Konsulko to speak at multiple OSSE events, September 16-19

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We’re heading to Austria for Open Source Summit Europe, with a large contingent of our engineers, as well as four speakers for this always important conference.

September 16: AGL updates to Yocto Project 5.0

Principal Engineer Scott Murray will join the Linux Foundation’s Walt Miner to present “What’s Happening with Automotive Grade Linux and How Our Update to Yocto 5.0 Went.” Walt and Scott will share some lessons learned from upgrading from the 4.0 to 5.0 versions of the Yocto Project and provide an update on the latest AGL features included in the Ricefish release.

September 17: Rewriting zblock in Rust

Vitaly Wool, Principal Engineer and GM of Konsulko AB will discuss “Rusty Swapping: Rewriting a Zswap Backend in Rust.” Rust has gained popularity as the second Linux kernel high-level language. Recently, Vitaly rewrote a zswap backend called zblock in Rust. This talk will cover the main principles of zblock (which stay the same no matter which language is used), the obstacles met while implementing it in Rust, and finally the comparison of the two.

September 17: Best Practices for Scarthgap

Principal Engineer Tim Orling will present “Are You Ready For Scarthgap? Best Practices For The Latest Yocto Project LTS Release.” Tim will discuss setting up your own “distribution” and board-support package (BSP), and share techniques for managing and discovering layers. He’ll discuss best practices to ensure your public layers are ready for the Layer Index, and investigate meta-lts-mixin layers. He’ll look at the latest tools for Software Bill of Materials (SBOM), license compliance (SPDX), and software vulnerabilities (CVEs), and share ways to leverage new IDE tools added in this release.

September 19: A/B Update Solutions with Yocto Project

At Yocto Project Developer Day 2024 (co-located with OSEE) Senior Engineer Leon Anavi will provide a “Side-by-side Comparison of Dual A/B Update Solutions with the Yocto Project.” Leon’s talk will provide a detailed exploration of Mender, RAUC, and swupdate, comparing them on the same hardware platforms. He’ll discuss their advantages and disadvantages and how to select the most appropriate open-source solution for specific projects. Leon will delve into various use cases and practical examples, concluding with a side-by-side comparison.

We hope you’ll be able to join us in Vienna.

Konsulko engineer speaks at AGL All Member Meeting in Berlin

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Scott Murray, Principal Software Engineer at Konsulko Group presented at the summer Automotive Grade Linux AMM. Scott shared details around the work done the past few years to prepare AGL before it upgraded to the new Yocto Project long-term support release, Scarthgap, earlier this year.

Konsulko Group: The Year in Review 2023

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Konsulko Group has had another great year. We’ve helped our customers build new breakthrough embedded products of all sizes, from semiconductors to medical devices to automotive to heavy equipment.

We continue strong relationships with the Linux Foundation, Yocto Project and Automotive Grade Linux. We work with our partners mender.io and PHYTEC, providing support and development for their customers.

Konsulko is growing

We’ve expanded our footprint across the US and Europe, welcoming three outstanding engineers to the team: George McCollister, Darko Alavanja and Bryan Cisneros.

George McCollister has over 25 years of experience in Embedded Systems development. Starting with 8051 microcontrollers and quickly adopting Linux, he has worked on a wide range of technologies from network switches and storage appliances to automated utility fault restoration and process automation. He was a key designer and architect of an industry leading utility automation platform.

Darko Alavanja was deeply involved with robotics as a student, competing in several teams in the Eurobot contest. He designed mechanical components, PCBs, sensor electronics, actuator systems and software used for creating mobile robots. Darko has developed embedded systems for industrial devices such as FPGA-based hardware-in-the-loop equipment, controllers for industrial machinery and protocols for communication gateways.

Bryan Cisneros has developed embedded software, UIs, and test code across various industries, including medical devices, RF modules, and AI-enabled cameras. Before joining Konsulko, Bryan worked in the defense industry developing networked applications for weapons and information systems, focusing on redesigning outdated UIs and programs, and implementing CI/CD pipelines.

Committed to the Open Source community

In addition to our consulting work for our customers, Konsulko Group continues to actively participate in the Open Source community and its conferences around the world.

Konsulko’s senior leadership have been contributors in the Linux kernel and other OSS communities since the late 1990s. The entire Konsulko team has been involved in a number of Open Source projects including U-Boot, Yocto Project, OpenEmbedded and Automotive Grade Linux (AGL).

Konsulko principal engineer Tim Orling serves on OpenEmbedded Board of Directors. He co-presented Maintaining a Community BSP Layer: Updating Meta-Tegra with Ilies Chergui (Medtronic) at Embedded Open Source Summit in June 2023, and Customize your CROPS containers with crops-generator with Eilís ‘pidge’ Ní Fhlannagáin (BayLibre) at Yocto Project Developer Day.

Principal engineer Denys Dmytriyenko and the Yocto Project Technical Steering Committee were instrumental in helping Yocto Project secure important new funding from the Sovereign Tech Fund. Denys also wrote about some of the technical highlights from the 2023 Linux Plumbers Conference.

Principal engineer Scott Murray presented Vehicle Signaling Specification and KUKSA.val at Automotive Grade Linux All Member Meeting Berlin, a “lightning talk” on VSS Updates in AGL at Automotive Linux Summit, Evolving VSS Usage in AGL at AGL AMM Japan, and Automotive Grade Linux: Status and Roadmap at Embedded Recipes Paris.

Senior engineer Leon Anavi spoke about RDP with Wayland, Weston & Yocto at FOSDEM, and Integrating VNC/Weston with the Yocto Project/OpenEmbedded at Yocto Project Virtual Summit 2023.

Vitaly Wool, principal engineer and General Manager, Konsulko AB presented Implementing secure boot for AOSP running U-Boot at the Lund Linux Conference 2023.

Finally, Konsulko Group intern Atanas Bunchev demonstrated remote updates and troubleshooting of connected embedded Linux devices using Mender.io at TuxCon 2023. The presentation (in Bulgarian) spread the word about the Yocto Project, OpenEmbedded and various Mender features among the local community. Atanas also co-wrote (with Leon Anavi) RAUC on CuBox-I/HummingBoard for Software Updates and Mender Add-ons: Remote Troubleshooting Devices in the Field.

Konsulko Group engineer to speak at Yocto Project Summit

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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

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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).

Automotive Grade Linux: Status and Roadmap

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Scott Murray
Embedded Recipes Paris 2023

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Evolving VSS Usage in AGL [slides]

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Scott Murray
AGL AMM Japan 2023

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Evolving VSS Usage in AGL

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Scott Murray
AGL AMM Japan 2023

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Customize your CROPS containers with crops-generator

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Tim Orling (Konsulko) and Eilís ‘pidge’ Ní Fhlannagáin (BayLibre)
YPDD 2023

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

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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.