ELC + ABS: Full Schedule

10:30am PDT

Android OTA Updates - Andrew Boie, Intel

AOSP is distributed with the source code and tools for full (whole image) and incremental (binary patch) secure over-the-air (OTA) software updates, specifically an alternate boot target Recovery Console, the updater logic itself, and tools to create software updates. There is no publicly available documentation for how this mechanism is supposed to be integrated. This presentation will give a detailed end-to-end description of how software updates are created, digitally signed, and applied to the device. There will be a discussion on the plug-in architecture and Edify language which allows builders to customize the OTA updates with platform-specific features. This is an updated version of a talk presented at ABS in 2012, with details on new OTA features including block-level OTA updates in Lollipop.

Speakers

Andrew Boie

Sr. Software Engineer, Intel Corporation

Andrew is a senior engineer at Intel Corporation and a maintainer of the Zephyr kernel. He has spoken at previous Linux Foundation events on Zephyr kernel topics. Prior to his work on Zephyr Andrew worked on enabling Android on x86-based platforms, authoring the Kernelflinger bootloader... Read More →

Monday March 23, 2015 10:30am - 11:20am PDT
Ballroom Salon 3

Android Experience: Advanced

4:20pm PDT

Implementation of the Global Task Scheduler in big.LITTLE Android Platforms - Michael E. Anderson, The PTR Group

Recent advancements in the kernel for ARM-based big.LITTLE architectures now incorporate the ability to run on both the big and LITTLE cores simultanteously. In this presentation, we will discuss the implementation of the GTS patch in the Android kernel and its implications for Android power managment.

Monday March 23, 2015 4:20pm - 5:10pm PDT
Ballroom Salon 3

Android Experience: Advanced

5:20pm PDT

Memory Management Internals - Karim Yaghmour, Opersys

The Android stack is fairly deep, with several key components impacting applications: the framework API, the system services, the virtual machine (be it Dalvik or ART), the native layer and the Linux kernel. Each of these components has an impact on the system's memory usage. Beside rules of thumb, there isn't much in terms of documentation on how the Android's internals manage and deal with memory.

This presentation will examine the Android OS' memory management, from the Linux kernel all the way up to the app layer. We'll discuss the features and limitations of every key component, how platform developers can navigate around those limitations and what to watch out for, and present the tools and methods available to understand each components' memory usage.

Speakers

Karim Yaghmour

CEO, Opersys inc.

Karim is part serial entrepreneur, part unrepentant geek. He's most widely know for his O'Reilly books: "Building Embedded Linux Systems" and "Embedded Android". As an active member of the open source community since the mid-90's, he pioneered the world of Linux tracing with the Linux... Read More →

Monday March 23, 2015 5:20pm - 6:10pm PDT
Ballroom Salon 1/2

Android Experience: Advanced

9:00am PDT

Android Verified Boot - Andrew Boie, Intel

Android Lollipop introduces new features for boot security, with a specification for build-time signing and run-time verification of the boot, recovery, and system images, with the bootloader controlling verification of the boot/recovery images and Linux dm-verity enforcing the integrity of the system image. There are also facilities for enrolling user-supplied keys via Fastboot so that custom images may be verified. In this presentation Andrew will detail how these components work together, the requirements for creating a compatible bootloader, how to use the available tools in AOSP to create signed images and keystores, and some discussion on the implications of these features with respect to OTA updates, covering the new block-level incremental update feature.

Speakers

Andrew Boie

Sr. Software Engineer, Intel Corporation

Tuesday March 24, 2015 9:00am - 9:50am PDT
Ballroom Salon 3

Android Experience: Advanced

9:00am PDT

A Scalable, Cloud-based Device Reprogramming Architecture - James Simister, Panasonic

Device reprogramming includes such things as general updates to the software, bug fixes, enhancements, or adding functionality to the device. Reprogramming platforms require the ability to scale resources, to provide quick response times, and to maintain data security. Maintaining a permanent infrastructure is expensive, particularly when you consider that these reprogramming events are infrequent over the life to the device. This presentation shows a platform based on Panasonic's IoT platform, but includes guidelines and techniques that are generally applicable.

Speakers

James Simister

Director of Consulting Services, Panasonic

James Simister graduated from the University of Utah with a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science . His professional career in software engineering spans a number of areas of computing, including networking, security, systems architecture, embedded devices, cloud computing, library... Read More →

Tuesday March 24, 2015 9:00am - 9:50am PDT
Ballroom Salon 5/6

Experience: Advanced IoT

11:20am PDT

Room For Cooperation: Bionic and musl - Bernhard Rosenkränzer, Linaro

A while after Android started Bionic, another interesting libc project was started: musl (http://musl-libc.org/). Its licensing is compatible with Android's - so there may be room for picking the best of both worlds. This talk investigates where musl outperforms Bionic and vice versa -- and whether or not (and how) Android can benefit from pulling musl code into Bionic.

Speakers

Bernhard

Software Engineer, BayLibre

Bernhard "bero" Rosenkränzer has been a Linux developer since the days he saw a stack of 70 floppy disks containing an interesting, totally unknown OS back in the mid-1990s. Before joining BayLibre, he has worked for MandrakeSoft, Red Hat, Linaro and various startups. Outside of... Read More →

Tuesday March 24, 2015 11:20am - 12:10pm PDT
Ballroom Salon 3

Android Experience: Advanced

3:25pm PDT

Platform-Level UI Customization - Karim Yaghmour, Opersys

In addition to being popular as a mobile OS, Android has increasingly been popular in the embedded world. Yet there's little to no information on how to customize one of Android's foremost features: its user interface. How can developers change the look and feel of the Status Bar or the Launcher (home screen)? How can they theme the OS? How can they create kiosk systems based on Android?

This presentation will walk embedded developers through how Android's user interface can be customized. We'll take each part of the user interface one by one, show how it's implemented, and demonstrate modifications to it. Examples will include the Status Bar, the Launcher, screen overlays, theming of the interface, theming the boot process, kiosk applications, etc.

Speakers

Karim Yaghmour

CEO, Opersys inc.

Tuesday March 24, 2015 3:25pm - 4:15pm PDT
Ballroom Salon 1/2

Android Experience: Advanced

3:25pm PDT

Last One Out, Turn Off The Lights - Geert Uytterhoeven

Recently, power management has been moving from system-wide power states to more fine-grained power control, saving more power and providing snappier user experiences (QoS). Modern devices are almost never turned off, even if battery operated. They are lurking in (partial) low-power states, always ready to process external requests.
At the hardware SoC level, this is done by organizing the various SoC components in complex topologies, controlled by power and clock controllers. Inside the Linux kernel, PM domains and the Generic PM Domain provide abstractions for various types of power and clock domains.
In this presentation, Geert will talk about recent advancements in the areas of PM domains and runtime PM. He will explain how to handle SoC power and clock domains in Linux, how to model them in DT, and how to ensure that (existing) drivers play well in a system using PM domains.

Speakers

Geert Uytterhoeven

Embedded Linux Kernel Hacker, Glider bv

Geert Uytterhoeven became involved with Linux more than 25 years ago, when he started hacking the Linux kernel to make it work better on his Amiga. This paved the way for a long string of contributions to Linux. In 2013, Geert founded Glider bv (http://glider.be/), to build upon the... Read More →

Tuesday March 24, 2015 3:25pm - 4:15pm PDT
Blossom Hill 1/2

Embedded Experience: Advanced

4:25pm PDT

Android Customization: From the Kernel to the Apps - Cédric Cabessa, Genymobile

On Linux, you probably know how to expand your OS with new drivers, new packages, new SDKs, etc and develop an app that uses all those features.
With Android, the “all in one package” approach makes it easy for beginner to start writing apps, but harder to add new features to the OS
In this presentation, we explore the best ways to customize an Android system to let your applications benefit from a change in the low level stack.
We will visit every layers of the Android system (kernel, hal, jni, services, aidl, ...) and see how we can integrate our work into Android’s APIs in order to make it available to application developers.

Speakers

Cédric Cabessa

Software Engineer, Genymobile

Cédric is a software engineer at Genymobile, where he has been helping several companies customizing their Android platform. Today he spend most of his time hacking on Genymotion (Genymobile’s emulator). His area of expertise cover the Android middleware with a good knowledge... Read More →

Tuesday March 24, 2015 4:25pm - 5:15pm PDT
Ballroom Salon 1/2

Android Experience: Advanced

4:25pm PDT

Freedreno Status Report: Upstream and FOSS Graphics on ARM/SoC Devices - Rob Clark, Red Hat

Much progress has been made on FOSS graphics for ARM/SoC based devices in the last few years. Before you could only choose between no graphics or blob graphics on these devices, if you even had that choice! Freedreno has been leading the charge with an upstream gallium and kernel drm/kms driver. The result is the software you have come to take for granted on x86 now also works on ARM based devices (composited DE's like gnome-shell, wayland, games, webgl, and so on). Yet, there is much left to do. In this presentation, we will go into more detail about freedreno and discuss how the community can get involved: how to use, how to debug, and the remaining tasks for gl3/gles3 support. We will also demonstrate the current capabilities of the freedreno drivers on several Snapdragon based boards, such as the Inforce 6410 and 6540.

Speakers

Rob Clark

Sr. Train Driver, Google

Rob Clark, from the Red Hat graphics team, is a free software, ARM, and graphics enthusiast. He has been working on the freedreno project for the last few years as part of an effort to bring ARM devices into the world of upstream and open source graphics. In addition to mesa/gallium... Read More →

Tuesday March 24, 2015 4:25pm - 5:15pm PDT
WG 2/3

Embedded Experience: Advanced

5:25pm PDT

Creating Platform Development Tools - François-Denis Gonthier, Opersys

Android platform development is challenging, even for the initiated. Part of this is due to inherent system complexity but part of it is also due to lack of documentation and appropriate platform-level development tools. Indeed, while Google does a good job a polishing app-developer tools, its platform tools are mostly undocumented and very uneven.

This talk will explain the work we've done on creating open source platform development tools for Android. We'll describe, for instance, how the popular Node.js framework can be used to create web-based platform tools such as the open source Opersys Process Explorer. We'll also describe how to create Java-based command line tools and package them as APKs by showing how the open source Opersys Reverse AIDL tool works.

Speakers

François-Denis Gonthier

François-Denis Gonthier is a gradute of Université de Sherbrooke computer science program. He began his career with a startup company called Kryptiva, delivering cryptographic software using open source technologies. From that point, he never strayed far from the Linux and open... Read More →

Tuesday March 24, 2015 5:25pm - 6:15pm PDT
Ballroom Salon 1/2

Android Experience: Advanced

5:25pm PDT

Regulators: Learning To Play With Others - Mark Brown, Linaro

Traditionally embedded Linux systems have been built on the basis that idea that the processor running Linux has full control of the system and can directly manage the hardware at all times. This has never been true for all systems and with modern power sensitive systems very often have coprocessors managing the lowest power states while Linux is suspended or idling CPUs. This especially affects the regulator API which must coordinate with these coprocessors to provide functionality in low power states, this is the main current driving force for development in the API.

This talk will provide an introduction both the the regulator API and current systems, then discuss approaches to extending the regulator API to get the best from these systems.

Speakers

Mark Brown

Principal Software Engineer, Arm

Mark is the maintainer of several subsystems in the Linux kernel, primarily for embedded systems, and has spoken at a number of conferences on related topics. He is the maintainer of the Linaro Stable Kernel, supporting production deployment of the latest features for ARM. Prior to... Read More →

Tuesday March 24, 2015 5:25pm - 6:15pm PDT
WG 2/3

Embedded Experience: Advanced

1:40pm PDT

Doing big.LITTLE right: little and Big Obstacles - Vitaly Wool & Vlad Rezki, Softprise Consulting OU

The ARM's big.LITTLE technology implements a smart idea of combining high-performance cores are with low power ones to deliver peak-performance capacity at a lower average power cost. However, as big.LITTLE effectively is an asymmetrical MP, mainline SMP-oriented kernel "fair" scheduler can't take advantage of it. This talk will show what should be changed in the mainline scheduler to fit big.LITTLE architecture.

Multiple attempts were carried out to come up with the improvements implementing these changes, with the most notable coming from Codeaurora and Linaro/ARM. This talk will explain these implementations specifying their differences and similarities, and provide power and performance comparisons for both.

Speakers

Vlad Rezki

Senior Embedded Software Engineer at Softprise Consulting OU. Spent more than 8 years working in embedded software area with focus on telecommunication, automotive, automatic control systems and mobile. Earned M.Sc. as a Software Engineer in Belarus in 2009, worked first as a Linux... Read More →

Vitaly Wool

Principal Engineer, Konsulko AB

Vitaly has more than 20 years of experience in embedded software development. Starting in real-time and critical systems, he moved to Embedded Linux in 2003, making numerous contributions to MTD device drivers and flash file systems. Then he moved to Sweden where he began working... Read More →

Wednesday March 25, 2015 1:40pm - 2:30pm PDT
Ballroom Salon 3

Android Experience: Advanced

2:40pm PDT

Fixing the y2038 Bug - Arnd Bergmann, Linaro

It is widely understood that all existing 32-bit Linux systems will stop working 23 years from now in 2038, when time_t wraps around. A small group of kernel hackers is now working on fixing this problem and this presentation gives an overview of what the overall strategy is, which changes have been implemented already and what the main remaining problems are faced in the kernel and in user space. Going into more detail, Arnd Bergmann will explain his plans for addressing some of the harder problems inside of the kernel.

This is a must-see presentation for people working on embedded systems with an expected life of 20 years or more, such as automotive or medical equipment. A secondary audience is anyone interested in core kernel development and API design along with developers of toolchains and distributions that are going to be affected by the necessary changes we are doing.

Speakers

Arnd Bergmann

Kernel Developer, Linaro

Arnd Bergmann works for Linaro as one of the maintainers of the arm-soc tree, through which the platform specific code for ARM based SoCs are merged. As a long-time kernel contributor, he has worked on many CPU architectures and subsystems before that, and his current side interests... Read More →

Wednesday March 25, 2015 2:40pm - 3:30pm PDT
Ballroom Salon 3

Embedded Experience: Advanced