become available).
More information on the Embedded Recipes conference and the full programme can be found here.
Cover image was created by Sparkelle (Yan) and licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.