Some time passed since ELC-E took place. I did not wrote about it before because I was busy with other things and wanted to wait for presentations to be available.
The whole event took place in Grenoble, France on 15-16 October. I was there as a guest of ST-Ericsson company and had one talk there.
There were just 3 tracks so it was much easier to choose which talks to attend. I was on:
- Jon Masters “Porting Linux” — interesting and it was nice to see the person which do LKML summary podcast
- Grégory Clement “How We Got a 3D Application Booting in 5 Seconds Under Linux” — author told about few tricks they tried in a bit boring way
- Sascha Hauer, Marc Kleine-Budde “U-Boot-v2” — project looks nice and I hope that my devices will migrate to this one day
- Cedric Hombourger “Why OpenEmbedded Proved a Good Foundation for MontaVista” — lot of people attended, interesting talk it was. Nice part was when Cedric told that they checked all of currently available free build systems and chosen our one.
- Samuel Ortiz “Linux Wifi Solutions for Mobile Platforms” — lot of technical informations but now I know more about Linux WLAN stack that I did
- Matt Porter “Mythbusters: Android” — nice talk about this system and which parts of it needs lot of work to be usable on other devices then just phones. I was also interested in it as I had Android on Nokia N810 during ELC-E but finally decided to go back to Maemo.
- Alessandro Rubini “Use of the Fast IRQ (FIQ) in ARM-Linux” — again lot of technical informations but I really like how Alessandro do his talks.
- Alex de Vries “Technical Features and Components of Open Source Build Systems” — nice summary of what open embedded distributions lacks and what needs to be done. Was fun to listen how Alex tries to not say “open embedded distributions” too often ;)
- Pierre Pronchery “Hackable Devices: The New Possibilities of Open Hardware”
- Michael Opdenacker “Small Business” — most of small companies which attended have OpenEmbedded services in a list of what they do
I planned to attend few more but decided that Friday will be a good time to see Grenoble in other places then just hotel and conference centre.
What was a nice surprise for me was the amount of people familiar with OpenEmbedded. Most of people which I spoke with used it for misc projects. I had a talk with one guy about “stable” branches and how our view differ. For me “stable/2009” branch is what has to be buildable all the time but can take some updates, he prefers project branches with halted development and just very important fixes related with project.
My “Hacking with OpenEmbedded” talk got some interesting questions. Mostly about Maemo5 support but I do not know too much about it’s status.
Was it worth going? Definitely yes. Met friends, got new contacts, discussed about different projects. Was good to be there. I just hope that next time it will be in a place easier to get to — I had to fly thought Amsterdam so whole trip took me about 12 hours (each way). But on return trip I had interesting talk with Ruud Derwig during flight :D
Will something from ELC-E lands in OpenEmbedded area? Few things:
- I had a talk with Atmel guys about their work on updating linux4sam website and their OpenEmbedded support. AT91 devices will get 2.6.30 kernel in OE and it will land also in “stable/2009” branch on which they plan to base their repository (instead of old stable branch).
- my work on ST-Ericsson NHK-15 board starts to appear in official metadata. I still need to test it on board but base is added.
- one company plans to release OMAP3 based developer board soon and this will be their first use of OpenEmbedded