Open Source Summit + Embedded Linux Conference North America 2026

This lightning talk walks through building a Wordle-style guessing game powered entirely by a local Wikipedia dump running on a Raspberry Pi. No cloud, no proprietary APIs, no internet required during gameplay.
We'll cover the practical technical journey: downloading and parsing Wikimedia dumps, extracting structured metadata into SQLite, building a lightweight Node.js server on ARM Linux, and running the game full-screen via Chromium in kiosk mode on a Pi connected to an HDMI display.
The result is a fully self-contained open knowledge game console. Live demo on actual hardware included.
Key takeaways: working with Wikimedia open data dumps, SQLite on constrained ARM hardware, Node.js performance on edge Linux, and Chromium kiosk mode as a game display layer.

Note: Open to presenting as Lightning Talk

Secure provisioning is a foundational step in productizing embedded Linux systems, especially when enabling secure boot and establishing silicon identity through eFuses or one-time programmable (OTP) memory. Yet many teams still rely on manual fuse programming flows that are error-prone and difficult to scale particularly when dealing with complex, vendor-specific fuse maps. This talk explores how modern U-Boot capabilities streamline secure device provisioning in real manufacturing workflows. It introduces an upstream enhancement to U-Boot’s fuse subsystem that supports bulk, structured eFuse programming. This approach makes fuse provisioning more automation-friendly, and suitable for production use. Attendees will gain practical insights on integrating U-Boot-based provisioning into factory flows.
Agenda:
1. Challenges in Traditional eFuse Programming on Embedded Systems
2. U-Boot’s Existing Fuse Subsystem and Its Limitations in Production Flows
3. Design and Upstream Integration of the 'fuse writebuff' command
4. Structured, Automated Provisioning using Memory Buffers
5. Practical Provisioning and Production Workflow Considerations

While mature solutions such as QEMU provide broad architectural coverage, they are optimized for generality rather than minimal footprint, rapid bring-up, or architectural experimentation. To examine system-level design trade-offs, gain fine-grained control over memory and execution behavior, and enable lightweight Linux-based sandboxing and verification, we built a RISC-V system emulator from scratch.

rv32emu [1] supports RV32IMACF with Zifencei and Zicsr, along with CLINT, MMIO, and a complete Sv32 three-level page table. Through VirtIO integration, it efficiently maps Linux guest services to host resources. A tiered JIT compilation framework accelerates Linux workloads while reducing memory consumption compared to QEMU.

This talk presents the architectural decisions behind building a compact yet Linux-capable RISC-V system emulator, highlighting trade-offs in ISA support, memory management, JIT design, and device virtualization, and sharing practical techniques with a lean footprint without sacrificing performance or correctness.

[1] https://github.com/sysprog21/rv32emu

Once you've done enough of them, putting together a simple Linux system is easy. The hard part is working out what "simple" means in each new context.

We'll start by building and booting an example minimal Linux system to a shell prompt, first under QEMU and again on real hardware. Then we'll explain the theory: build environment (dependency management, reproducibility), native vs cross compiling (toolchain selection, libc selection, static vs dynamic), board bringup theory, kernel configuration, initramfs creation (and other root filesystem options), installing and booting, the init process and system bringup, hardware resource management and I/O categories, and running "your app" on its own dedicated device.

If there's time we'll go into software dependencies AGAIN (on target this time), add an example server (sshd), add a native toolchain to compile "hello world" on the target (build vs development environment), and some perspective on the online book "Linux From Scratch" for further reading (plus "what is a container".