FOSDEM 2019 Is over, and it has been awesome once again. A big thank to the FOSDEM volunteers!
Among the talks I attended, Microcontroller Firmware from Scratch by Nikolay Kondrashov was by far the most well made and enjoyable, no matter if I’m not a firmware developer anymore. Nikolay was able to squash a huge amount of precious experience about microcontroller firmware and device drivers writing in his 40 minutes timeslot while making it very easy and fun to understand, thanks to great speaking and perfect supporting slides. I particularly loved the sections about how to find and read chip documentation, understanding hardware schematics, using device registers, interrupt vectors and the stack. I suggest watching the video to firmware newbies for learning and to passionate experts for a refreshing entertainment.
I like talks about about specific classes of hardware and how they are modeled in software, so I loved these talks in the Hardware Enablement and Graphics devrooms:
- Linux and USB Audio Class 3 by Ruslan Bilovol
- Complex cameras are (were?) complex by Jacopo Mondi
- PipeWire by Wim Taymans
- V4L2: A Status Update by Hans Verkuil
Finally, a few talks that I liked even though I’m not specifically interested in the topic:
- UEFI Boot for Mere Mortals by Stephano Cetola and Alexander Graf
- Flickerfree boot by
- Fearless Multimedia Programming –using GStreamer & Rust by Zeeshan Ali
Congratulations to all those speakers, and see you next year!