FOSDEM 2026

FOSDEM week is back.

At the end of January, Codethink will once again be in Brussels, this time with more than 40+ Codethings speaking, volunteering, and presenting across FOSDEM itself and a set of pre-FOSDEM events and conversations that lead into the weekend.

From 31 January to 1 February 2026, FOSDEM will bring together the people who build, maintain, foster the open source community. We're looking forward to a few full days of deep technical talks, devrooms, hallway conversations, and long-overdue catch-ups. Just as importantly, the days leading into FOSDEM are where many of the most interesting discussions begin, and Codethink will be there too.

We're excited to listen, share, reconnect with familiar faces, and to meet new ones along the way.

Codethink is proud to sponsor FOSDEM, and members of our team will be speaking across a range of topics throughout the week. You'll find details of all Codethink talks and events, both during FOSDEM and in the run-up to it, below.

Pre-FOSDEM Events

Talk: Your CRA Plan Is Already Broken: Only Trustable Software Can Save It

Speaker: John Ellis

Eclipse Foundation Code & Compliance Workshop

Location: Maison de la Poste, Rue Picard 7, 1000 Bruxelles

Date: Thursday, 29th January

Start: 10:30

End: 10:50

Link here

Description:

Most organisations are about to learn the hard way that the CRA is not a compliance exercise. It is an engineering audit disguised as regulation. CRA doesn’t care how impressive your policies are, how many documents you’ve written, or how many consultants have “mapped controls”. It cares about something brutally simple: Can you prove how your software is built, secured, and maintained?

The Eclipse TSF provides the escape hatch. By generating reproducible builds, provenance trails, SBOM integrity checks, tamper-evident pipeline metadata, and continuous trust signals, TSF creates the exact evidence CRA expects but does not explicitly spell out. TSF doesn’t add bureaucracy, it replaces guesswork with verifiable fact.

The provocation is explicit: If your CRA strategy doesn’t start in the pipeline, you don’t have a CRA strategy at all.

Panel: Deep Dive: Competitiveness & Open Source in the Automotive Industry

Speaker: John Ellis

EU Open Source Policy Summit

Location: Sparks Meeting, Rue Ravenstein 60, 1000 Bruxelles

Date: Friday, 30th January

Start: 16:10

End: 16:50

Link here

Description:

Europe’s automotive sector is restructuring around software-defined mobility, with manufacturers, suppliers, open source organisations, and technology providers adopting shared development models to manage complexity and maintain strategic control. This session will examine how open source can strengthen competitiveness across the automotive value chain, drawing on perspectives from industry leaders, software suppliers, and the European Commission.

Panellists will consider how collaborative platforms support interoperability, reduce duplication, and enable long-term capability, and how these industry efforts align with the Commission’s Automotive Action Plan and broader transport innovation agenda. The discussion will address the regulatory and organisational conditions needed to sustain shared development, ensure safety and compliance, and support deployment at scale. It will also explore how insights from software-defined vehicle initiatives can inform open approaches across other strategic sectors.

FOSDEM Events

Talk: Upstream Embedded Linux on RISC-V SBCs: The Past, Present and Future

Speaker: Marcel Ziswiler

Track: RISC-V

Room: H.2214

Date: Saturday 31st January

Start: 14:00

End: 14:35

Link here

Description:

Last year’s talk on running upstream embedded Linux on RISC-V, using the SpacemiT K1-based Banana Pi BPI-F3, is revisited with an update on upstreaming progress and remaining issues.

The talk then introduces several new contenders added to the embedded Linux testing lab, including the Siflower SF21H8898-based Banana Pi BPI-RV2, the ESWIN EIC7700-based EBC77 with SiFive HiFive Premier P550 cores, and the Ky X1-based Orange Pi RV2 and R2S, the latter two of which will be addressed by a subsequent speaker. By comparing downstream vendor options with upstream efforts, the session highlights the overall progress of embedded Linux on RISC-V, before looking ahead to upcoming RVA23-compatible boards based on chips such as SpacemiT K3, Tenstorrent TT-Ascalon, UltraRISC UR-DP1000 and Zhihe A600.

The time is ripe for embedded Linux to shine on RISC-V.

Talk: Running GNOME OS on mobile phones

Speaker: Abderrahim Kitouni

Track: FOSS on Mobile

Room: UB4.132

Date: Saturday 31st January

Start: 17:30

End: 18:00

Link here

Description:

GNOME OS is GNOME's development, testing, and QA operating system. It builds the in-development versions of the GNOME desktop and core applications. It is also a modern image-based Linux system.

This talk will present recent efforts to run GNOME OS on phones. Right now, the FairPhone 5 and the OnePlus 6 are supported, but ideally any phone that is supported by the mainline Linux kernel could have GNOME OS support.

It will present different tools and projects that make this possible, and what this initative hopes to achieve: better testing for the GNOME applications, and more ways to do FOSS on Mobile.

Talk: Externally verifying Linux’s real-time deadline scheduling capabilities

Speaker: Theodore Tucker

Track: Testing and Continuous Delivery

Room: H.2213

Date: Sunday 1st February

Start: 09:00

End: 09:25

Link here

Description:

Many industrial systems require hard real-time scheduling from Linux, but scheduling measurements from the system itself cannot be completely trusted as they are referenced to the same clock as the kernel-under-test.

This talk presents Codethink’s hardware-in-the-loop approach to verifying Linux as an RTOS. A Linux “Rusty Worker” requests real-time scheduling via sched_setattr and emits timing data over UART, while embedded Rust firmware on a Raspberry Pi Pico captures independent, microsecond-precision measurements outside the kernel’s scheduling domain.

We show how embedded Rust enables deterministic, memory-safe verification software and reproducible builds, and how continuous testing is integrated into CI. Using the Eclipse Trustable Software Framework (TSF), we aggregate and analyse results across commits, providing clear, evidence-based confidence in Linux’s real-time capabilities.

Talk: Rust meets cheap bare-metal RISC-V

Speaker: Marcel Ziswiler

Track: Rust

Room: UB2.252A (Lameere)

Date: Sunday 1st February

Start: 09:30

End: 09:55

Link here

Description:

With the release of embedded-hal v1.0 almost two years ago, Rust is now well suited for bare metal embedded development.

This talk focuses on low cost RISC-V microcontrollers such as the CH32V003, in the same space as boards like the Raspberry Pi Pico or Teensy but costing under €1.30, and shows how to build an embedded system using bare metal Rust. It covers the full workflow from getting to main, to flashing and debugging with probe-rs, IDE integration, and using no-std to achieve the smallest possible footprint.

Talk: Generating SBoMs for BuildStream projects

Speaker: Abderrahim Kitouni

Track: SBOMS and supply chains

Room: UD2.208 (Decroly)

Date: Sunday 1st February

Start: 16:30

End: 17:00

Link here

Description:

BuildStream is a software integration tool that allows building software aggregated from multiple sources in a single pipeline to produce a final output. This final output could be a container image, an operating system image or anything that you can write a plugin for.

This talk presents buildstream-sbom - a tool that extracts information from a BuildStream project and uses it to generate an SPDX-formatted SBoM. It will also discuss some of the issues in translating from BuildStream concepts to SPDX.

Can't make it to Brussels this year?

If you won't be in Brussels, FOSDEM offers livestreaming for talks throughout the weekend - full details are available on the FOSDEM website. Recordings from related pre-FOSDEM events hosted by the Eclipse Foundation and OpenForum Europe will be published in the weeks following their respective events.

After the dust settles, we'll share a post-FOSDEM write-up with highlights, themes, and takeaways from the week. Until then, you can find more information about the events Codethink is sponsoring and participating in on our events page.