Free Electrons Blog
free-electrons.com · Company blog · on HN since 2008
Free Electrons Blog comes from an embedded Linux engineering company, covering kernel development, drivers, upstreaming, and training materials.
What HN saysHN commenters describe Free Electrons as the best company for Linux upstreaming and a good embedded company blog, and link its kernel driver posts and free book.
22HN people shared it
8linked it in comments
15stories submitted
123story points
9 years agolast shared
2008people per year2026
Most-shared posts
- 1How we found that the Linux nios2 memset() implementation had a bug2 people · 97 points · first shared 2016 · 16 comments on HN
- 2Elixir Cross Referencer: new way to browse kernel sources2 people · 2 points · first shared 2017 · 1 comments on HN
- 3Linux kernel and driver dev lab book (free-electrons.com) [pdf]1 people · 3 points · first shared 2015 · discussion on HN
- 4Managing flash storage with Linux1 people · 3 points · first shared 2012 · discussion on HN
- 5Linux kernel support for Microcrystal RTCs1 people · 3 points · first shared 2016 · discussion on HN
- 6FOSDEM 2009 Embedded Linux Videos1 people · 3 points · first shared 2009 · discussion on HN
- 7FIQ Handlers in the ARM Linux Kernel1 people · 2 points · first shared 2015 · 1 comments on HN
- 8Hardware infrastructure of Free Electrons lab1 people · 2 points · first shared 2016 · discussion on HN
- 9Linux 4.6 released, with Free Electrons contributions1 people · 2 points · first shared 2016 · discussion on HN
- 10Free Electrons CC-Licensed Docs (kernel/real-time/Android/embedded Linux)1 people · 2 points · first shared 2017 · discussion on HN
- 11A Kickstarter for a low cost Marvell ARM64 board1 people · 1 points · first shared 2016 · discussion on HN
- 12Videos from the Embedded Linux Conference1 people · 1 points · first shared 2008 · discussion on HN
- 13Free Embedded Linux with Buildroot Training Course1 people · 1 points · first shared 2015 · discussion on HN
- 14Software architecture of Free Electrons’ lab1 people · 1 points · first shared 2016 · discussion on HN
- 15Elce2010 murray boot time.webm1 people · first shared 2015
What HN people wrote when they linked it
Aissen · 2016-06-15
Next Thing Co is specifically contracting the best company out there to do Linux upstreaming (Free Electrons) of the SoC and board:
http://free-electrons.com/blog/free-electrons-chip-nextthing/
mvanga · 2011-07-12
Getting code into the Linux kernel requires patience and a lot of work to conform to the standards set by the developers. I saw a great talk at ELC 2010 [1] from Greg Kroah-Hartman on the problems they faced when trying to get the Android changes into the kernel. He also did a short write-up of the problems[2].
[1] Video: http://free-electrons.com/blog/elc-2010-videos/
[2] http://www.kroah.com/log/linux/android-kernel-problems.html
magpi3 · 2017-11-30
There is a similar exercise in "Linux Device Drivers." The first driver they ask you to write is a char device that runs in memory called "scull."
Here is a link to the free book (warning it's a pdf):
http://free-electrons.com/doc/books/ldd3.pdf
And here is a link to a github project with all exercises updated for the most recent kernel:
https://github.com/martinezjavier/ldd3
mrpippy · 2017-04-21
First blog I thought of, although it's not a company: Dolphin. https://dolphin-emu.org/blog/
As for actual companies, as an embedded dev I think Atomic Object (https://spin.atomicobject.com) and Free Electrons (http://free-electrons.com/blog/) both do a good job.
homarp · 2016-11-07
The VPU is getting there: http://free-electrons.com/blog/support-for-the-allwinner-vpu-in-the-ma…
"Currently, the combination of the kernel driver and VA-API backend supports MPEG2 and MPEG4 decoding only. There is for the moment no support for encoding, and no support for H264, though we believe support for both aspects can be added within the architecture of the existing driver and VA-API backend."
msbarnett · 2016-05-01
Yeah, that's not about the ISA, that's just Evidence That GCC's Inline ASM Functionality is a Mess #938292721
See also: http://free-electrons.com/blog/how-we-found-that-the-linux-nios2-memse…
See also: http://robertoconcerto.blogspot.ca/2013/03/my-hardest-bug.html
voltagex_ · 2015-09-20
Video if anyone wants it: http://free-electrons.com/pub/video/2010/elce/elce2010-murray-boot-tim…
daemon · 2011-06-06
Video of the talk can be found here: http://free-electrons.com/blog/abs-2011-videos/