Articles by Robert Schwebel
Managing Complexity with Open Source
A few days ago, something exciting happened: I revisited my very first embedded system - a 34 year old stepper motor controller, driving the telescope mount of the Public Observatory Rothwesten, which was built by me back when I was in class 12 in highschool. Comparing those embedded systems from back in the days with the recent industrial systems, it is impressive to see that the latter ones are not manageable any more without the use of open source software.
Chemnitzer Linux-Tage 2023
After the Corona break, the Chemnitzer Linux-Tage will actually take place in real life again, and the Pengutronix team will have eight (!) talks there.
FOSDEM 2023
The Pengutronix team is on it's way to FOSDEM in Brussels! We are looking forward to many interesting discussions with developers of different open source software components - be it the Linux kernel, Debian, KiDAC, FreeCAD etc ...
rsc's Diary: ELC-E 2022 - Day 4
Friday, the last day of ELC-E 2022, is traditionally the day of the Embedded Linux Closing Game, with Tim Bird reporting about the embedded Linux world (universe?) domination progress and the overall state of the union. Of course, there were again several interesting talks.
rsc's Diary: ELC-E 2022 - Day 3
The Convention Centre is directly at the water front of the Liffey river, just a few walking minutes away from O'Connell Bridge, Temple Bar and Trinity College. Visiting ELC-E is always a good opportunity to visit interesting cities in Europe. However, here is my story of the talks I heard on day 3.
rsc's Diary: ELC-E 2022 - Day 2
The Dublin Convention Centre is huge - there is more than enough space for all the developers participating in the Open Source Summit. Fortunately, the talks will be on YouTube after the conference, so it's no problem that one can only hear a small selection of talks. However, here is my report of the talks I heard on the 2nd day of the conference.
rsc's Diary: ELC-E 2022 - Day 1
After two years with online conferences, the embedded Linux community once again meets in person for their annual Embedded Linux Conference Europe in Dublin, Ireland this year. Since many years, ELC-E is part of the Linux Foundation's Open Source Summit, and the best opportunity of the year to meet other Linux kernel and wider core ecosystem developers and discuss recent and future technological topics.
Pengutronix Kernel Contributions in 2021
2022 has started, and although Corona had a huge impact on our workflow, the Pengutronix team again made quite some contributions to the Linux kernel. The last kernel release in 2020 was 5.10, the last one in 2021 was 5.15, so let's have a look at what happened in between.
Smart City - vom Rapid Prototyping bis zur Tragfähigen Infrastruktur
Wir wollen zum Bundesweiten Digitaltag am 18.6.2021 das Thema "Smarte Städte" ein bisschen von der technischen Seite beleuchten, aber keine Angst: es bleibt für alle verständlich.
rsc's Diary: ELC-E 2019 - Day 3
Day 3 at ELC-E started slowly, almost no interesting talks in the morning, so after a long evening with community networking, I had some time to keep up with my blog post. But finally, here is day 3 of my report from europe's largest embedded linux conference...
rsc's Diary: ELC-E 2019 - Day 2
The 2nd day at ELC-E started again with lots of keynotes, so I took the time to meet people at the sponsor showcase area. It's impressive to see that more and more of our industry customers come to these community conferences as well! A better integration of corporate developers with the Embedded Linux community is definitely a good move.
rsc's Diary: ELC-E 2019 - Day 1
Day 1 at ELC-E started with Kernel-CI being a Linux Foundation project now. Read more about the talks I heard today in Lyon below...
ELC-E 2019
Tomorrow, Embedded Linux Conference Europe 2019 starts in Lyon, france, and as every year, Pengutronix crew uses this opportunity to present our recent open source activities and to meet other Linux and OSS developers. Here's the list of our talks during the next days:
15 Years of i.MX in Mainline Linux
Today it has been 15 years since we mainlined support for Freescale/NXP's i.MX architecture in the Linux kernel! That was one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for (industrial Linux users') mankind :-) Here is some background about why it happened and what you might want to learn from history for your next embedded Linux project.
Diary: Chemnitzer Linux Tage 2019
In this article we are writing our diary about the two fascinating days at the Chemnitzer Linux Tage 2019. We invite you to visit us at our booth. This year the OSADL is our guest.
Pengutronix Contributions to Linux 5.0
Linux 5.0 is out, and while Linus keeps on telling everyone that the number has no special meaning at all, we again contributed about 90 patches as part of our work on industrial projects.
rsc's Diary: ELC-E 2018 - Day 3
This is my report from the 3rd day of Embedded Linux Conference Europe (ELC-E) 2018 in Edinburgh.
rsc's Diary: ELC-E 2018 - Day 2
This is my report from the 2nd day of Embedded Linux Conference Europe (ELC-E) 2018 in Edinburgh.
rsc's Diary: ELC-E 2018 - Day 1
This is my report from the first day of Embedded Linux Conference Europe (ELC-E) 2018 in Edinburgh.
What Kernel Should I Use (Embedded Edition)
Some days ago, Greg Kroah-Hartmann wrote a great blogpost about Which Stable Kernel One Should Use?. I fully agree with his position; however, I'd like to make some additions for the industry device manufacturer use case and some common pitfalls and misunderstandings we see in that area.
Embedded World 2018: Etnaviv on MX8M!
Every year's end-of-winter highlight starts next Tuesday: Embedded World 2018, and like every year, it is our main trade show and a good opportunity to meet many long-term customers in person. This year's highlight of the highlight: We have Etnaviv and Wayland running on MX8M!
First i.MX 8M Patches posted for Mainline
Eight days after NXP announced the immediate availability of the i.MX 8M processor family, Pengutronix developer Lucas Stach today posted a first set of 11 patches to support i.MX 8M in the mainline kernel (linux-gpio, linux-clk, linux-arm-kernel and linux-netdev).
rsc's Diary: ELC-E 2017 - Day 3
Day 3 of the Embedded Linux Conference Europe 2017 in Prague is over, all of our talks have been absolved successfully and we made many new community contacts and refreshed old ones. Here is my report.
rsc's Diary: ELC-E 2017 - Day 2
The second day of ELC-E is over. This is my report.
rsc's Diary: ELC-E 2017 - Day 1
This is my report from the first day of Embedded Linux Conference Europe (ELC-E) 2017 in Prague.
All Systems Go 2017: Updating Embedded Systems
At the All Systems Go conference in Berlin, Michael Obrich reported at 2017-10-22 about "Updating Embedded Systems - Putting it all together", based on the experiences of the Pengutronix integration team.
Talk at All Systems Go 2017 Conference
Before the ELC-E conference starts in Prague, Berlin hosts the All Systems Go conference, the successor of the systemd conference. In times of increasing IT security incidents with IoT devices, updating such systems in a secure and reliable way becomes more and more important. Michael Olbrich's talk outlines the challenges and possible solutions for a robust update process.
Pengutronix Talks at ELC-E in Prague
The autumn conference highlight is the Embedded Linux Conference Europe (ELC-E), which takes place in Prague this year. The Pengutronix team will be present with four talks and two demo points / showcases, presenting current open source projects (RAUC, labgrid, etnaviv).
Talk: Long Term Maintenance at Embedded Recipes (Paris)
While the technical side of building embedded Linux systems is mostly solved, running such systems connected to the internet over a long time has its own challenges. At the Embedded Recipes Conference in Paris, Marc Kleine-Budde will talk about establishing a sustinable workflow for this usecase tomorrow (2017-09-26).
DistroKit - A Playground BSP for PTXdist
At Pengutronix we are using PTXdist to automatically integrate many industrial embedded Linux projects. Some time ago I started DistroKit: This example BSP shall be able to demonstrate PTXdist features.
OSADL Networking Day 2017
In the last talk before lunch, my colleague Enrico Jörns talked about the RAUC (Robust Auto Update Controller) framework.
labgrid: Test Automation Framework Released
At Pengutronix, one of the most important tasks in our industrial linux projects is testing of embedded systems. While testing is easy on the component level (there are many unit test frameworks around), it is increasingly difficult on system level. Tests do not only run code and compare results, they need to bring the device-under-test into different states (i.e. "bootloader", "linux console", "power off"). If you have many embedded Linux devices, remote-controlling power, serial consoles, network, switches, reset lines, SD cards in scalable, automatic labs is also on the wishlist.
RAUC v0.1.1 released
RAUC is making progress, and my colleagues Enrico Jörns and Jan Lübbe finally pushed out a new release today that reflects what happened during the last months. Updating embedded linux systems in the field in a secure and robust way becomes more and more important; we had many interesting talks with our customers during the last time, and some of the new ideas are already finding their way into the codebase. However, there is still a lot of work ahead, and if you have more ideas, either drop us a note on the community channels, send patches or github pull requests, or ask for commercial help!
Chemnitz Linux Days 2017
In the first talk today, Michael Tretter reports about the current state of Open Source Graphics for Embedded Systems. For regular observers, it's probably not surprising that the focus will be on i.MX6, Etnaviv and the IPU.
Pengutronix Contributions to v4.10
Here is a short report about Pengutronix' contributions to the 4.10 kernel. It mainly contains more improvements for the i.MX6 graphics and video subsystem, Etnaviv, Marvell Orion and Altera SoCFPGA.
ELC Europe 2016, Berlin
At the ELC Europe 2016 in Berlin our colleagues Jan Lübbe and Marc Kleine-Budde are talking about two interesting and important presentations about Kernel longterm maintenance strategies and verified boot.
Free Linux BSP for ARM/x86 Emulated Platforms
Hildesheim, Germany - Pengutronix offers a new release of its free Board Support Package for generic and emulated platforms. It provides all required components to get everything run in a QEMU environment, and is dedicated for beginners in the embedded world. And for the experienced user it can act as a quick start for her/his own development as well.
Pengutronix Techweek 2014
During week 25/2016 (2016-06-16 to 2016-06-20) the Pengutronix team is out-of-office, due to the yearly internal TechWeek event. During that time, our availability in the Hildesheim office is reduced and we can only be contacted by e-Mail.
Barebox-2014.03.0
The Barebox project has released version 2014.03.0 of its bootloader:
Pengutronix' Activities in Linux 3.13
During our embedded linux projects, the kernel engineers at Pengutronix do a lot of improvements which end up in the mainline kernel. Here's a short story about what went into the recently released 3.13: