Another report on MeeGo Conference

MeeGo Conf happened from May 23-25, in San Francisco, CA at the Hyatt Embacadero Center and I went there to meet the MeeGo people, especially people from projects that I develop like ConnMan, oFono and BlueZ and check what are the new stuff on MeeGo.

This time we had no free devices! But we had the announcement of MeeGo tablet during the Conference keynote, one of the first devices running MeeGo.

Some talks I attended there: “MeeGo connectivity: State of the union – what comes next …” by Marcel Holtmann,  who talked about how far we got with ConnMan, oFono and BlueZ integration to give a solid connectivity  platform.; “Connman Tethering API” by Samuel Ortiz which showed a quite easy to use free software tethering implementation. Samuel evene mentioned me in his talk due to some work I did on the ConnMan’s PrivateNetwork API (one of the pieces of the Thethering code); “Qt Open Governance Progress” by Tiago Maciera talking about how Qt will be managed by community and “Systemd for MeeGo – fastboot 2.0?” by Auke Kok reporting the speed ups gains with the systemd, that will be  in MeeGo 1.3 (the next version).

Also I was able to discuss with Marcel some issues I’m having in the rewrite of the L2CAP Protocol (Expect a post on this subject soon!)

It was nice see lot of new stuff about MeeGo and that its commit is doing great even with Nokia’s back out, more people are joining MeeGo and release 1.3 will be a lot better.

Finally, I would like to thank ProFUSION and MeeGo Conference for sponsor my travel to San Francisco.

A little report of MeeGo Conference

In the end of the last month I attended MeeGo Conference in San Francisco, CA. The conference venue was very nice, and they managed to create a quite nice hacker lounge, with comfortable couches and free beer! :-)

There I attended some talks, as long as the opening keynote. The keynote was not that good, much more focused in the Linux success on mobile than MeeGo itself. But the talks were all about MeeGo, of course.

And like any other conference it was a nice time to assign faces to nick and meet people who you talk everyday in the internet.

Brazilians at MeeGo Conference - by gustavoboiko

Brazilians at MeeGo Conference - by Gustavo Boiko

As it was my first time in San Francisco, I also managed to do some sightseeing, so I visited the Golden Gate Bridge among other places

See you around!

BlueZ: GSoC students announced

Last Monday Google announced the students accepted to take part in 2011 edition of Google Summer of Code. BlueZ this time got four slots. Our projects, and students, for this year are:

Improve EDS backend of Phone Book Access Profile (PBAP)
Student: Bartosz Szatkowski
Mentor: Claudio Takahasi

Nintendo Wii Remote Device Driver
Student: David Herrmann
Mentor: Gustavo Padovan

Implementing the Basic Imaging Profile(BIP)
Student: Jakub Adamek
Mentor: Vinicius Gomes

Implement the Video Distribution Profile(VDP)
Student: Prasad Bhat
Mentor: Luiz Augusto von Dentz

Besides the mentors, Johan Hedberg and Marcel Holtmann along with whole community will also support the students helping them with doubts and technical decisions. We expect to have a very productive summer, happy hacking to all students. ;)

Google Summer of Code: List of Ideas for BlueZ

As many of you may already know Google announced the accepted organizations for Google Summer of Code and BlueZ[0] was accepted again! If you a student and know nothing about it go to the Google Summer of Code page[1] and learn about it.

We are already accepting projects proposal, check our ideas list[2] or propose some new good idea you want to implement in BlueZ. Discuss them with the BlueZ mentors and submit your project proposal.  Our freenode  irc channel for GSoC is #bluez-gsoc.

We will be very glad to accept the best students proposals to take part of GSoC 2011 with BlueZ.

[0] http://www.bluez.org
[1] http://code.google.com/soc/
[2] http://www.bluez.org/development/gsoc/gsoc-ideas-list/

Bluetooth changes for 2.6.38

2.6.38 was a quiet release cycle for the Bluetooth subsystem, the biggest changes came from Johan Hedberg for the HCI management Interface, a under development code. Besides that we added support for two Atheros devices (AR9285 and AR5BBU12). Fixed a regression with the USB autosuspend and lot of other fixes and clean ups.

On the other hand 2.6.39 is being a very busy release cycle, stay tuned to see all the new stuff we will add to the Linux Bluetooth stack.

Talk at Linux Plumbers Conference

I just did my talk at the Linux Plumbers Conference at Cambridge, MA. I had many problems with English which made it no so good, but that’s ok. I have to improve it for the next talk. ;-)  You can get the slides at here.

L2CAP Extended Features on 2.6.36

On October 20th, Linus released the 2.6.36 kernel and one of the new features released with it was the support in the Linux Bluetooth stack for the L2CAP Extended Features. Also called eL2CAP, the L2CAP Extended Features add some new features to the L2CAP layer, like the Enhanced Retransmission Mode(ERTM), a reliable protocol with error and flow control; the Streaming Mode, an unreliable protocol for streaming purpouses; the Frame Check Sequence, a checksum for each received packet; and Segmentation and Reassembly of L2CAP packets which make retransmission easier. The L2CAP Extended Features were in the kernel before, but in an experimental mode and disabled by default.

Other Bluetooth changes in 2.6.36: In-kernel blacklist for incoming connections, that allow dropping selected incoming connections in kernel space without having to wake up bluetoothd. Support for the Atheros AR300x chip. A new hci_recv_stream_fragment() function which is part of a refactory in the HCI recv path to make the life of some drivers easier.

Embedded Linux Conference Europe

I’m right now at the Embedded Linux Conference in Cambridge, UK, where I’m going to talk tomorrow about the Linux Bluetooth stack. The talk will explain how the Linux Bluetooth stack works and show the upcoming features to the stack. I’ll post the slides sometime in the future on this blog. Next week I’ll be at Linux Plumbers, in Cambridge, MA. (Yeah, I’ll visit to two different Cambridges :) to also talk about the Linux Bluetooth Stack.

Bluetooth Subsystem maintainership change

Since the beginning of October I’m the new Linux Kernel maintainer of the Bluetooth Subsystem. Marcel Holtmann, who was maintaining the trees before will be around as before, but only on patch review now. Only Marcel knows the whole stack, so his help and ack is needed for sure. All rest, like apply patches, check if everything builds correctly and send pull request, is my job. That is not a big change in the Bluetooth subsystem, things should work the same way as before in linux-bluetooth.

You can find my bluetooth-2.6, intended only for bug fixes for the current linux release cycle, here:

http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/padovan/bluetooth-2.6.git

and my bluetooth-next-2.6 tree, where the hot fresh stuff goes, here:

http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/padovan/bluetooth-next-2.6.git