Konsulko Group engineer to speak at Yocto Project Summit

Konsulko Group senior engineer Leon Anavi will be presenting at the Yocto Project Virtual Summit, Tuesday, November 28 through Thursday, November 30, 2023.

Formerly known as the Yocto Project Developer Day, the Summit has an expanded scope to include both workshops for engineers building customized Linux distributions and applications, as well as an open forum where maintainers, trainers and users present papers on how the project is evolving and how they are using it.

On Wednesday, November 29, Leon will present Integrating VNC in Weston with the Yocto Project and OpenEmbedded. Weston 12 introduces Virtual Network Computing (VNC) support, allowing remote connection and control through graphical desktop sharing.

Leon will examine the technical aspects — dependance on Neat VNC and AML libraries, TLS support and user authentication — followed by a step by step tutorial to demonstrate remote connection from another computer.

The presentation aims to simplify the process of setting up the VNC backend in Weston and empower developers to utilize this powerful feature seamlessly within their projects.

We hope you will join us for this presentation, and all of this new edition of Yocto Project Virtual Summit.

Helping Yocto Project secure important new funding from STF

Yocto Project has received major funding from the Sovereign Tech Fund to aid and drive significant transformation. The funded work improves the long-term sustainability of the project by attracting a new generation of developers.

Konsulko Group is proud of the work done by principal engineer Denys Dmytriyenko and the Yocto Project Technical Steering Committee to help secure the funding. Together, they spent many hours over several months to identify development areas that can be self-contained and measured, then estimated required efforts for the proposal so the funding might be approved.

The work the Sovereign Tech Fund (STF) is commissioning aims to improve the Yocto Project’s efficiency, security, user experience, and developer engagement in these specific areas:

Build Process and Workflow

  • Core workflow improvements, including enhancements to build tooling and workflows.
  • Development of the Yocto Project Reference Binary Distribution, focusing on workflow improvements and policies.
  • Introduction of Patchtest, an automated testing tool for code patches submitted via mailing lists.

Security and Quality Improvements

  • Strengthening security processes and the security team.
  • Advancing Software Bill of Materials (SBOMs) for improved transparency.
  • Addressing tooling issues and enhancing quality-of-life features in Devtool, Recipetool, and Pseudo.

Integration and Usability Enhancements

  • Updates and improvements to Toaster, a web-based UI for BitBake.
  • Integration of VSCode with Yocto Project for enhanced developer features and usability.

Layer Management Standardization

  • Integration of OpenEmbedded Core best practices into Meta-OpenEmbedded.
  • Development of standard tools for managing Yocto layers, promoting layer tooling standardization.

STF is funded by the German Federal Ministry of Economics and Climate Action (BMWK) and supported by the German Federal Agency for Disruptive Innovation GmbH (SPRIND).

Konsulko Group a sponsor of Embedded Recipes 2023 in Paris

Now in its fifth edition, Embedded Recipes is a small, technically-focused, informal conference about embedded software and hardware, held in Paris, France on September 28 and 29, 2023.

With two days, 15+ presentations and lightning talks, Embedded Recipes takes a deep dive into the developments, contributions, tools and platforms that Open Source developers use to create solutions.

Konsulko Group is proud to be a supporter sponsor of Embedded Recipes 2023. We hope you will join our engineers, together with some of the main contributors of the embedded world from throughout Europe and North America, at the Fondation Biermans Lapotre in Paris for this event.

Konsulko Group updates Embedded Linux devices at TuxCon 2023

Held on June 10th and 11th, 2023 in the beautiful city of Plovdiv (Bulgaria), TuxCon 2023 marked the 10th anniversary of this annual local two-day conference. Organized by dedicated volunteers, the event aims to advocate the adoption of open source hardware and foster the use of free and open source software.

Konsulko Group intern Atanas Bunchev participated as a speaker, and demonstrated remote updates and troubleshooting of connected embedded Linux devices using Mender.io. The presentation was in Bulgarian and spread the word about the Yocto Project, OpenEmbedded and various Mender features among the local community.

Mender is an open-source, over-the-air (OTA) software update management platform specifically designed for embedded devices. It provides an efficient way for software updates and management of fleets of connected devices in various industries, such as IoT (Internet of Things), automotive, industrial automation, and healthcare. It provides options for ensuring the resilience of system-wide updates and also for updating individual applications. Furthermore debugging of devices is possible with the troubleshooting package, such as the File Transfer and Remote Terminal Add-ons.

Konsulko Group, a partner of Northern.tech, often works with Mender.io. If you are developing a new product, we would be thrilled to discuss how Konsulko’s engineering expertise and experience can contribute to your project. Or if you are a Linux software developer who is passionate about open source, we invite you to reach out to us regarding potential opportunities to join the Konsulko team.

Konsulko Group to speak at EOSS / ELC / ALS in Prague

Konsulko engineers will be giving two talks at Embedded Open Source Summit (EOSS), a new Linux Foundation umbrella event held in Prague, Czech Republic, June 27-30, 2023. Attending virtually is also an option. Incorporated into EOSS are the Embedded Linux Conference (ELC) and the Automotive Linux Summit Europe (ALS).

On Tuesday, June 27, Konsulko Principal Engineer Scott Murray will present a Lightning Talk: Vehicle Signal Specification and KUKSA.val Updates in AGL at ALS.

The Vehicle Signal Specification (VSS) has been included in the AGL UCB by incorporating the KUKSA.val project. Scott will provide an update on the work done for the upcoming Prickly Pike UCB release.

On Thursday, June 29 at ELC, Tim Orling, Konsulko Principal Engineer and Ilies Chergui of Medtronic will speak about Maintaining a Community BSP Layer: Updating Meta-Tegra Through Major Changes.

The meta-tegra BSP layer supports the NVIDIA Jetson family of systems-on-module and has an active OpenEmbedded for Tegra community. Tim and Ilies will discuss changes in the latest SDKs including the bootloader and the trusted OS, and how these affect secure boot and disk encryption implementations. They will also discuss changes needed to support over the air updates and cover how the community keeps up with upstream Open Embedded/Yocto Project changes, as well as the roadmap for support for future Jetson platforms and Yocto Project releases.

Please join Scott, Tim, and a good-sized contingent of our engineers in Prague (or virtually). Register here.

Scott Murray on VSS & KUKSA.val at AGL AMM & Embedded World

Konsulko Group Principal Software Engineer, Scott Murray will present Vehicle Signaling Specification and KUKSA.val in AGL at the Automotive Grade Linux All Member Meeting in Berlin on Thursday, March 9, 2023.

The Vehicle Signaling Specification (VSS) is an emerging standard to define and categorize vehicle signals. AGL members who attend the session will receive a high-level overview of what VSS and the related Vehicle Information Service Specification (VISS) provide. This will be followed by a discussion of how the KUKSA.val VSS implementation has been integrated into the AGL demonstration stack.

The following week, Scott will be on hand at the AGL stand at Embedded World (Hall 4, Stand 4-171) in Nuremberg, March 14-16. He’ll be happy to talk about VSS, KUKSA.val and many other AGL technical topics. Please stop by if you are visiting the show.

Konsulko connects RDP with Wayland, Weston & Yocto at FOSDEM

Taking place February 4 & 5, 2023 in the beautiful city of Brussels (Belgium), FOSDEM is a two-day event organized by volunteers to promote the widespread use of free and open source software.

This year, Konsulko Group senior software engineer Leon Anavi will present Ups and Downs with Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) on Wayland, Weston and the Yocto Project.

Leon’s tutorial provides the exact steps to build-from-scratch core-image-weston, setup RDP and remotely access the embedded device using wlfreerdp (for Wayland) or xfreerdp (for X11) from a personal computer with Linux in the same network. Examples will be based on the kirkstone long-term support release of Yocto Project.

Leon will also discuss the advantages and the disadvantages of RDP as well as some troubleshooting guidelines.

If you are attending FOSDEM, be sure to to catch this lightning talk at the Embedded, Mobile and Automotive devroom on Saturday.

Konsulko Group to speak at Yocto Project Virtual Summit

Konsulko Group’s Leon Anavi will present Porting Mender to New i.MX 8M Plus Machine and Working with Toradex BSP at the Yocto Project Virtual Summit. Leon will focus on porting Mender, a popular open source over-the-air software update solution, to Toradex Verdin iMX8M Plus SoM. He’ll examine the exact steps to build images for it and the Dahlia carrier board using the long-term support release of Yocto Project and the Toradex BSP.

Tim Orling will present two technical “lightning talks.” Running QEMU Images with virtio, virsh and virt-manager will discuss some experiences building and launching QEMU images with tools that leverage libvirt and virtio on a host. Creating an Installer that Leverages bmaptool will describe how to create an installer image using output from another image and writing all the partitions at once to the target using bmaptool.

The Yocto Project Virtual Summit is a 3-day technical conference for engineers, open source technologists, students and academia in the OSS space. Learn about Yocto Projects’ direction, get training on the next wave of embedded Linux technologies and network with industry peers, Yocto Project maintainers, OpenEmbedded maintainers and other experts.

Registration is $40 for the whole event. We hope you are able to join us.

Konsulko Group brings security focus to ELCE Dublin

At the Embedded Linux Conference in Dublin, Ireland, September 13-16, 2022, Konsulko Group’s Tim Orling will present “Tales from the Crypt: Implementing Secure Boot and Disk Encryption on Tegra Platforms.” Learn about the challenges and successes implementing effective security on Nvidia’s Tegra.

Secure Boot challenges

“Secure boot” needs different implementations on different platforms. For Tegra platforms, secure boot involves a one-time only burning of keys into the on-device fuses. Tim will share a reliable approach to confidently secure boot into the vendor’s Ubuntu-based OS before creating a Yocto Project-built OS.

Disk encryption with LUKS and dm-crypt

Extending this approach to disk encryption – testing the vendor’s OS before moving on to creating our own, Tim attempted to stay as close to the vendor’s tools (luks-srv and luks-srv-app) and design as possible, to try to “future proof” the implementation for newer releases of Linux for Tegra.

Extending for Over-the-Air updates

A/B flashing for OTA updates (e.g. rauc or mender) added additional challenges, generalizing the approach for the meta-tegra community. The end solution must address the bootloader, initramfs, kernel command line, /etc/crypttab, /etc/fstab and more. Add in the complexity of the partition table layout and flashing tools for Tegra platform, and it can be a wild ride.

Dublin and ELCE

The city of Dublin, Ireland has a storied history of literature, music and beverage. In September, Dublin will play host to the Embedded Linux Conference, Europe (ELCE), part of the Linux Foundation’s Open Source Summit.

Launched in 2005, Embedded Linux Conference is for companies and developers using Linux in embedded products. It gathers the technical experts working on embedded systems and applications for education and collaboration, paving the way for transformation in these important and far reaching areas.

To attend, register for Open Source Summit. You’ll also get access to all the other events in the Open Source Summit collection. Hope you will be able to join us in person or virtually.

Pick the Right Software Update Solution for Your Product

Live Webinar:

Software Update Mechanisms: Selecting the Best Solution for Your Embedded Linux Device

August 18, 2022 at 1 pm EDT/7pm CET

Get the foundation you need to make an informed decision on the right solution for your software update needs. Leon Anavi of Konsulko Group and Jeff Tranter of ICS will examine several different industry approaches, including A/B updates with a dual-redundant scheme, delta updates, container-based updates and combined strategies, as well as the leading technologies that support these approaches.

You can find complete information and register here for the free webinar on the ICS website. Hope you’ll join us on August 18.