Traditionally ELCE has been an important annual event for Codethink. This year was no exception. ELCE 2017 was not only a great technical event but it also demonstrated some of Codethink's effort and participation in CIP, the Linux Foundation's initiative to create an Industrial Grade Platform.

ELCE preparations

Having been involved in CIP, Ben Hutchings, Robert Marshall and I from Codethink attended ELCE 2017. CIP had organized several activities prior to and during the event, which included several meetings, workshops, Q & A sessions and a booth facility. This was a busy event for Codethink and CIP. Ben Hutchings, first maintainer for CIP's super long term support kernel. also participated in several activities in relation to the Kernel Summit.

In the weeks leading up to the event, Robert Marshall invested significant time in preparing for the release of Board At Desk v1.0, the testing environment based on kernelci.org tooling used in CIP. In addition during the week before the event, Tom Pollard, another colleague from Codethink, and Robert Marshall prepared a demo which was delivered at the CIP booth throughout the event. Ben Hutchings further released a new version of the CIP Kernel right before the event, which was well received by both companies and developers who are interested in utilizing a long term supported kernel for use in their products.

Simultaneously, Ben and I prepared several additional CIP related activities, these included a Q&A Kernel maintenance session; a meeting with Y2038 initiative leaders to learn first hand current status and evaluate how we can help to speed up progress, and we coordinated a meeting between CIP and AGL CIAT group, in order to consider collaboration on the testing side and organizing a CIP developers gathering.

The event

The day before the event started, CIP's Technical Steering Committee took place in the morning and several other activities as prearranged followed during the afternoon. The day closed with setting up the booth and dinner. It was good to witness an increasing number of CIP Member engineers participating in these activities.

During ELCE 2017, Codethink provided two talks:

• Open Source Developing a State-of-the-Art Brain Scanner with Linux and FPGAs, delivered by Codethink's Senior Kernel engineer Ben Dooks.

• Maintaining a Linux Kernel for 13 Years? You Must be Kidding Me. We Need at Least 30!, delivered by Ben Hutchings CIP Kernel Maintainer, alongside 3.16 and 3.2 (Debian kernels) delivered by Ben Hutchings and myself.

Both talks were well received and particularly well attended. In particular, I was pleased to see around 100 people at our talk. In addition, the contributions made by Codethink within CIP were summarized at the main CIP presentation, namely Civil Infrastructure Platform: Industrial Grade Open Source Base-Layer Development, presented by both Urs Gleim, from Siemens AG, and Yoshitake Kovayashi, from Toshiba.

The activity around the booth, the talks, specific CIP activities and other meetings kept Codethink's team actively busy. As usual, Codethink also took the opportunity to partake in interesting conversations with current and potential customers as well as key upstream project maintainers. It is always important to get first hand knowledge about relevant projects on behalf of Codethink and our customers.

At ELCE there is always time to attend the numerous talks on offer. As usual, there were good technical talks from great hackers as well as developers introducing their new work. ELCE provides an ideal opportunity to catch up with former colleagues and friends, exchange knowledge and maybe enjoy the odd beer with those who may be now be working for companies around the world. Prague is the right city for doing that, by the way....

As expected, the effort invested by Codethink at ELCE was intense but worth it. Codethink hopes to be back next year collaborating in another great city, Edinburgh, UK, close enough to our Manchester head office. Hope to see you all there. In terms of events, our next annual event is, FOSDEM 2018, which is once again sponsored by Codethink Ltd.