Open Source Firmware Conference 2018
At September 12-15 the first conference focusing exclusively on open source firmware took place in Erlangen, Germany - the OSFC 2018. The mission of this conference is to provide an appropriate platform to bring together as many Open Source projects, hardware manufacturers and developers as possible, in order to collaborate, share knowledge and push the firmware development in an Open Source manner.
Different topics related to the open firmware developments mostly targeting different bootloader or payload variants were presented at the conference. LinuxBoot, coreboot, U-Boot and TianoCore and ARM Trusted Firmware related topics were intensively covered in different talks.
Pengutronix and the barebox bootloader project were represented by Sascha Hauer and Oleksij Rempel. While we didn't do any presentation ourselves we had a chance to communicate with many developers representing different projects with open or even closed nature.
From different talks I would note the following:
- many vendors do things and not always contribute back to initial open source projects - (this is not new)
- some vendors are looking for open source alternatives, for example for BIOS, because government related customers forbid usage of closed software for security reasons.
- almost all companies make their own variants of bootloaders, with special use case covering specific hardware.
All in all, it was an interesting conference, with many good talks and insights into other firmware projects' motivation.
Further Readings
Pengutronix at FOSDEM and OE Workshop 2026
On January 31st and Febuary 1st 2026 it is once again time for waffles, Belgian beer and Open Source: FOSDEM will take place at ULB in Brussels. With over 8k hackers, FOSDEM is the biggest and most important Open Source conference in Europe. One other event riding the wave of FOSDEM is the the OpenEmbeddedWorkshop. The full list of co-located events is here. We are participating in both FOSDEM and OE Workshop and are looking forward to many interesting discussions with developers of different Open Source software components – be it the Linux kernel, Yocto, Labgrid, Debian, and others...
Pengutronix at SPS in Nuremberg
After some years of absence, Pengutronix is back at the SPS 2025 in Nuremberg. You will find us in hall 6, booth 6-350C. We are looking forward to connecting with old and new friends, partners and customers. As usual, we will be showcasing demonstrators on current topics at our exhibition stand.
GStreamer Conference 2025
This years GStreamer conference was held at the end of Oktober in London, UK. Since GStreamer is our goto-framework for multimedia applications, Michael Olbrich and me were attending this years conference to find out what's new in GStreamer and get in touch with the community.
Pengutronix at the Single Pair Ethernet Forum in Ludwigsburg
Single Pair Ethernet (SPE) is a set of new Ethernet standards in which communication works over a single pair of wires. Embedded Linux is ideally suited, especially for the smallest nodes connected via SPE. Pengutronix is a partner of this year's Single Pair Ethernet Forum in Ludwigsburg and will also be giving a presentation.
Talks, Workshops, Time at the Beach - Embedded Recipes 2025
I was part of a small delegation of Pengutronixians at the Embedded Recipes conference this year in Nice, France. We had a great time there, so let's take a look back at the great talks we have seen, the labgrid workshop we held and our time in Nice in general.
Looking back at Embedded World 2025
An exciting week is over: Embedded World 2025 in Nuremberg! We had lots of interesting talks with our visitors and other exhitibors, and for me the most important result was: connected embedded Linux devices won't be possible anymore without a good maintenance strategy for the kernel, without secureboot and a solid updating concept, taken that companies have to fulfill the european regulations of the cyber resilience act!
Bringing Barebox into OE-Core (Yocto)
This blog post chronicles the multi-year journey to get Barebox accepted into OE-Core—from the early attempts to the eventual success in October 2024. Along the way, we’ll explore the technical hurdles we faced, the community discussions that shaped the process, and the improvements we added to both OE and Barebox.
DSA in Barebox
The v2022.05.0 Release of barebox introduced initial support for the Distributed Switch Architecture (DSA) Framework. DSA is originally a subsystem from the Linux Kernel, which exposes the individual ports of a network switch IC as virtual network interfaces.
Foster mvebu Support in barebox
barebox works great on NXP's i.MX platforms. While there is some support for Marvell's mvebu platform, it is not even near being complete. The main limitation is in my eyes that there is no code to initialize RAM settings on these machines.