Keeping up with our 2023 retrospectives, we wished to highlight the contributions we made throughout the year to the various open-source projects we use on a daily basis for our needs and those of our customers, or those in which we are strategically involved in their development or maintenance.
As a member of the Yocto Project (one of the Linux Foundation’s project) and the LF Energy, and as the creator and developer of several open source software products, including Jami, Savoir-faire Linux is a committed and recognized player in the Free Software and Open Source ecosystems and contributes to building a more innovative and sustainable world.
It’s important to us to give back to the community as much as we can. In the following sections, we present our contributions to various projects over the past year.
An overview of our main contributions, courtesy of LFX.dev
Savoir-faire Linux contributed to the Linux Kernel.
This year, Elinor Montmasson proposed a series of patches in the ALSA subsystem. The patches aim to add support for the S/PDIF DAI in the fsl-asoc-card machine driver, and to make use of the Asynchronous Sample Rate Converter when using the S/PDIF interface.
This work is based on her work on the Resampling impact on performance in embedded audio pipeline with Pipewire. While the patch-set is still in progress, we identified a blocking DMA issue which has been worked on by the component manufacturer.
In parallel, Thomas Ballasi fixed a small issue in the ChipIdea USB controller used on NXP i.MX systems, exposing proper behavior on sysfs. e
As a silver member of the Yocto Project, Savoir-faire Linux is committed to the betterment of the Yocto Project ecosystem. This translates in an active participation to the project, as we try to upstream as much as possible our changes and bug fixes. In 2023, according to the Linux foundation, we were in the top 10 contributors, with 858 commits.
A
mong this plan, Savoir-faire Linux was at the heart of the newly revamped official Yocto Project extension for VS Code. A diverse team, composed of experts from both the embedded and web domains, contributed significantly to this project, with a total of over 480 commits. The core team, consisting of Ziwei Wang, Enguerrand de Ribaucourt, Io Andes Daza-Dillon, and Mohammed Raza, was particularly instrumental in this endeavor. The 2.6.0 version, containing all target features, was recently released. Be sure to try it out!
These developments were carried out as part of a Five-Year Plan and investment provided by the Sovereign Tech Fund to the Yocto Project to improve the long-term sustainability of countless global devices and to attract a new generation of developers.
Find out more about this ambitious VS Code extension:
On a parallel track, Savoir-faire Linux also marked significant advancements for the Toaster application, a web interface tailored for OpenEmbedded and BitBake. The main focus was ensuring the application’s long-term reliability. The contributions of the core team, which includes Marlon Rodriguez Garcia, Alassane Yattara, Alexander Lussier-Cullen, and Mohammed Raza, can be tracked directly on the poky repository with a total of 101 commits.
Be sure to check out the notable successes on the Yocto Project’s Autobuilder.
Additionally, a few other commits were primarily focused on the maintenance, updating and improvement of the cukinia recipe, as well as adding support for GNU oSIP and libeXosip2 to meta-openembedded.
In line with our consistent commitment over the years, SEAPATH continues to be a crucial project for Savoir-faire Linux. This significance is further emphasized by the introduction of our open-source commercial support for the project, positioning us at the forefront of energy systems decarbonization.
This commitment has also solidified Savoir-faire Linux as the primary contributor to the project. As reflected in all SEAPATH repositories, Savoir-faire Linux has amassed a total of 395 commits.
We extend our special thanks to all contributors for their dedicated work:
While providing the details of every commit might not be feasible, let’s highlight the key achievements attained for the project this year:
As a member of the open-source community, Savoir-faire Linux relies on freely developed tools and aims to share back to the community the tools we use internally. As such, we continued improving cqfd, our utility to automate the use of build containers, and cukinia, our pure shell on-target Linux firmware validation framework.
We also developed an open-source tool called test-report-pdf to generate a PDF report from cukinia results. test-report-pdf enables us to efficiently communicate results with our customers.
Charles Perry created support-pack, a tool that generates a tech support package containing information about the current machine state. Specifically designed for embedded Linux systems, support-pack offers modernized and configurable features. The generated information enable non-technical users to run the program and send the results to a tech support team.
Jami is a free/libre, end-to-end encrypted, private and distributed communication software. It is a GNU package, developed and maintained by Savoir-faire Linux.
Developed by Adrien Beraud and Amna Snene, and originally a component of Jami, DHTnet is an open-source lightweight Peer-to-Peer Communication Library tailored for secure connections using public-key authentication. Functioning as a network overlay, it offers an IP network abstraction for device connections while adeptly handling peer discovery and connectivity setup. DHTnet is equipped with connection management, multiplexed sockets, UPnP integration, and server TURN support.
Throughout 2023, our teams in Rennes and Montreal have made significant contributions across various open-source projects, showcasing our dedication to the community. We extend our gratitude to all contributors for their valuable work, and we look forward to continuing our collaborative efforts in the open-source realm, bridging the gap between innovation and industry.
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