Konsulko Group: The Year in Review 2022

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2022 went by quickly with Konsulko engineers working closely with our customers, our partners and the open source community. For the tenth straight year, Konsulko Group has helped our clients build outstanding commercial products with Embedded Linux, Yocto Project and OpenEmbedded, as well as deploying Over-the-Air (OTA) software updating.

Engaging with our customers

We had particular success with our Konsulko Continuous Time Engagement™ offering, providing dedicated engineering resources for two of the world’s largest semiconductor companies. This model provides guaranteed engineering time for an agreed period. KCTE has allowed our customers to use our engineers on a variety of their requirements, and switch between these tasks as the rest of their project and in-house engineering required.

Of course, many of our clients prefer Konsulko OnDemand Time Engagement™, SOW-based engineering for high level consulting, on-demand support, and specific tasks within a larger project. KOTE is also best for longer term engagements without a hard deadline that can be stopped and started as necessary, and projects with an expected pause (such as bring-up of new hardware which almost always results in a re-spin of the PCB).

Partnerships and Conferences

We continue our strong relationship with the Linux Foundation and Automotive Grade Linux. We worked with mender.io and PHYTEC, providing support and development for their customers. With our friends at ICS, we presented at a joint webinar in August, Software Update Mechanisms: Selecting the Best Solution by Konsulko’s Leon Anavi and ICS’ Jeff Tranter.

Our Konsulko engineers were active participants (often in person, sometimes virtually) in conferences and developer gatherings. Leon Anavi, Vitaly and Maria Wool, and Tim Orling made presentations at the Embedded Linux Conferences (North America and Europe), FOSDEM and Yocto Project Summits:

Tim also posted a technical paper on Using kernel config fragments to remove an unwanted feature.

Two top engineers join the Konsulko team

The bar is pretty high for joining Konsulko Group. Some of our team have thirty years experience with embedded software and Linux. Most have over twenty and all have over fifteen years, working (and playing) with Linux and the open source community. So we were happy to welcome Denys Dmytriyenko and António Oliveira to Konsulko Group this year.

Denys is a long time Open Source Software developer, contributing code to many FOSS projects, like glibc, PostgreSQL, KDE, MythTV, LIRC, OpenEmbedded, and Yocto Project. Before joining Konsulko Group, he worked as Software Developer and Architect for Texas Instruments for almost 20 years on numerous Embedded Linux (MIPS and ARM-based) products. Since 2011 Denys has served on the OpenEmbedded Board of Directors, and since 2019, on the Yocto Project Technical Steering Committee. He is a long time contributor and maintainer of numerous recipes and layers in the OpenEmbedded/Yocto Project universe.

António has worked in development of highly optimized hardware and software ranging from deeply embedded microcontrollers to full-fledged graphical user interfaces. During this time, he has gained extensive experience in build automation tools, analog and digital circuits, powerline communications, and low power and low frequency radio communications. An active member of the open source community, he has contributed to Yocto Project and the Linux kernel. In addition to his work as an embedded engineer, António served eight years on the executive board of his local parish in Portugal, including four years on the municipal council.

We hope you will have the opportunity to work with Denys, António and the rest of Konsulko Group in 2023.

Konsulko Group to speak at Yocto Project Virtual Summit

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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.

Tales from the Crypt: Secure Boot and Disk Encryption on Tegra [video]

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Tales from the Crypt: Secure Boot and Disk Encryption on Tegra

“Secure boot” is not one size fits all, but rather there are different implementations on different platforms. For Tegra platforms, secure boot involves a one-time only burning of keys into the on-device fuses. We’ll share the lessons learned from turning a board into a lovely paperweight as well as the reliable approach we used to confidently secure boot into the vendor’s Ubuntu based OS before creating our own Yocto Project built OS.
For disk encryption with LUKS and dm-crypt, we extended our approach of testing the vendor’s OS before moving on to creating our own. The added complexity of unique passphrases derived from disk UUIDs and per-device HW-derived keys was an interesting challenge. We attempted to stay as close to the vendor’s tools (luks-srv and luks-srv-app) and design as we could, to hopefully future proof the implementation for newer releases of Linux for Tegra. Extending to A/B flashing for OTA updates (e.g. rauc or mender) added additional challenges, especially when trying to generalize 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 platforms and you are in for a wild ride.

Tales from the Crypt: Secure Boot and Disk Encryption on Tegra [slides]

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Tales from the Crypt: Secure Boot and Disk Encryption on Tegra

“Secure boot” is not one size fits all, but rather there are different implementations on different platforms. For Tegra platforms, secure boot involves a one-time only burning of keys into the on-device fuses. We’ll share the lessons learned from turning a board into a lovely paperweight as well as the reliable approach we used to confidently secure boot into the vendor’s Ubuntu based OS before creating our own Yocto Project built OS.

For disk encryption with LUKS and dm-crypt, we extended our approach of testing the vendor’s OS before moving on to creating our own. The added complexity of unique passphrases derived from disk UUIDs and per-device HW-derived keys was an interesting challenge. We attempted to stay as close to the vendor’s tools (luks-srv and luks-srv-app) and design as we could, to hopefully future proof the implementation for newer releases of Linux for Tegra. Extending to A/B flashing for OTA updates (e.g. rauc or mender) added additional challenges, especially when trying to generalize 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 platforms and you are in for a wild ride.

Konsulko Group brings security focus to ELCE Dublin

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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

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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.