FOSDEM 2025: What to Expect from Codethink

It’s that time of year again: FOSDEM!

On the 1st and 2nd of February, 30+ Codethings will be in Brussels for FOSDEM '25. If you’ve never attended FOSDEM (which one member of our team described as the ‘Glastonbury of Open Source’), we highly recommend it. FOSDEM is the ultimate space for the open source community to learn, connect, and collaborate.

Not only is Codethink sponsoring the event, but we will also be giving talks and presentations on a range of topics. You can find information about Codethink-sponsored presentations below.

We’ll be posting updates on LinkedIn and Mastodon. Follow us on both platforms for updates.

See you in Belgium!

Codethink Presentations/Talks

Saturday 1st February

Automated testing for mobile images using GNOME

Speaker: Sam Thursfield When: 10:30 Where: H.2215 (Ferrer) What: "The GNOME project has some end-to-end tests running with openQA and os-autoinst. So far these test GNOME OS integration, the Shell and core applications, accessibility features and more. However, all these tests assume a desktop form factor.

To help GNOME work well on mobile, we also have a gnome_mobile test suite, but there are currently some missing features in QEMU and os-autoinst which limits how useful these tests are.

This lightning talk will cover:

• Why mobile devices are different from desktops and laptops, and why the current gnome_mobile tests are not good enough
• How QEMU can better support mobile form factors
• What we might need in os-autoinst to start simulating multi-touch inputs to a mobile device."

The Trustable Software Framework: A new way to measure risk in continuous delivery of critical software

Speaker: Paul Sherwood When: 11:00 Where: Room UD6.215 What: "Many of the international standards for software in critical systems (e.g. IEC 61508, ISO 26262) are published under restrictive licences, at high prices. They broadly discourage the use of FOSS, by imposition of processes that do not align with modern open source best practices such as continuous delivery and automated testing. As a result some industries such as automotive, medical and aerospace, are locked in to proprietary software.

This talk will introduce the Trustable Software Framework (TSF), a new free and open source project which establishes an evidence-based method for measuring the actual risks involved in continuous delivery of software in critical systems."

RISC-V Linux bug hunting

Speaker: Ben Dooks When: 15:45 Where: Room H.1309 (Van Rijn) What: "Debugging issues with the Linux kernel and user space can be both interesting and challenging. This talk goes through looking at a couple of bugs we found while working with RISC-V in both kernel and user space.

The aim is to show multiple ways of approaching issues in both the kernel and user space, a run through why these happen, and how we fixed these problems. We will include taking an syzbot report and analysing what is going on during a strange kernel oops, and going through a user report of a crashing system where there was an issue with a Buildbot on a set of remote workers.

As part of this, we will go into how to decode kernel oopses, how to dump object code and attempt to decipher bug reports without the aid of attaching a debugger."

Upstream Embedded Linux on RISC-V: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

Speaker: Marcel Ziswiler When: 18:00 Where: Room H.1309 (Van Rijn) What: "This talk looks at the state of upstream U-Boot, Linux kernel, Freedesktop SDK, and Yocto Project for the powerful SpacemiT K1-based Banana Pi BPI-F3. Nothing has been merged yet, but I took the various pieces posted on mailing lists or available as merge requests and gave them a spin. As a reference for comparison, I also looked at the vendor downstream stuff available from Banana Pi Team/SpacemiT."

Sunday 3rd February

Fedora Silverblue With Disk Encryption: How I Almost Lost Everything But Gained Much Wisdom (Side Story: Bmaptool And Ddrescue: Why One Should Never Ever Use Dd)

Speaker: Marcel Ziswiler When: 10:30 Where: Room H.1302 (Depage) What: "While testing different Radxa ROCK 5B board boot options, I inadvertently typed sudo dd of=/dev/nvme0n1 on my notebook! While recovering I learned one too many things which one supposedly should know when running a modern distro like Fedora Silverblue with disk encryption. This talk covers some lessons learned from using Fedora Silverblue as a daily driver and outlines what modifications might make sense during installation and what parts you might want to have backed up to avoid a similar disastrous shocking moment from happening. As a side story, I cover why using dd is a really bad idea and what better options to consider."

How to push your testing upstream

Speaker: Sam Thursfield When: 14:00 Where: H.1302 (Depage) What: "Quality assurance is the final stage of testing a distro release, where you boot a real OS image, and use the keyboard and mouse to navigate the system. Several distributions have adopted openQA and os-autoinst which can automate much of this work, allowing QA testing to happen every time a package updates, instead of just at release time.

Increased downstream testing is great for upstreams, but for developers to work efficiently, we need quick feedback between publishing a change and discovering what broke. In many cases we still don't get issue reports upstream until weeks or months after a merge request landed.

What's missing? Let's look at the remaining pain points around QA in the Linux OS world. Then we’ll look at research happening in the GNOME project to bring QA testing all the way to the merge request pipelines in GNOME Gitlab, so we can find integration issues as they happen.

We’ll also touch on how systemd-sysext allows testing built artifacts in an OS in a distro-independent way. And we’ll look at how changes in openQA could mean that QA teams in different companies can join forces to build testsuites once, instead of everyone working separately to maintain their own."

Note: The full FOSDEM 2025 schedule can be found on the FOSDEM website.

Can't make it to Brussels?

If you can't make the trip to Brussels, the FOSDEM team provides an excellent livestreaming service. Information about livestreaming can be found on the FOSDEM website.

From our side, stay tuned for a post-FOSDEM blog post detailing what we got up to. In the meantime, to learn more about the events Codethink attends and sponsors, please check out our events page.