Robert Schwebel

The talk starts with a short introduction of the Barebox bootloader. Recently, barebox gained several new features: one of the most prominent is multi image support with full initialization from the open firmware device tree. Using this method, it is now possible to generate bootloader binaries for a whole family of devices, just by writing an open firmware device tree. Porting Linux to new hardware has never been so easy.

Other new features include support for the freedesktop.org bootspec: This method to define "boot target" makes it much easier to realize redundancy-boot setups and in-system upgrade mechanisms for industrial devices. For community hardware, the bootspec makes it quite easy to boot standard distributions without taking care of all the ARM specialties.

The PTXdist build system recently had its 10th anniversary: time to look at the state of the project and the new features which have recently been developed by the community. The highlights of the last year are a new image generation mechanism, improved systemd support, running on OS X, the split up of runtime and build time dependencies, the start of SELinux support and of course a lot of package version bumps and cross build patch mainlining all over the place.

The spectrum of hardware ptxdist is able to cover is demonstrated with BSPs on quadcore Cortex-A9 with 1 GHz+ and on Cortex-M3 with 48 MHz.

This talk is for developers who need to integrate Embedded Linux systems, as well as for developers working on other cross build systems.