CE Linux Forum conference report and videos

Dear LWN editors,

I hope you are interested in the following report...

Thanks for everything,

    Sincerely,

    Michael.

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The 2006 edition of the Consumer Electronics Linux Forum (CELF) 
conference took place last week (April 11 and 12) in San Jose, 
California. For the first time, it was called "Embedded Linux 
Conference", as the ELC accronym is now free after the end of the 
Embedded Linux Consortium last year. For the first time too, it was open 
to the general public (for a very moderate registration fee), and not 
only to CELF members like last year.

This conference featured approximately 40 talks, tutorials or Bird Of a 
Feather sessions as well as several product demos, 100% targeted to 
embedded system developers. See 
http://www.celinux.org/elc2006/sessions.html for session descriptions. 
The conference attracted many participants from Asia (mainly Japan and 
Korea), from the USA and a few from Europe.

A few key topics: system size and boot time, real-time (now getting 
mature thanks to the prempt-rt patches), power management, debugging and 
tracing, as well as work on common specifications and APIs. Of course, 
many sessions also covered the audio, video and graphics topics. An 
interestingly new focus on solutions for multi-core embedded systems 
also appeared. The first day ended with demos and a reception, chaired 
by a giant penguin made of ice. Actually, at 7:30 pm, many people went 
back to the meeting rooms to participate to BOF sessions. The second day 
ended with an entertaining embedded Linux quiz game between 2 teams from 
the audience, a team of geeks (from industry members), and a team of 
nerds (community developers).

This conference was a great way for developers across many companies to 
share their experience and issues, and also an opportinity to meet key 
community developers such as Greg Kroah Hartman (Linux kernel), Rob 
Landley (Busybox), Greg Ungerer (uClinux), Matt Mackall (Linux Tiny, 
Linux kernel and Mercurial), Hyok S. Choi (MMU-less arm Linux), Thomas 
Gleixner (Linux real-time patches), Pat Mochel and Pavel Macheck 
(Software Suspend).

The CE Linux Forum, created and driven by Tim Bird (a faithful penguin 
lover who appeared first in Novell, Caldera and then Lineo, and now 
works for Sony), is a non profit consortium, with the goal to develop 
the suitability of Linux as an operating system for Consumer Electronics 
devices. Its members are major embedded system makers, software vendors 
and service providers. It hosts projects like reducing Linux size and 
startup time and works on common specifications and standards (such as 
the phone or graphics API). It is also setting up a test lab that will 
let remote developers test their code on a wide range of architectures 
and embedded platforms.

Inclusion in mainstream versions is a key objective for CELF and these 
projects. For example, many Linux Tiny patches are now available in the 
latest Vanilla Linux kernel.

Hence, CELF now plays a significant role in the Free and Open Source 
Software developer and user community. Its technical conferences, 
developer mailing list and wiki are open to anyone.

To make this event profitable to as many persons as possible, some 
videos have been shot by Free Electrons' Michael Opdenacker. These 
videos, along with videos from other conferences, are available under a 
free license on http://free-electrons.com/community/videos/conferences/ 
. Slides are being collected on 
http://tree.celinuxforum.org/CelfPubWiki/ELC2006Presentat... . See also 
http://www.linuxdevices.com/articles/AT8247255296.html for 
LinuxDevices.com's detailed coverage of the demo session.

It is easy to capture and encode your own videos on GNU/Linux. So, don't 
hesitate to make your own ones next time you go to a technical conference!

-- 
Michael Opdenacker
Free Embedded Linux Training Materials
on http://free-electrons.com/training
(More than 1000 pages!)