LinkedIn posts quickly fade out from view and may not last forever. Here is a copy of my most successful post in 2024.

Last Friday was my last day at Bootlin, the company which I created 20 years ago.

Bootlin is in good hands now, and has become a great contributor to many Open Source projects. I stayed there for three more years after selling it in 2021 to two of its engineers, Thomas Petazzoni and Alexandre Belloni. This was a very good experience to get back to engineering, especially contributing to the Yocto Project, teaching training sessions and sharing experience through speaking at international conferences. Bootlin has also managed to hire incredibly talented engineers over the years. However, working as an employee didn’t leave enough time to explore as many new techniques and resources as I was interested in.

Building and Simulating Linux Kernel Panic QR with DRM/KMS in QEMU

When a Linux system runs into a serious error that it can’t recover from, it triggers a kernel panic. This fills the system console with complex information, including registers, call stacks, and error codes. When the system console is on a serial line on terminal, such information is easy to copy to another machine for analysis. Retrieving all the data becomes much more difficult when the panic is displayed on a graphical console. You can take a picture with a smartphone but then getting the corresponding text back is tedious.