In this month's CE Linux Forum newsletter:

* Announcing the CE Linux Forum monthly newsletter
* Recent activity by CELF contractors
* eLinux wiki update
* Conference-palooza!
* Planning contract work for next year

== Announcing the CE Linux Forum monthly newsletter ==

The Architecture Group of the CE Linux forum has started a
new initiative to produce a newsletter each month describing
forum, member and community activities that are of interest
to our membership as well as to other embedded Linux
developers.

The purpose of the newsletter is to inform you of important
projects and forum activities that you may want to get involved
in. Also, it is to reassure you that the forum continues to be
actively involved in working to enhance Linux for use in
Consumer Electronics and embedded markets. (CELF's mission!)

This e-mail represents the first official e-mail instance of
this newsletter. Look for others to arrive on a monthly basis
authored by other forum members and focusing on a wide array
of different technology areas and forum activities.

== Recent activity by CELF contractors ==

Recently some of the work by CELF contractors has been showing
up in the main Linux kernel mailing lists. Some patches
that CELF has been interested in for a long time have even
been integrated and included in recent mainline kernels!

The CE Linux Forum is funding the effort of Philip Lougher to
add SquashFS to the mainline kernel. SquashFS is a read-only
flash filesystem with better compression and bootup-time
performance than other filesystems currently available in the
Linux kernel.

Philip recently made two significant attempts to mainline
the code, and received a lot of valuable feedback from other
kernel developers. Andrew Morton, an important kernel
developer, suggested that with some additional work to address
the feedback, SquashFS could be ready for merging in the next
major release of the kernel.

Philip presented technical details of SquashFS at CELF's
recent Embedded Linux Conference Europe. See
http://tree.celinuxforum.org/CelfPubWiki/ELCEurope2008Presentations
for a link to Philip's presentation.

Another good example of CELF contractor activity is the work
done by Michael Opdenacker and Thomas Petazzoni (of Free
Electrons) to continue adding patches from the Linux-tiny
project to the Linux kernel. Some of the patches that were
accepted in the last few months into the mainline Linux
kernel include:
* Reduction in DMI blacklist
* Ability to Disable PCI quirks
* Configurable Asynch IO
* Configurable file locking

These patches make it possible for anyone using the Linux
kernel to better fine tune the features of the kernel and
reduce the kernel memory footprint for their product.

== eLinux wiki update ==

The eLinux wiki ( http://elinux.org/ ) continues to be a
great information resource for developers of embedded Linux
systems.

More content has just recently been added due to a contest
CELF ran as part of Embedded Linux Conference Europe.
The forum invited attendees of that event to add content to
the wiki and to enhance existing pages on the site. Several
participants did so, adding new, valuable information and
making the site better for everyone.

The winner of the contest will be announced shortly, but
details can be seen at:
http://elinux.org/ELCE2008_Editor_Contest

Given the success of this activity, you can expect that
CELF will repeat this type of contest in the future.
But don't wait! You can add information to this site
any time by just going to the site and editing it.

== Conference-palooza! ==

It has been an exciting year for CELF in terms of conferences.
Conference sponsoring and participating are very important
to CELF in order to disseminate technical information and
help industry and community developers meet and interact.

Technical Jamborees have continued on a bi-monthly basis
in Japan. And this year we have had three regional technical
conferences in Korea! The Korean events were hosted by
Samsung, LG and ETRI, in turn. The most recent Korean
Technical Conference was just held last week (November 21)
and included a talk by Jonathan Corbet. Previous guest
speakers have included such Linux luminaries as Thomas
Gleixner and David Woodhouse.

Of course, we just completed our second Embedded Linux
Conference, Europe earlier this month. A future newsletter
will give a more full account of this event, but I'll just
mention here that I thought it was a great success.
My thanks go out to the program committee, event agency,
and of course the keynote speakers and other presenters who
did such a marvelous job!

The forum now looks ahead to Embedded Linux Conference 2009,
which is planned for April 6-8 in San Francisco, California.
We are very excited to be co-conferencing with the Linux
Foundation's Spring Collaboration Summit. The call for
presentations for this event has already gone out, and
information about the event is available at:
http://www.embeddedlinuxconference.com/elc_2009

Looking even a bit farther ahead, the forum is already making
plans in conjunction with the Linux Foundation to sponsor and
participate in the Japan Linux Symposium, following next
Fall's kernel summit in Tokyo. The Japan Linux Symposium
will be held in Tokyo, October 21-23, 2009

CELF will continue all next year with it's strong emphasis
on conferences and events, in its effort to assist in sharing
information and building relationships and trust -- important
to all our involvement in the Linux community.

Please see http://elinux.org/Current_events for information
about upcoming and previous CE Linux Forum events.

== Planning contract work for next year ==

Finally, the CELF Architecture Group is currently working to
put together CELF's list of contractor projects for 2009. For
CELF members, your primary representative to the forum should
have seen a list of the project candidates with a request for
feedback on those projects that are a priority for your
company. Please get that feedback to me as soon as possible,
so we can evaluate the different project and decide on the
most important ones to fund for 2009.

With your feedback, CELF will continue with its important
effort to fund and support projects that will improve Linux
for all of us.

Thanks and regards,
-- Tim

=============================
Tim Bird
Architecture Group Chair, CE Linux Forum
Senior Staff Engineer, Sony Corporation of America
=============================