OSS + ELC EU 2026

Most silicon vendors claim to support upstream Linux. Few show what it actually takes to sustain that when customer deadlines and upstream changes compete for limited engineering resources. Espressif Systems, the company behind the ESP32 wireless MCUs and open-source ecosystems around them, is debuting in embedded Linux, but no stranger to open source communities: ESP-IDF is widely supported, and its engineers are active contributors to Zephyr RTOS, including a member on the TSC. This is a candid look at how a newcomer builds its development process with the community in mind.

We walk through the concrete processes we established: a branching strategy and sync cadence that track each stable kernel release, a pipeline for preparing and submitting patches to mainline, and immutable, reproducible release branches. We also cover the organizational model, a chip verification team that confirms silicon works quickly and a separate upstreaming team that refactors drivers to upstream standards, collaborating continuously to shrink the porting gap. The supporting infrastructure rounds this out with CI across multiple build systems, a LAVA CI board farm, and QEMU for pre-hardware testing.