Luca Ceresoli

Producing a Linux-based electronic device requires to put together lots of open source software packages, which is a complex task.

Complying to the licensing obligations for each of them is also complex, especially if you are not a lawyer. Not complying is immoral, illegal and risky.

Discover how your build system can help you!

With live demos, Luca will introduce you to:

• how Buildroot builds all the needed software components in a simple way;
• which are the obligations for the most common licenses;
• what Buildroot can (and what it cannot) do to help you in being compliant.

The Xilinx Zynq UltraScale+ MPSoC (aka ZynqMP) is a powerful and complex chip featuring 64-bit cores, 32-bit realtime cores, a large FPGA, a GPU, video codecs and dedicated power management and security units.

Luca will first give a brief overview of the hardware architecture and how it differs from other SoCs.

Then he will explain with technical details how Linux can fully leverage the SoC resources. FPGA and booting issues will be covered in detail, but using the hardware accelerators and software support will also be discussed.

The main topics covered will be:

• Overview of the hardware.
• Available software support from Xilinx and from the community.
• How the peculiar CPU+FPGA design effectively allows to design "your own SoC", with the technical steps to implement this with Linux.
• Why booting is nontrivial on this SoC and the currently available ways to boot Linux.
• Handling the H.264/H.265 hardware codecs.
• GPU support issues.

Focus will be given to how much open source technologies can be used with the ZynqMP SoCs, why this matters, and the current status of open source resources with respect to the alternatives.

System-on-Chip vendors typically provide a board support package (BSP) which should be a good starting point to develop the software for an embedded Linux system. However they often seem to misunderstand what the software designers want, and deliver something that makes their life harder without any apparent benefit.

In this talk Luca will share some of his experiences with such vendor BSPs, featuring jurassic kernels, non-working drivers, non-existing bootloaders, code of appallingly bad quality, ineffective customer support and Windows-only tools.

You will discover why he spent weeks in understanding, fixing and working around BSPs instead of just using them. The effects on the final product quality will be described as well.

Luca will also discuss what the options are when you face such a BSP, and what both hackers and vendors can do to improve the situation for everybody's benefit.