Konsulko Group engineers will be attending FOSDEM ’20 on February 1 & 2. Look for us during the conference around the Automotive Grade Linux and OpenEmbedded stands, or at Leon Anavi’s presentation on Saturday, Building Homebridge with the Yocto Project. Hope we see you in Brussels!
Konsulko Group has completed another busy year, working hard to solve our customers’ problems, while building efficient and reliable open source software for their products in development.
We’ve helped our customers launch exciting new products across the spectrum of embedded systems: automotive, medical devices, networking equipment, and cutting-edge consumer electronics.
As Globally Employable Engineers, we are geographically distributed across North America and Europe, but thanks to today’s technology, we have worked together every day as a team, often in real time.
At Konsulko Group we believe production software should be closely aligned with OSS community work upstream, and we work to make that happen. Our community work in key open source projects includes the Linux kernel, Yocto Project, OpenEmbedded and Automotive Grade Linux. We participate in important OSS conferences like FOSDEM and SCaLE, sponsor TuxCon and OpenFest every year, and have published two new “how to” technical papers, useful to developers at all levels (available on this website).
We’ve continued our close relationship with the Linux Foundation and Automotive Grade Linux, supporting AGL development, demos and member meetings. Konsulko Group gave technical talks at ALS Tokyo, ELC San Diego, ELCE and Yocto Project Summit Lyon, and the AGL AMM Monte Carlo, and participated in the OSLS Half Moon Bay.
Through the Embedded Apprentice Linux Engineer program, Konsulko provided well-received training sessions in 2019 at SCaLE 17x Pasadena, ELC San Diego and ELCE Lyon. We’ve given on-site and remote training to major companies in North America, and remain a Linux Foundation Authorized Training Partner.
All in all, 2019 seems like it has gone quickly. We now look forward to working with you in 2020 and beyond.
Automotive Grade Linux (AGL) is a collaborative open source project accelerating development of a fully open software platform for automotive applications. At CES 2020, AGL will be highlighting both members and the broader AGL ecosystem, demonstrating connected car services, audio innovations, instrument cluster applications, security solutions and more, all running on the AGL open source software platform.
Again this year, Konsulko Group will be supporting the AGL booth at CES [Westgate (Tech East) Smart Cities, booth 1815]. Come see us during the show or at the AGL Evening Reception on Wednesday, January 8 from 6:00pm – 8:00pm.
Building a DIY SOHO router using the Yocto Project build system OpenEmbedded, 6 months on
A little more than six months ago, I posted part 4 of our series on making a SOHO router using the Yocto Project and OpenEmbedded. After 6 months of deployment, this is a good time to follow up on how the router has worked out in residential use. The zeus code-name Yocto Project release was just announced, and that means that the release we started out with in part 1 is now close to being out of support. That’s not a problem since we designed in support for moving to new software releases using Mender to deliver software updates.
One of the most important metrics in a project like this is, how does it perform? From the standpoint of a family of 4 heavy internet users, it’s gone really well. The WiFi range is only a little better than before, but that’s not really a function of the software. Making everyone use Pi-hole has only resulted in a small number of places where I needed to override the blacklist and allow something in. From an end-user point of view, this has worked as well as any off-the-shelf router. From the administrator point of view, I’ve done scheduled maintenance during the day on a weekend, and it really did take only the 5 minutes I promised everyone rather than turning into one of those worst case scenarios where something broke and it takes an hour to fix it. In fact, the update portion of the plan has gone exceedingly well. While I didn’t make a post about moving to warrior from thud, I did that transition a while ago and it went smoothly. Mender introduced a change that required attention be paid while migrating, but it was documented and went smoothly. On the metadata side, the upgrade was as easy as one could hope. A few of the bbappend files needed to be updated for a new version, and some of the changes I had made and pushed upstream as part of the original series were now just included, so they got dropped from my layer.
One of the things I touched on in the series was about using the update functionality to test development changes in a production environment. The chance to do that came up with a systemd-networkd issue that was a problem in my local setup. The upstream project requested people verify the problem exists with newer versions of systemd and a new enough version was available in what would become zeus. So I made a quick weekend project of doing an update of my layers to build with a newer version of all of the metadata, removed the work-around, and flashed the image in place. A quick reboot confirmed that the issue was indeed fixed, and then rather than commit to running an otherwise in-progress release I simply rebooted and automatically rolled back to my stable release. With the network back up again, I updated the issue in upstream Bugzilla to let them know the problem was fixed. After a bit longer, a few other people also confirmed it worked for them and now the issue is resolved.
In terms of the metadata itself, there have been a few clean-ups to what I did in my own layer with each release update I’ve done. In the series I left out what hardware I was building on, and I also left out talking about using the linux–yocto recipe. Since I first wrote the series linux-yocto has become easier to use, and I found this as part of reviewing my own changes like they were brand new with each upgrade. I was setting some variables that initially didn’t have reasonable default values, and now they do and I don’t need to set them myself. This in fact means that moving forward, rather than a version-specific kernel bbappend file, I can go with an always-used one to enable the additional kernel CONFIG options that I need for a time-based firewall.
I started out by mentioning that zeus has been released, and I’m working on migrating to it as I write this. In fact, it’s so new that I’m doing my own little port of the meta-mender core layer to zeus for my needs. I expect that by the time I do my first update from one build of zeus to the next there will be an official update I’ll be able to use instead. Looking forward, this was a great little project that also was a lot of fun. The goals I set way back at the start have been met, and I’m happier with my network than I have been in a long time. Of course, the list of features an off-the-shelf system provides is always growing, and there’s now monitoring and display items on my weekend project list now to keep up. I foresee using and improving this setup for a long time to come.
Again this year, Konsulko Group is very pleased to be a sponsor of OpenFest, November 2-3, 2019 in Sofia, Bulgaria. As a team of embedded Linux and Open Source Software community and industry veterans, we are always happy to support important OSS events.
Headquartered in California, Konsulko works with customers throughout North America, Europe and Asia to develop and maintain Open Source-based solutions for products. Our European subsidiary, Konsulko Ltd is based in Sofia.
Konsulko’s focus is upstream and production software design, enablement, optimization, and maintenance for customers in a wide array of embedded software markets including automotive, networking, industrial, medical devices and IoT.
Our senior leadership have been contributors in the Linux kernel and other OSS communities since the late 1990s. Konsulko engineers are involved today in many Open Source projects, including the Linux kernel, U-Boot, Yocto Project, OpenEmbedded, and Automotive Grade Linux (AGL). Members of the Konsulko team have been key participants in major software projects with Google, Sony, NEC, Nokia, Nvidia, MIPS, Texas Instruments, NXP, Juniper Networks, Huawei, Robert Bosch, Groupe PSA, and Jaguar Land Rover.
If you are attending OpenFest, we’d love to talk with you about engaging Konsulko’s engineering expertise and experience on your project. Or if you’re an accomplished software developer with a passion for Linux, please contact us about joining the Konsulko team.
Matt Porter, Konsulko Group CTO and Leon Anavi, Konsulko Senior Software Engineer are presenting at co-located Linux Foundation events in Lyon, France, October 30 – November 1, 2019.
At Embedded Linux Conference Europe, Leon will speak on Home Automation with MQTT, a machine-to-machine real-time communication protocol widely used in the Internet of Things, as part of the Open IOT Summit.
Matt Porter will present his very popular tutorial, Introduction to IIO and Input Drivers. Students will create their own game controller driver and use it to play a game on their devices. The lab will be conducted using the provided hardware kit.
The Yocto Project Summit is a technical conference to learn about Yocto Projects’ direction, get training on the next wave of embedded Linux technologies, and network with Yocto Project maintainers, experts and peers.
In his session on Working with NVIDIA Tegra BSP and Supporting Latest CUDA Versions, Leon Anavi will share his experience in customizing Poky, the reference distribution of the Yocto Project, for embedded devices with NVIDIA Tegra SoCs using OpenEmbedded build system and the BSP meta layer meta-tegra.
We hope to see you there.
The Automotive Grade Linux (AGL) All Member Meeting brings the AGL community together to collaborate, learn about the latest developments and share best practices. What better place to drive rapid innovation than Monte Carlo, the home of the Circuit de Monaco. AGL members who have not already done so can register here. Konsulko Group is looking forward to seeing you there for a great AMM.
How to get started and build a minimal custom Linux distribution for embedded NVIDIA CUDA-enabled devices using the Yocto Project (YP) and OpenEmbedded (OE).
Embedded Linux Conference (ELC) is the premier vendor-neutral technical conference on embedded Linux and industrial IoT products. This year, ELC North America will be held in San Diego, August 21-23, 2019, at the beautiful Hilton Bayfront, right on the harbor and just over a pedestrian bridge from Petco Park and East Village.
On Thursday, August 22, Leon Anavi, Senior Software Engineer at Konsulko Group will present a Comparison of Open Source Software Home Automation Tools that allow users to customize the setup depending their own specific needs and manage devices manufactured by different vendors in one place. Leon will focus on popular open source tools, Home Assistant, OpenHAB and Domoticz, and explore the supported embedded Linux development boards on which these platforms can be installed, as well as the IoT with which they can interact out of the box.
Also on Thursday, Vitaly Wool, Senior Staff Engineer and General Manager of Konsulko AB, will give a technical talk on Secure Updates for a Memory Constrained XIP (eXecute In Place) System looking at technology that allows code to be executed directly from flash without copying the code to RAM first. The memory footprint can be optimized very tightly and this permits really low-power IoT Linux appliances. However, there is a big obstacle: no standard secure update process for such systems will work due to the very nature of XIP. How can you update the flash when it must always be ready to execute? This talk will provide some real world answers and examples.
The next day, Friday, August 23, Matt Porter, Konsulko Group CTO, will present a tutorial, Introduction to IIO and Input Drivers to briefly look at the Linux IIO and Input subsystems and how to gather information from hardware documentation to assist in software development. In a guided hands-on lab, students will write a new driver that leverages the IIO and Input kernel subsystems, and create their own game controller driver and use it to play a game on their devices.
For the first time in 2019, Embedded Linux Conference North America will co-locate with Open Source Summit North America. We hope you can join us, along with 800+ developers and technical experts from across the globe for education, collaboration, deep-dive learning, and some good times in San Diego.
On June 8th and 9th, Konsulko Group is proud to again be a Gold Sponsor of the 6th annual TuxCon conference in Plovdiv, Bulgaria, the 2019 European Capital of Culture.
Headquartered in California, Konsulko works with our customers throughout North America, Europe and Asia. Our European subsidiary, Konsulko Ltd is based in Sofia, Bulgaria.
If you are building a new product, we’d love to talk with you about engaging Konsulko’s engineering expertise and experience on your project. Or if you’re a software developer with a passion for Linux, please contact us about joining the Konsulko team.
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