Linaro Connect Las Vegas 2016
I spent last week at Linaro Connect in Las Vegas. Nominally I was there for some discussions about Ion. The week ended up being fairly full of the gamut of ARM topics.
IoT is still a top buzzword. Linaro announced the founding of the LITE (Linaro IoT and Embedded) group. The work that this group has done so far is mostly related to Cortex-M processors which don’t run Linux. This is a change of pace from a consortium that has exclusively focused on Linux. The Linux Foundation has done the same thing, given their focus on the Zephyr Project. I see this shift for three reasons: 1) vendors want an end-to-end solution and reduced fragmentation and Linaro/Linux Foundation provide a good forum to do this because 2) both Linaro and the Linux Foundation are very good at courting companies and engaging in ‘corporate hand holding’ through open source projects especially 3) when bootstrapping relatively new projects. This is not intended to be a negative, sometimes companies need to throw money at outside entities to inform them what needs to be done (even when internal employees are shouting the same thing). Corporate influence in open source can certainly be critiqued but I’m optimistic about that not being a problem for Linaro1.
Red Hat also announced its involvement in the LITE group. Red Hat’s interest aren’t in the RTOS Microcontroller space but the higher level gateway. All those IoT devices have to communicate somewhere and a centralized gateway makes it easier to manage those devices, especially for industrial use cases. Hearing the full-stack story of IoT was a good learning experience for me, as I mostly have my head in the kernel. Everyone seems to be learning everywhere and most of the work is brand new. The Zephyr project was talking about writing new IP stacks which should give you some idea of where these projects are right now.
In not IoT things, I sat in on the firmware mini conference. This was mostly an update about ACPI and UEFI related things for server platforms. arm64 ACPI and UEFI support has come a very long way. In the Fedora kernel, we carry very few arm64 related patches. Basic virtualization works and servers boot in a ‘boring’ manner. PCIE quirks are still an ongoing TODO item along with SMMU work. There was discussion about the next version of the UEFI spec, or as much discussion as could be had, given UEFI rules. Leif Lindholm gave an update about Tianocore, the open source UEFI implementation. There’s been some change in community governance to hopefully make more forward progress, which is always good to hear.
I had a meeting with some of the other folks who have been working on kernel hardening for arm64. arm64 mostly has feature parity with x86 for hardening features that have been merged. There’s ongoing work for software emulation of Privilege Access Never (PAN) on targets that don’t have this in hardware. Newer features like vmapped stacks are works in progress but should have a short window for merging. We concluded that many of the features on the wiki involve becoming a gcc hacker. Nobody stepped up to do that quite yet so that’s still an open project2. I spent some time hacking on a patch set to do checking for writable/executable pages to match with x86. I sent v1 out at the end of last week, so v2 will probably come after the merge window closes in a few weeks.
As mentioned, my nominal reason for heading to Linaro connect was for discussion about Ion. I was excited to report we had made some good progress with things like platform support. Then several devicetree people announced that they hadn’t gotten around to giving feedback and they still don’t like the idea of Ion in devicetree. So much for that milestone. There was some interesting discussion that came out of XDC last week where apparently the DRM layer is looking for something similar to constraint solving. This was interesting to hear as the constraint solving had become less important for Ion in recent years. The discussion in the Android miniconference was useful. People do care about Ion so I can’t just delete it. I had been hoping for a small first step of moving Ion as a self-contained framework out of staging into drivers/android/ but that seems less plausible and less of a good idea. I had a meeting with others who are working on the secure memory allocation framework (SMAF). They need something very similar to Ion and given what the DRM people are looking at as well it may in fact be time for a centralized constraint allocator (cca instead of Ion as a name?). There’s still a month before plumbers where there are supposed to be more discussions of Ion. I’ll have more research and work to do before that.
Most of the videos should be up sometime in the near future if they aren’t already. I believe the keynotes should be up. You need to watch Sarah Sharp’s keynote which is a great summary of why corporations struggle with upstreaming. I may start linking to this the next time a “but why isn’t my phone upstream” topic comes up. The keynote about IoT Zephyr was excellent. Jono Bacon gave a great talk about community management.
Overall, it felt like a productive week. I always enjoy meeting with the ARM community and this time was no exception.
extreme happening. If anyone involved is reading this, please don’t make me eat my words, I’m cynical enough already.
project’, the gcc plugins could be for you!