Konsulko Group brings security focus to ELCE Dublin

/in /by

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

/in /by

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.

Join us at Embedded World in Nuremberg, June 21-23, 2022

/in /by

Are you coming to Embedded World? Konsulko Group will be there, too, supporting our partners and friends.

Be sure to stop by the Automotive Grade Linux (AGL) stand in Hall 4 to see the AGL ecosystem and to say hello.

Better still, if you’d like to set up an appointment at the show to talk with us about your company’s embedded products and your software development requirements, please contact us to set up a meeting.

Konsulko Group speaking at Embedded Linux Conference Austin

/in /by

Konsulko Group engineers will make two presentations at the Embedded Linux Conference North America (ELC) in Austin, Texas (and virtual), June 21-24, 2022.

Software Update Mechanisms

On Wednesday, June 22 at 2:35pm CDT (Texas time), Leon Anavi will present How to Choose a Software Update Mechanism for Embedded Linux Devices.

This talk will look at the advantages and disadvantages of widely-used industry approaches: A/B updates with dual redundant scheme, delta updates, container-based updates and combined strategies. Open source technologies such as Mender, RAUC and libostree-based solutions implement these strategies and provide tools to manage updates of multiple devices. Leon will discuss how to choose an appropriate open source solution to implement for a specific project.

Edge Computing with RISC-V and Linux

On Thursday, June 23 at 2:55pm CDT, Vitaly Vul and Maria Vul will present Edge Computing with RISC-V Platforms Running XIP Linux.

XIP stands for eXecute In Place, allowing code to be executed directly from flash without copying the code to RAM first, making it possible to run Linux on such RISC-V devices as Kendryte K210, which has only 8 MB of SRAM, not only for demonstration purposes but for real applications as well. This talk will cover running edge computing specifically on K210 under Linux with XIP enabled.

Part of Open Source Summit North America

These and many other excellent presentations at ELC are part of the Linux Foundation’s Open Source Summit. We hope you will join us in June.

At Yocto Project Summit: A/B Linux updates with RAUC

/in /by

Konsulko Group Senior Software Engineer Leon Anavi will be speaking about A/B Linux updates with RAUC and meta-rauc-community: now and in the future at the Yocto Project Virtual Summit on December 1, 2021 at 12:20 (UTC).

About the presentation

RAUC is a safe and secure open source software solution for A/B updates of embedded Linux devices. It supports the Yocto Project and OpenEmbedded, Buildroot and PTXdist. Upgrades are performed through RAUC bundles which can be installed either through the network or the old-fashioned way with a USB stick.

In 2020, the layer meta-rauc-community was created to provide examples of how to integrate the lightweight update client RAUC on various machines. Leon will talk about the evolution of meta-rauc-community and provide guidelines for porting to new machines using Yocto and OpenEmbedded BSP layers.

About the Summit

The Yocto Project Summit is a 3-day virtual technical conference for engineers, open source technologists, students and academia in the OSS space. The classes will be presented in Zoom. It will be highly interactive, with chat sessions, side rooms, teaching assistants, and hands-on exercises with live class accounts. Registration is $40 for the entire conference.

We hope you will be able to join us at this always important event.

Embedded Linux support and development for PHYTEC customers

/in /by

PHYTEC provides off-the-shelf System on Modules (SOMs) in support of advanced Arm Cortex devices. PHYTEC SOMs are a rapid, agile and long-term solution that enables product developers to simplify processes, streamline development, reduce timelines and minimize risk.

Konsulko Group is partnering with PHYTEC to offer Embedded Linux support and development to PHYTEC customers, integrating up-to-date drivers and other community releases on PHYTEC SOMs using PHYTEC’s reference Yocto Project Linux distribution.

We hope to see you at the Embedded Linux Conference in Seattle (and virtually), September 27-30, 2021. Konsulko will be in and around PHYTEC’s booth during the conference. We are also making two presentations at ELC. If you can’t make it to the conference this year, please contact us for more information, and talk with us about how Konsulko Group can help with your next project.

Konsulko Group engineers to speak at ELC Seattle

/in /by

Embedded Linux Conference, September 27- 30, 2021

Hyatt Regency Seattle | Seattle, Washington + Virtual

For over 15 years, Embedded Linux Conference (ELC) has been the premier, vendor-neutral technical conference for companies and developers using Linux in embedded products. Recent ELCs have expanded the scope to include both the user-space developers building applications on embedded Linux as well as the architects and developers working to deliver smart connected products and industrial IoT solutions.

At the upcoming Embedded Linux Conference, September 27- 30, 2021 at the Hyatt Regency Seattle (with a virtual option available), Konsulko Group engineers will give detailed technical talks on building RISC-V Linux systems, and Linux A/B upgrades.

Building a Low-key XIP-enabled RISC-V Linux System

Tuesday, September 28 • 4:00pm – 4:50pm

Principal Software Engineer (and GM Konsulko AB) Vitaly Vul (aka, Vitaly Wool) will discuss new hardware designs based on RISC-V, an open standard instruction set architecture. In modern times, RISC-V SoCs quite often have QSPI flash onboard which makes them perfect candidates to use XIP (eXecute In Place) technology to execute directly from flash without copying the code to RAM first. That allows to optimize memory footprint very tightly and thus opens up to really low-power IoT Linux appliances. Vitaly will present a demo how to run a mainline kernel configured for XIP on a RISC-V board, and discuss extending XIP support for RISC-V to 32-bit and MMU-less systems for low-key battery-powered RISC-V systems with RAM shortage.

Practical Experience with Linux A/B Upgrades

Wednesday, September 29 • 1:30pm – 2:20pm

Senior Software Engineer Leon Anavi will discuss deploying software upgrades to fleets of embedded Linux IoT devices, using A/B redundant systems with two identical partitions using popular open source solutions (like Mender or RAUC). Although they provide great features out of the box there are still plenty of technical obstacles to overcome for real-world use cases. In this presentation, we will walk through practical experiences using both Mender and RAUC with Yocto Project and OpenEmbedded. Leon will discuss BSP integration and porting efforts for new devices, bootloader requirements and configurations, tips and tricks for ARM and x86-64 systems, read-only file systems, partition layouts, storing persistent data during upgrades, managing single-file artifacts, simultaneous setup with Docker and other containers.

Join us in Seattle or virtually for this always informative, educational and fun conference for commercial and community embedded Linux developers.

“Surfing on an Interactive Kiosk” at Yocto Project Summit

/in /by

The Yocto Project and OpenEmbedded are often used for building custom GNU/Linux distributions for powering interactive kiosk and displaying HTML5 content. Surf is a simple minimalist web browser based on WebKit2/GTK+ with interface that does not include any graphical control elements.

In his presentation, Surfing on a Interactive Kiosk, Konsulko Group’s Leon Anavi will describe the exact steps to build a minimal GNU/Linux distribution with systemd, X11, openbox window manager and the Surf web browser.

Yocto Project Virtual Summit, May 25-26, 2021, is both a workshop for engineers building customized Linux distributions and applications, and an open forum where maintainers, trainers and users present papers on how the project is evolving. The highly interactive classes will be presented in Zoom, with chat sessions, side rooms, teaching assistants, and hands-on exercises with live class accounts.

We hope you will participate with us in the Summit.

AGL members: Be sure to attend the virtual All Member Meeting

/in /by

Automotive Grade Linux Virtual AMM March 17-18

The Automotive Grade Linux (AGL) All Member Meeting takes place bi-annually and brings the AGL community together to learn about the latest developments, share best practices and collaborate to drive rapid innovation across the industry.

This All Member Meeting will take place virtually, March 17-18, 2021, allowing you to attend from anywhere in the world, and include opportunities to network with other attendees, attend sessions with live speaker Q&A, and much more.

AGL members can register here.

Webinar – Getting Started with AGL using Raspberry Pi

/in /by

Coming December 1, a new AGL Member Webinar by Konsulko Group’s Leon Anavi

In 2016 Automotive Grade Linux was ported to Raspberry Pi and since then this low-cost single board computer has become a preferred getting started platform among the community. Although Raspberry Pi doesn’t match the hardware capabilities of high-end industrial and automotive hardware platforms, its wide availability and low-cost makes it a great choice for rapid prototyping and exploring AGL. 

This presentation will provide guidelines and exact steps for building AGL image for Raspberry Pi. We will explore the past and present of AGL on Raspberry Pi, including practical experience for supporting Wayland, PipeWire, libostree for software over the air updates and various hardware peripherals. 

The talk is appropriate for beginners. No previous experience with AGL is required. Hopefully, the presentation will encourage more people to join and contribute to our open source community! Register here.