 So we're here at the Embedded World and you just arrived? Yes, I did. So what do you think so far? Well, I just got in so I can't really say much, but I met my good friend Thomas here. What does he do? Hey, hello, I work for Electrons. So we're a French-based embedded Linux services company, and we're here on the Atmel booth to showcase what we've done with Atmel on the Linux channel. So what do you think about what they do? It's pretty cool. Yeah, I mean, we've known each other for, what, 12, 13, 15 years now? Yeah, we've been, you know, been doing embedded Linux, he's been doing embedded Linux and, you know, life is good. What kind of work are they doing? What kind of work they're doing. How about you go, you take a stab at that. Okay, so we mainly do Linux channel work. So we work with several SoC vendors. Atmel is one of them and we help them push to the official Linux channel to support for their ARM SoCs. So we are now for the 40.0 channel that's going to be released in the next few months. It will be, I think, the seventh contributing company in number of patches. Seventh? Yeah, seventh, absolutely, next to Google and Inaro and ARM and the others. Are you in front of Inaro or just after? I think it depends on the channel releases, but mainly I believe we're after. But how many guys are you in the company? Six engineers. Two hundred and fifty. Six. Six guys. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So the company is nine persons, but we have six engineers doing channel work. So it's possible as few guys to do a lot of work and embedded Linux stuff? Absolutely. I mean, that's, at least that's what got me into Linux is you don't actually need a lot of infrastructure. You just need to have the will and proper people to do the work. So in our case, you know, we've been helping customers take Android and put it in all sorts of devices. We're practically the same size as they are. And, you know, you don't need hundreds of people. You just need to have the right people. How do you find the right guys? You're a straight secret. I'll keep that one to myself. I'll keep the secret. I think you're going to say the same thing anyway. So like a couple of years ago, you were talking in one of my videos about Android for embedded world. Yes. So what's the status? What's the status of the use of Android in embedded devices? It's everywhere. I mean, okay, so I was there, you know, I was just happened to be there when Linux took off in the embedded world, say 13, 14 years ago. And people would put it and wouldn't advertise it. It wouldn't necessarily say this is running Linux. Nowadays, all the embedded devices out there that are running any sort of 32-bit operating system are practically all running Linux. And the same thing kind of goes with the Android these days with the user interfaces. It's got a UI and it's running a 32 or 64-bit processor. It's, you know, it's a very good candidate for embedded Android. So what do you think about Android for embedded? Well, there are lots of, well, situations where Android is appropriate, consumer devices or as Karim said, devices that have reached UI and Android is perfect for this type of usage. In our case, we work mainly with industrial customers that do more deeply embedded devices. They may not even have a screen. Nobody knows that the device is here. So not many people know about those devices, but also many of them running with Linux, sometimes some real-time variants of Linux. And in this case, Android is not always used and there are still a lot of cases where Android is not used. At Mail, for example, they do a lot of SOCs that are widely used in the industrial space and Android is not really a good match for such SOCs and still those SOCs have lots of serial ports and communication devices that make it really nice for the industrial space. So I think it's kind of each operating system for its different types of markets. And there's some more and more powerful embedded processors that run Linux great, no? Yes. Indeed, yeah? Yeah. So what are you going to do here at the Embedded World? What's your plan? Well, I do have a workshop tomorrow about embedded Android. So that's my main plan. But today I'm going to just walk around the show floor and see what's new. Cool. And you're showing stuff? Yeah, we're showing some basic demo, yes. Cool. So let's go check it out. All right. So I'll catch up with you guys later. Yeah. So let's jump in there. Right at the point where there are many people around. Yeah. So what are you showing over there? So what we're showing over here is... This is a customer? Yeah. Sorry? Yeah. So that's what we're showing here? Yeah. It's a... Is it going to be done on the Linux panel? Yeah, I know. Yep. So this is some E5-T4-T3 board. Yeah. And we've done for them the developers for the LCD driver. So they did the development. And then all the work was the canal maintainers to get this driver merged into the Linux canal. So as you can see over here, it's actually quite funny because our driver, the PRM KMS, was supposed to merge into the canal 3.20, but we had to live-patch our poster because... We decided to rename this canal version 4.0 just a few days ago. So it was too late for us to adjust the poster. So in 4.0, this AdMail platform will have a two-featured LCD driver in the Linux canal. So you've been busy to do a bunch of stuff for the 4.0? Yes, absolutely, absolutely. As I just said, it will be the 7th contributing company to 4.0. And how many guys are right here at the booth? Actually, four of us are here. Right now, it's just the two of us. It's lunchtime right now. What am I doing? I'm one of the guys supporting the Linux canal mainlining for AdMail. I'm actually working on that. And yeah, that's basically what I do. What I've done for the 4.0. Is it the hard work or is it easy? It actually quite depends on the IPs that you are trying to support in the canal. I've been busy with cleaning up the core support for AdMail chips. So I did a lot of power management stuff. I removed a lot of dead code and unused code and that kind of things. Three electrons, you have many customers? Yes, I think we have for a small size company that we are. Yes, we believe we have a good number of customers. We work here with AdMail. We also work with Marvell on similar type of projects. Doing canal mainlining. We've pushed hundreds of patches to support Marvell processors in the last three years. And then we work with a lot of embedded system makers, maybe mainly in the industrial area. And they do products like in the medical space or automation or other types of usually DPM embedded products. So you're already busy? Pretty much, yes. And so what's the next big thing? What's the next big thing you mean for us? What's the next big challenge with embedded Linux or upstreaming all that stuff? Well, upstreaming more and more support for additional SoCs. We work with a few SoC vendors and more and more SoC vendors are getting engaged with the upstreaming canal work. But not all of them and there are still quite a few SoC vendors that should do this effort as well. So I guess that's the next big step. And another big step in my opinion is the issue of GPU support. It's all going to be open source, right? Yeah, it would be great. It's still not the case at the moment and I believe a lot of silicon vendors and embedded system makers would be really happy to see one GPU-IP designer provide open source drivers for this open source. And not just reverse engineered GPU. Which is not the same, right? It's not the same. Reverse engineering I believe is really cool. It's nice to have that but it's usually going to happen way after the product has been made. So it's usually too late for real products to use something like that. So it's technically really great. Hopefully it's going to push at some point the GPU designers to do something with open source drivers. But they should do it themselves. Do you do Manchester with 64-bit ARM? It's somewhere on the radar. There's not much I can say about it. I have lots of secret projects too. Well, we work with S&C vendors. So they have their own roadmaps and we have some knowledge about their roadmaps that we cannot disclose. Do you work with Linaro guys? Not necessarily. We do work with them in the open, in the community. Many Linaro guys are maintainers of various canal subsystems. So we do interact a lot with them on the canal mailing list. But besides that we don't have any special interaction with Linaro. All right. Cool. So for electrons people can take one of those and what they can read in here. Absolutely. And we also give a lot of trainings. And we are probably the only training company that has freely available training materials. So every slide, every practical lab you can download for free on our website. Where are you based? We're based in France. Where? Basically the south of France. I'm in Toulouse, southwest. My colleague Alexandre here is in Lyon. And we have four pieces of orange as well in the southeast. So you just work from home? I do. Alexandre does? Yeah, I do. But now they have an office and there are four guys in it. So that's good. All right. Cool. Did you have a look at our code editor? This is a code editor. And you have a debugger there, right? This is a debugger. Cool. Yeah.