Embedded Linux Conference 2016 and OpenIoT Summit 2016 Schedule

The Embedded Linux Conference 2016 and the OpenIoT summit 2016 will take place on April 4 – 6, 2016 in San Diego, California, and over 800 attended will meet including kernel & system developers, userspace developers, and product vendors. The Linux Foundation has recently published the schedule, so I’ve had a look at some of the talks, and designed my own virtual schedule to find out more the current development focus although I won’t attend.

Monday April 4

10:40am – 11:30am – Linux Connectivity for IoT by Marcel Holtmann, Intel OTC

There are many connectivity solutions that available for IoT. For example Bluetooth Low Energy, 802.15.4, Zigbee, OIC, Thread and others. This presentation will provide and overview of the existing technology and upcoming standard and how they tie into the Linux kernel and its ecosystem.

11:40 – 12:30 – BoF: kernelci.org: A Million Kernel Boots and Counting by Kevin Hilman, BayLibre

The kernelci.org project is currently over 1500 kernel boot tests per day for upstream kernels on a wide variety of hardware. This BoF will provide a very brief overview of kernelci.org and then be a forum for discussion and feature requests, how to participate and next steps.

14:00 – 14:50 – Hello, Brillo by Dave Smith, NewCircle

Brillo is Google’s latest embedded offering, based on Android, intended for low-power devices in the IoT market. But what does “based on Android” really mean? In this session, we will compare the Brillo stack to Android, examining what has been added as well as removed. You will learn how Google attempts to bring secure solutions to IoT using Brillo and Weave—Google’s IoT connectivity protocol. We will also discuss the current status of user space application development on the platform.

15:00 – 15:50 – Reducing the Memory Footprint of Android by Bernhard Rosenkränzer, Linaro

The Android team inside the Linaro Mobile Group has been working on reducing the memory footprint of the Android system – cutting around 70 MB off the memory used by a newly booted AOSP build on Nexus 7.

This talk describes what techniques we have used to save memory without having too much of a negative impact on performance.

16:10 – 17:00 – Bringing Display and 3D to the C.H.I.P Computer by Maxime Ripard, Free Electrons

Every modern multimedia-oriented ARM SoC usually has a bunch of display controllers, to drive a screen or an LCD panel, and a GPU, to provide 3D acceleration. The framework of choice to support these controllers in Linux is the DRM subsystem.

This talk will walk through the DRM stack, the architecture of a DRM/KMS driver and the interaction between the display and GPU drivers. The presentation is based on the work we have done to develop a DRM driver for the Allwinner SoCs display controller, as part of enabling the C.H.I.P platform with the upstream Linux kernel. The work done to make the ARM Mali OpenGL driver work on top of a mainline DRM/KMS driver will also be detailed.

17:10 – 18:00 – Bluetooth on Modern Linux by Szymon Janc

This presentation will help audience to better understand how Linux supports fast changing and evolving technology as Bluetooth. It will provide comprehensive guide on BlueZ 5 Bluetooth stack architecture demystifying transition from BlueZ 4 systems. This includes integration with external components like PulseAudio or NetworkManager. Audience will also have good overview of how Bluetooth on Linux can help building Internet of Things by supporting bleeding edge features like LE Connection Oriented Channels, 6LowPAN, LE Secure Connections and more.

18:10 – 19:00 – BoF: Device Tree by Frank Rowand

The Linux kernel Device Tree continues to evolve. The presentation portion of the BoF will include improvements completed over the last year, the status of partially completed projects, and plans for the coming year. Suggestions for changes and improvements to Device Tree will be solicited from the participants. Come meet Device Tree maintainers and contributors.

Please bring questions, complaints, solutions, reports of what is not working for you, and wish-lists.

Tuesday April 5

9:00 – 9:50 – Implementing Miniature Smart Home by Constantin Musca, Intel

We are at the beginning of a new era of technologies computing where almost every device communicates with each other or communicates with their environment. It is about the so called Internet of things (IoT).

A major line of investigation is the smart home and the benefits of having one and what it takes to make a home “smart”. These solutions are to make life easier and free more time. How cool is to be able to control the temperature, lights, music or garage door remotely.

The smart house system runs on a Brillo OS device which exposes standard peripherals’ APIs and can be controlled through the standard Weave interface using your Google account with commands like: open_garaje_door, set_living_temperature, play_song or close_curtains.

For the moment we only implemented this solution on a miniature house, but we are looking forward to extend it to a larger scale and use it in real

I’ve found a demo of the project, and they’ve actually used a house as big as “standard” apartment… Maybe it’s only considered miniature if you live in the US…

10:00 – 10:50 – Developing a Standard Interface for Drones by Tully Foote, Open Source Robotics Foundation

With the proliferation of a huge variety of drones it is becoming more important to develop standard interfaces which can enable software to be reused across whole classes of airframes. In his work on ROS (the Robot Operating System), Tully Foote has been actively involved in many standard interface proposals and refinements and is the maintainer of many of the core message definitions. In this talk he will review the important aspects of designing standard interfaces using examples from indoor robotics, autonomous cars, and more. The talk will conclude with a proposed standard interface for drones with the hope of sparking further discussion in the greater drone community.

11:20 – 12:10 – Linux Power Management Optimization on the Nvidia Jetson Platform by Merlin Friesen, Golden Gate Research

Powerful cellular System on Chip (SoC) Application Processors with multiple ARM cores and a vast array of peripherals are now readily available for non cellular applications and are finding use in areas such as vision processing, robotics and drones. These devices, due to their use in mobile smart phones and tablets, have highly optimized power management features and come with Linux kernels that complement the hardware.

The Linux based Nvidia Jetson platform is used in this presentation to give developers a hands on overview of SoC power management and techniques they can use to monitor and improve power consumption in their own designs.

14:00 – 14:50 – libiio – Access to Sensor Devices Made Easy by Lars-Peter Clausen, Analog Devices

The Linux IIO (Industrial IO) framework is tasked with handling configuration and data aggregation from and to all sorts of sensors and data converters including ADCs, DACs, temperature sensors, accelerators, chemical analysis, light sensors, lifestyle sensor and many more. libiio is a system library hides the low-level details of the IIO kernel ABI and provides a simple yet complete programming interface. It implements functionality often required by applications which want to access IIO sensor devices.

This presentation will give an introduction to the core concepts of libiio, it’s API and how it can be used in applications to access sensor devices, enabling attendees to develop their own applications being able to access sensor devices fast and efficiently. In addition it will discuss the existing infrastructure and tools that have been built around libiio.

15:00 – 15:50 – Communication for IoT: MQTT Development and Integration by Rodrigo Chiossi, Intel

MQTT is a lightweight publish/subscribe protocol intended for small sensors and mobile devices. It is designed to work with high-latency and unreliable networks and is the protocol of choice of many IoT solutions, such as IBM Bluemix and Amazon AWS IoT. MQTT is also one of the communication protocols of the Soletta Project, which uses Mosquitto, a compact open source implementation of MQTT, as backend.

This technical talk is focused on the integration between Mosquitto and Soletta. The Soletta MQTT API will be presented along with the process of integrating Mosquitto into Soletta’s mainloop. We then discuss the main limitations and problems of this process, and present the solutions applied. Lastly, we take a look at live demos of Soletta MQTT working with IBM Bluemix and Amazon AWS, with code snippets and development guidelines for those platforms.

Wednesday April 6

9:00 – 9:50 – Static Code Checking in the Linux Kernel by Arnd Bergmann, Linaro

As a maintainer of the arm-soc tree, Arnd is responsible for the quality of a lot of new code that gets merged each release. His dirty secret is that he never runs any of it on real hardware, but that makes static compile-time checking at even more important.

In this presentation, Arnd shows his setup for finding and fixing bugs, and gives an overview of many of the available tools, including kernelc, sparse, coccinelle, clang, checkpatch and coverity.

10:00 – 10:50 – HDMI CEC: What? Why? How? by Hans Verkuil, Cisco Systems Norway

The HDMI connector features a CEC (Consumer Electronics Control) pin that allows connected devices to detect and control one another. This talk describes what CEC is, why you would want to implement support for it, and how you can use a new kernel framework and API to support this HDMI feature.

This talk will include a short introduction of the upcoming CEC framework and the utilities that use it.

11:05 – 11:55 – Embedded Linux 3D Sensing: Minnowboard Meets RealSense by Miguel Bernal Marin, Intel

Robots and Drones use sensing devices (like cameras, lasers range-finders, ultrasonic sonars) to get information from external environment and it is used avoid obstacles or create maps. The use of 3D depth cameras helps to do these task easily. But the current 3D depth cameras in the market are heavy to load on a drone or the smaller doesn’t have Linux support. In this presentation, Miguel will explain how to use the Intel RealSense 3D camera in a Linux environment using a Minnowboard Max, a small 3D camera that can be used in outdoors. In addition, Miguel will go into detail on how to use it using the Clear Linux Project for Intel Architecture.

13:35 – 14:25 – Survey of Open Hardware 2016 by John Hawley, Intel

This is a generalized talk where we’ll generally compare, contrast and discuss various things that have happened in the last year regarding Open Hardware. In 2016 this will cover things that happened at the last OSHWA meeting, various new devices that are on the market, and generally focus on devices capable of running and operating system, and not micro-controllers.

14:35 – 15:25 – Zephyr Project: An RTOS to change the face of IoT by Anas Nashif

An increasing number of developers need a scalable, real-time operating system designed specifically for small-footprint IoT devices. It needs to be affordable, easy to use and built with input from the developers using it. An open source RTOS can’t just be called “open” – it must live and breathe “the open source way.” Developers should have influence over the direction of the project and be able to impact its software and hardware architecture support. The OS should also maximize interconnectivity between other devices, contain powerful development tools and come with customizable capabilities. The Zephyr Project offers just that.

This class will give an overview of Zephyr Project. Zephyr is a small, scalable, real-time operating system designed specifically for small-footprint IoT edge devices. Its modular design allows you to create an IoT solution that meets all of your device needs, regardless of architecture. It is also embedded with powerful development tools that will, over time, enable developers to customize its capabilities.

Launched in partnership with the Linux Foundation, the Zephyr project is a truly open source solution focused on empowering community development. The goal of Zephyr is to allow commercial and open source developers alike to define and develop IoT solutions best suited for their needs.

There are so many other interested talks that I did not mention in my list, but that’s what happens when you do a schedule.

You can register online to attend both Embedded Linux Conference and OpenIOT Summit 2016. The fees are as follows:

~~Early Registration Fee – US$550 through February 21, 2016~~
Standard Registration Fee – US$650 through March 13, 2016
Late Registration Fee – US$850 after March 14, 2015
Student Registration Fee – US$175
Hobbyist Registration Fee – US$175. You’ll need to contact events [at] linuxfoundation.org to receive a discount code, and you must pay for the fee yourself.

Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft)

Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.