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CIP Member Spotlight: Renesas

By Blog

The Civil Infrastructure Platform (CIP) project aims to speed implementation of Linux-based civil infrastructure systems, build upon existing open source foundations and expertise, establish de facto standards by providing a base layer reference implementation, and contribute to and influence upstream projects regarding industrial needs. CIP is driven by some of the world’s leading manufacturers of civil infrastructure systems and industry leaders including Codethink, Hitachi, Plat’Home, Renesas, Siemens and Toshiba.

This spotlight series highlights CIP members and how they are contributing to open source software solutions that will benefit the world’s technical systems. Today, we highlight Renesas in a conversation with Takehisa Katayama, Manager at Renesas Electronics Corporation.

What does your company do?

Renesas Electronics Corporation delivers trusted embedded design innovation with complete semiconductor solutions that enable billions of connected, intelligent devices to enhance the way people work and live—securely and safely.

To develop a safer, healthier, greener, and smarter world, Renesas offers three layers of solutions to provide optimal services with added value for customers in our three focus domains: Automotive, Industrial and Broad-based.

What is your role?

In Renesas, I am responsible for developing/maintaining the Linux kernel and open source software components that work on Renesas RZ/G MPU targeting industrial market.

In the CIP project, I am a member of the Technical Steering Committee (TSC) and the Governing Board as representative from Renesas. Renesas provides RZ/G1M boards as a reference board in the project so we can aggressively contribute the drivers upstream based on “upstream first” policy. We also contribute to advance Board At Desk (B@D), CIP’s testing environment, which just launched a new version.

Why did your company join CIP? Can you provide a use case scenario?

Devices currently used in the industrial field are getting more advanced with networking capabilities, as result of the standardization of IoT and Industry 4.0, and multimedia functionalities such as video and graphics processing. An increasing amount of Renesas customers are considering making the switch to Linux because that OS supports a wide array of software for implementing such functions.

However, in the industrial field, after the introduction of equipment, it is necessary to operate for a long period of time, usually more than 10 years. In addition, improvement of reliability and real-time operation is also a requirement.

The CIP project was launched to provide a platform that will meet this need. Renesas considers this project extremely important in terms of providing industrial solutions to support the “smart society” of the future. As a semiconductor manufacturer, by participating in the project, Renesas aims to substantially reduce the additional development and maintenance burdens for customers associated with boosting the reliability and real-time responsiveness of software for industrial devices.

How are you currently active in CIP?

Renesas was the first semiconductor manufacturer to join the CIP project and help provide an industrial grade software base layer for the civil infrastructure system supporting the lifeline. In addition to these activities, Renesas actively carries out activities to provide super long-term support, high reliability, and robust security for embedded devices for industrial use.

How are you going to use the software?

In October 2016, Renesas released the “RZ/G Linux Platform” which enables manufacturers of industrial products to reduce the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) targeting the domestic Japanese market.

Renesas built upon this by releasing a new RZ/G platform this month based on CIP SLTS kernel for worldwide. This release is a direct result of our CIP activities and the collaboration with other members. Renesas is expecting that Linux will become more popular for embedded industrial products that require high reliability.

What benefits have you seen or what do you expect to achieve?

RZ/G is targeting the industrial market and almost all customers in this field have demands like fixing security holes to ensure a stable kernel for long term operation. The CIP kernel maintenance policy meets the above demands by backporting the latest functionality for 5 years and applying “Bug-fixes” to current kernel for 15 years or more. Renesas is expecting CIP and members to help respond to these various demands and ensure long-term operation.

Where do you see civil infrastructure systems in 20 years?

We hope we can see everywhere in the industrial market.

Civil Infrastructure Platform Announces the Release of CIP Core

By Announcement

Open Source Community Working to Create Linux Base Layer of Industrial Grade Software will Showcase Achievements at ELC Europe

PRAGUE, CZECH REPUBLIC and SAN FRANCISCO – October 23, 2017 – The Civil Infrastructure Platform (CIP), which aims to provide a base layer of industrial grade open source software components, tools and methods to enable long-term management of critical systems, today announced the release of the CIP Core. The CIP Core, a ​reference ​minimal file system ​that offers a customizable environment that developers can use to test the CIP kernel and core packages, will be on display at Embedded Linux Conference Europe with planned workshops, demos and Q&A sessions.

CIP aims to speed implementation of Linux-based civil infrastructure systems, build upon existing open source foundations and expertise, establish de facto standards by providing a base layer reference implementation, and contribute to and influence upstream projects regarding industrial needs.

Hosted by The Linux Foundation, CIP addresses the needs of long-term software for the power generation and distribution, water, oil and gas, transportation and building automation industries. CIP members such as Codethink, Hitachi, Plat’Home, Renesas, Siemens and Toshiba are working to create a reliable and secure Linux-based embedded software platform that can be sustained more than 10 years and up to 60 years.

“CIP is committed to creating, testing and maintaining an open source software foundation needed to deliver essential services for civil infrastructure and economic development on a global scale,” said Yoshitake Kobayashi, Chair of CIP’s Technical Steering Committee and the Senior Manager of Open Source Technology Department at Toshiba. “The CIP Core is a major milestone that will provide a platform for developers to easily build a reference file system and quickly test the CIP kernel with specific application and use cases. This customizable testing will eventually became a part of the product solution.”

CIP Core features include: 

  • Creating reference file system images to test and demonstrate use of the CIP kernel and core packages, a selected set of open source software components that require super long-term support.
  • Achieving its first milestone after releasing reference file system images for the Beaglebone Black, the iWave RZ/G1M Qseven Development Kit, QEMU x86_64 and the DE0-Nano-SoC development kit.
  • Consolidating the CIP kernel and core packages into a minimal reference file system that can be tested and used for further development.
  • Leveraging released file system images that were generated with Deby, a reproducible and maintainable embedded Linux distribution currently based on poky and Debian LTS source code.

Board at Desk v1.0:

CIP also recently launched Board AT Desk (B@D) v1.0, a customized and easy to deploy instance of the kernelci and LAVA projects that should allow developers to test Linux kernels on boards connected to their own development machines using the tooling provided by one of the most successful Open Source testing projects, kernelci.org. B@D v1.0 is provided as a vagrant virtual machine (VM) image/recipe and as a VM image, known as a Vagrant box.

With this release, CIP is moving towards a “shared and trusted testing” target for not just those directly involved in maintaining the CIP kernel but any kernel developer that has physical access to a board. It reduces the deployment, configuration and maintenance costs. B@D introduces a “local” approach to kernelci.org which is a distributed service centrally managed. In addition, CIP intends to increase the number of developers and organizations willing to participate in kernelci.org by providing a simple mechanism to evaluate the technologies developed by that community (LAVA and kernelci) which CIP considers upstream. For more information about the B@D v1.0, read this blog post.

CIP at Embedded Linux Conference Europe:

Live demonstrations of the CIP kernel and LTS will be on display at the Embedded Linux Conference Europe taking place on October 23-25, 2017. The CIP booth (Booth M17) will be filled with innovative member solutions from Codethink, Plat’Home, Renesas, Siemens and Toshiba.

CIP members Agustin Benito Bethencourt, Principal Consultant at FOSS and Codethink, and Ben Hutchings, developer at Codethink and CIP lead maintainer, will also share insight, tips and experience about maintaining a Linux kernel over a long period of time on Tuesday, October 24 at 4:55 p.m. This session will describe the kernel maintenance challenges CIP is facing, the plans to overcome them and what additional measures will be taken in the near future to walk towards maintaining the CIP kernel for 30 years or more.

Additionally, Yoshitake Kobayashi and Urs Gleim, head of the Research Group of the Smart Embedded Systems at Siemens Corporate Technology and chair of the CIP governing board, will provide a CIP overview on Tuesday, October 24 from 11:45 a.m.– 12:25 p.m.. They will introduce attendees to the project’s strategy, use cases, technical roadmap, policies and milestones.

CIP is also hosting open workshops and a developer meeting before and during the show for Linux developers and maintainers. On Sunday, October 22, CIP members will lead three workshops for testing, collaboration and Q&A sessions in the Athens room at the Hilton Prague. The workshop schedule is below. For more information or to register for a session, visit the CIP wiki.

Workshops on Sunday, October 22:

2 p.m.: AGL Testing & B@D Collaboration Discussion

4 p.m.: B@D 101

5:30 p.m.: CIP Kernel Maintenance Q&A

Additionally, CIP members will host a Q&A session on Tuesday, October 24 at 1 p.m. The meeting is open to any and all developers interested in CIP, LTS, Linux maintenance and Debian. For more information, visit the CIP wiki.

About CIP

The Civil Infrastructure Platform (CIP) is an open source project hosted by The Linux Foundation. The project is focused on establishing an open source base layer of industrial grade software to enable the use and implementation of reusable software building blocks that meet the safety, reliability and other requirements of industrial and civil infrastructure. For additional information, visit https://www.cip-project.org/.

About The Linux Foundation

The Linux Foundation is the organization of choice for the world’s top developers and companies to build ecosystems that accelerate open technology development and commercial adoption. Together with the worldwide open source community, it is solving the hardest technology problems by creating the largest shared technology investment in history. Founded in 2000, The Linux Foundation today provides tools, training and events to scale any open source project, which together deliver an economic impact not achievable by any one company. More information can be found at www.linuxfoundation.org.

The Linux Foundation has registered trademarks and uses trademarks. For a list of trademarks of The Linux Foundation, please see its trademark usage page: https://www.linuxfoundation.org/trademark-usage/  Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.

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CNX Software – Embedded Systems News: Renesas RZ/G Linux Platform features CIP Super Long-Term Support (SLTS) Linux kernel

By In the News

In the consumer space, some devices never get updated, and you can consider yourself lucky if the manufacturer provides updates for several years, often just two as Linux LTS (Long Term Support) kernels had been supported that long so far. Google and the Linux Foundation realized that was not enough, so they recently announced 6-year LTS kernels at Linaro Connect SFO 2017starting with Linux 4.4 released on January 2016, meaning it will keeping being maintained until January 2022 with security patchsets and bug fixes.

But in the industrial/embedded space, they need even longer periods of support due to the longer equipment’s lifespan. I first heard about the Linux Foundation’s  Civil Infrastructure Platform (CIP) project last year, when I covered the schedule for the Embedded Linux Conference Europe 2016. The project aims at providing a super long-term supported (STLS) open source “base layer” for industrial grade software.

Read more at CNX Software – Embedded Systems News.

Electronics Weekly: Renesas launches Linux platform for industrial equipment

By In the News

Renesas has launched its RZ/G Linux Platform with the industrial-grade Civil Infrastructure Platform (CIP) Super Long-Term Support (SLTS) Linux kernel, which enables Linux-based embedded systems to be maintained for more than 10 years.

renesaslinuxThe RZ/G platform provides a verified Linux package with cloud-maintenance and development options that makes it easy for embedded developers to leverage Linux for high-performance industrial equipment.

Read more at Electronics Weekly.

Linux Gizmos: Renesas taps new 10-year SLTS kernel from the Civil Infrastructure Platform

By In the News

Renesas upgraded the Linux stack for its RZ/G SoCs to use CIP’s 10-year SLTS kernel. Meanwhile, the standard LTS kernel will expand from 2 to 6 years.

The Linux Foundation launched the Civil Infrastructure Platform(CIP) project a year ago with the intention of developing base layer, open source industrial-grade software starting with a 10-year Super Long-Term Support (SLTS) kernel. The SLTS kernel is now ready to go, and is being incorporated by Renesas in its RZ/G Linux Platform stack for its ARM-based RZ/G system-on-chips.

Read more at Linux Gizmos.

Join CIP at Embedded Linux Conference Europe

By Blog

Are you planning on going to the Embedded Linux Conference Europe? ELCE, located in Prague, Czech Republic from October 23-25, 2017, is the premier technical conference for companies and developers using Linux in embedded products. Traditionally, ELCE has had one the largest collection of sessions dedicated exclusively to embedded Linux and embedded Linux developers.

This year is no different. Vendors and kernel and systems developers will collaborate with the maintainers and experts building the applications running on embedded Linux platforms. This year, developers will have the opportunity to learn about the Civil Infrastructure Platform (CIP) and how to get involved with industry leaders such as Codethink, Hitachi, Plat’Home, Renesas, Siemens and Toshiba.

The Civil Infrastructure Platform (CIP) is creating a super long-term supported (SLTS) open source “base layer” for industrial grade software, components, tools and methods that will help key systems have a more sustainable workflow and less outdated software. The base-layer consists of an SLTS kernel, a basic set of open source software and standardization concepts that enable long-term management of technical systems such as electric power, transportation, water and waste management, healthcare and communication.

CIP Members Yoshitake Kobayashi, Senior Manager of Open Source Technology Department at Toshiba, and Urs Gleim, head of the Research Group, Smart Embedded Systems at Siemens Corporate Technology, will provide an update CIP on Wednesday, October 25 from 9:50–10:10 a.m. in Congress Hall 1.

They will introduce attendees to the project’s strategy, use cases, technical roadmap, policies and milestones. Participants will also get a look into technical details, development tools, testing and more for the CIP SLTS kernel. Add this to your ELCE schedule here.

CIP also invites Linux developers and maintainers to open workshops in the Athens room at the Hilton Prague that takes place before the conference begins. On Sunday, October 22, CIP members will lead three workshops for testing, collaboration and Q&A sessions. The workshop schedule is below. For more information or to register for a session, visit the CIP wiki page.

Workshops on Sunday, October 22:

2 p.m.: AGL Testing & B@D Collaboration Discussion

4 p.m.: B@D 101

5:30 p.m.: CIP Kernel Maintenance Q&A

Additionally, CIP members will host a Developer’s Meeting on Tuesday, October 24 at 1 p.m. The meeting is open to any and all developers interested in CIP, LTS, Linux maintenance and Debian. For more information, visit the CIP wiki.

Live demonstrations will be on display at the Embedded Linux Conference Europe taking place on October 23-25, 2017. The CIP booth (Booth M17) will be filled with innovative member solutions from Codethink, Plat’Home, Renesas, Siemens and Toshiba.

Please see below for the demo descriptions:

  • Renesas will be showcasing the CIP kernel in action with real-time capabilities of the RZ/G1M SoC with an iWave iwg20m board. The demo will display the benefit of low and stable latency, and the value of RT-PREEMPT patch set.
  • Siemens will link traditional industrial computing with Internet-of-Things (IoT) technologies based on IOT2000 devices, which are part of CIP’s long-term support commitment. The demo shows how to combine state-of-the-art sensor technology with proven, solid industrial approaches, and uses novel software mechanisms to describe automation processes.
  • Codethink Ltd will showcase at the event Board At Desk v1.0, released a few days earlier, the CIP testing environment based on KernelCI, so any developer can test a kernel or a simple system locally in a board connected to her machine and share the results and logs. During the demo, the latest CIP kernel will be tested on the Beaglebone Black and  Renesas RZ/G1M boards.
  • Plat’Home will show the demonstration with IoT. It runs on original product, “OpenBlocks IoT VX1” with CIP kernel. OpenBlocks IoT VX1 is the compact server for IoT gateway. It uses Environment Sensor made by OMRON.  It shows environment values at venue, such as temperature, humidity, atmospheric pressure, sound pressure, illuminance and ultraviolet radiation.

If you’re attending ELC Europe, we look forward to seeing you there. If you’re not, stay tuned. We’ll add pictures and updates on the our blog post and @CIP_Project.

 

CIP Member Spotlight: Toshiba

By Blog

Civil infrastructure systems are the core of our daily lives. These technical systems deliver essential services such as electric power generation, transportation, water and waste management, healthcare and communication. The Civil Infrastructure Platform (CIP) project, hosted by The Linux Foundation, aims to establish a base layer of industrial grade open source software components, tools and methods to enable long-term management of these systems. CIP is driven by some of the world’s leading manufacturers of civil infrastructure systems and industry leaders including Codethink, Hitachi, Plat’Home, Renesas, Siemens and Toshiba.

Photo by Creative Commons Zero

Launching today, this blog series will highlight CIP members and how they are contributing to open source software solutions that will benefit the world’s technical systems. Please read on for the first member spotlight – Yoshitake Kobayashi, Chief Specialist of Software Engineering and Technology Center for Toshiba Corporation.

What does your company do?

Toshiba is a company that channels world-class capabilities in advanced electronic and electrical product and systems into four focus business fields: Energy that sustains everyday life, that is cleaner and safer; Infrastructure that sustains quality of life; Storage that sustains the advanced information society; and Digitalization that sustains optimized and secure society. Guided by the principles of “Committed to People, Committed to the Future,” Toshiba promotes global operations and is contributing to the realization of a world where generations to come can live better lives.

What is your role in CIP?

I am the chairman of the CIP Technical Steering Committee (TSC) and also a member of the Governing Board as Toshiba’s representative. As a part of my activity as TSC chairman, I have given presentations in various conferences such as the Embedded Linux Conference and the Open Source Summit.

Toshiba is also contributing to several projects inside CIP, such as the reference implementation of the base-layer (CIP Project-X) and the testing effort (Board@desk). Outside of CIP, Toshiba is also contributing to the Debian Long Term Support (LTS) project, whose source code is used within the CIP Project-X.

Why is your company investing in an open source “base layer” of industrial grade software?

Toshiba wants to contribute to a sustainable society on business domains such as civil infrastructure systems. In recent years, civil infrastructure systems are changing towards more connected architectures and using open source software. Toshiba products, which have rather long life time spans, need to guarantee high levels of reliability and security. To achieve our goals, we are committed to the creation of a secure, reliable and maintainable software platform for infrastructure systems.

Why did your company join CIP? Can you provide a use case scenario?

As one of the founding members the CIP project, we believe that collaborating with other leading companies that have similar requirements, will help us develop a common base layer more quickly and efficiently. By sharing the cost of developing this base layer, Toshiba will be able to focus more on the added value in our products.

How are you going to use the software? What benefits have you seen or what do you expect to achieve?

Toshiba will use the CIP base layer as the core for creating the operating system for our products. Since CIP aims to provide a super long term support (SLTS) for its base layer, we believe this is one of the most critical concepts for us. Additionally, we want to solve other common problems that affect our systems such as real-time support or the Y2038 issue, an issue due to a limitation of the maximum number of seconds (relative to Jan 1, 1970) that can be represented in a 32-bit signed integer.

Where do you see civil infrastructure systems in 20 years?

Linux will be the master of the world and everyone will be using it.

To learn more about CIP, please see the below resources:

 

Debian developers from all over the world attended DebConf 2017 to collaborate, learn and showcase projects

By Blog

Stick a fork in it – DebConf 2017 is officially done!

The 18th annual conference, which was located in Montreal on August 6-12, had more than 400 Debian contributors and users from all over the world collaborate, learn and showcase projects. Several meetups popped up during the conference and was a welcome addition to the 165 planned events including 89 talks, 61 discussion sessions or BoFs, 6 workshops and 13 other activities.

Members of the Civil Infrastructure Platform (CIP) attended and presented key Debian sessions that offered tips and shared how CIP uses the Debian systems.

All photos taken by Aigars Mahinovs and licensed by Creative Commons

Jan Kiszka, a member of CIP and senior software engineer in the Competence Center for Embedded Linux at Siemens Corporate Technology, presented with Baurzhan Ismagulov, a developer with Ilbers, about building embedded Debian images with Isar. The Buzz room was filled with attendees who wanted to learn how to use Yocto-like layers for an industrial application and how to use Debian as a foundation.

Yoshitake Kobayashi, the Technical Steering Committee Chair of CIP and leader of an embedded Linux development team at the Toshiba Corporation, gave a presentation to a packed Buzz room of how CIP started the creation of an open source “base layer” of industrial grade software to enable the use and implementation of software building blocks in civil infrastructure projects. He shared why Debian is one of the integral parts of this “base layer,” how CIP adapts Debian for each use case and how CIP can contribute and collaborate with Debian.

For those who weren’t on-site, many of the sessions were live streamed so interested collaborators could still benefit from the knowledge sharing. These videos are also available at the Debian meetings archive website.

CIP spoke with many developers with a passion for Debian and the knowledge to improve the system. In fact, during the entire conference, the CIP team engaged with almost 60 developers to discuss Debian and how to improve support, especially for the Debian-Long Term Support (LTS) project. The LTS support is currently for 5 years but CIP has a goal of 10 or more years, which makes LTS one of the most important aspects of CIP. The gap in between projects is one of the issues and reasons CIP is collaborating with Debian.

Next year, DebConf18 will be held in Hsinchu, Taiwan, from July 29, 2018 to August 5, 2018. It will be the first DebConf held in Asia and CIP members will definitely be there to meet with Debian developers!

The CIP Project will be at DebConf 2017 in August!

By Blog

Members of the Civil Infrastructure Platform (CIP) will be attending and presenting at the 18th annual DebConf on August 6-12 in Montreal, Canada. DebConf is the annual conference for Debian contributors and users interested in improving Debian. Previous Debian conferences have featured speakers and attendees from all around the world. Last year’s conference took place in Cape Town, South Africa and was attended by 280 participants from 30 countries.

CIP is a Silver Sponsor this year and will participate in the job fair and host a booth at the conference. Additionally, two CIP members will be giving presentations.

Jan Kiszka, a member of CIP and senior software engineer in the Competence Center for Embedded Linux at Siemens Corporate Technology, will present with Baurzhan Ismagulov, a developer with Ilbers, about building embedded Debian images with Isar. Debian has a long history in embedded usage but many developers don’t know how to use the pre-built, well tested, long maintained Debian packages with the flexibility and reusability of image descriptions via bitbake and Yocto-like layers. This presentation will provide an introduction to this approach, how to use it for “big picture” industrial application scenarios and how to use Debian as a foundation. Jan and Baurzhan’s presentation is on Saturday, August 12 at 10 a.m. in the Buzz room. Click here for more information.

Yoshitake Kobayashi, the Technical Steering Committee Chair of CIP and leader of an embedded Linux development team at the Toshiba Corporation, will give a presentation about how CIP has started the creation of an open source “base layer” of industrial grade software to enable the use and implementation of software building blocks in civil infrastructure projects. Debian is one of the integral parts of this “base layer” and Yoshitake will share why CIP members use Debian, how they adapt Debian for each use case and how CIP can contribute and collaborate with Debian. Yoshitake’s presentation is on Saturday, August 12 at 10:45 a.m. in the Buzz room. Click here for more information.

If you’re going to the conference, stop by the CIP booth to chat with other members about all things Linux, Debian and open source industrial grade software. If you’re not going to be at the conference, stay tuned to this blog and @CIP_Project for event updates.