Tag Archive for: Tim Orling

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.

Konsulko Group: The Year in Review 2022

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 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.

Konsulko Group: The Year in Review 2021

Thanks to our customers, our partners and our dedicated team of engineers, 2021 was a very successful year for Konsulko Group. 

We’ve been chosen to work on important projects in consumer electronics, automotive, medical devices, agriculture, mining, finance, and autonomous vehicles. Our engineers helped our clients, new and old, build outstanding commercial products with Embedded Linux, Yocto Project and OpenEmbedded, as well as deploying Over-the-Air (OTA) software updating.

Partnerships

“Konsulko is a recommended and trusted partner for helping Mender customers and prospects succeed in the Embedded Linux space. They have an excellent team of professionals who will deliver on time and as agreed.”

Thomas Ryd, CEO, mender.io

We continued our strong relationships with mender.io, and with the Linux Foundation and Automotive Grade Linux (AGL). 

We also launched a new partnership with PHYTEC at the Embedded Linux Conference (ELC) in Seattle. Konsulko is providing support and development for PHYTEC customers using their Systems on Modules (SOMs) and Yocto Project Linux distribution.

Conferences

As in previous years, Konsulko engineers were active participants (often virtually) in conferences and developer gatherings, making presentations at ELC and Yocto Project Summits, and writing technical papers on Yocto Project, security, and OTA. We hope for a time in the not-too-distant future when it makes sense for developers from all over the world to gather again face-to-face to share ideas. 

Contributions

As many of our engineers have been working (and playing) with Open Source Software (OSS) for over 20 years, Konsulko Group is proud of our continuing commitment to contribute to the community. Last month we were happy to hear that Konsulko is #3 in contributions to Yocto Project “Non Core,” just behind industry giants ARM and Fujitsu, and ahead of every other software or hardware company.

This was even before we welcomed OSS veteran Tim Orling to the team in December. Tim was recently Core OS Architect and Yocto Project Architect for Intel Corporation, and serves as a maintainer of meta-python and many recipes in openembedded-core. He has authored hundreds of applied patches for openembedded-core and meta-openembedded. 

Doing business with Konsulko Group

As a team we have found that the best way to work with our customers and prospective customers is to provide a high level of transparency about our business processes. This year, we’ve published blogs on scoping the effort required to successfully complete a customer project, and another describing our two models of engagement

  • Konsulko Continuous Time Engagement™ for dedicated engineering resources
  • Konsulko OnDemand Time Engagement™ for high level consulting, on-demand support, and specific tasks within a larger project.

We hope you have found these useful, and we look forward to working with you in 2022.

Tag Archive for: Tim Orling