March 2009 Archives

I recently wrote about Emulation, Simulation and Native Development. There is another, related, tool: Virtualisation.

Virtual Machines (VMs) are revolutionising the Server sector, but they can be used in many aspects of embedded Linux development too. Here are some thoughts on where it may be useful to you...

Linux has supported Symmetrical Multi-Processor (SMP) environments for many years. Until recently this has mainly benefitted server class applications but increasingly multi-processor and multi-core systems are found in embedded systems.

To make best use of SMP, each application needs to be developed in a way which exploits the parallel execution capabilities.

Linux offers both a process and thread model but which should you use?

So 2.6.28 is here and so are a few very nice features.

ext4 with improved journaling, larger maximum capacity and an increase in speed. This update also means that ext3 can be updated to ext4 with minimal work as ext4 is backwards compatible.

Boot Tracer, something Wind River had in our previous and next release, has just made it to the Kernel. Now you can see what is taking the time during the boot and optimize it out.

taint_crap! New for the source tree to manage development drivers. This is moving all the *unstable* drivers currently in development into a staging area.

All this plus much much more!

Enrico Salvatori, Senior VP Qualcomm Europe, talks to Electronics Weekly about the impact of open source on mobile phone design.

Read the full interview - see Q5 Interview - Enrico Salvatori, Qualcomm Europe

There are many ways to develop applications for embedded Linux devices. The obvious method is to cross-compile on your host and debug on real hardware. This is probably how most people think of embedded development. But there are alternatives worth considering.

Over the years I have used several version control tools. They have served me well and generally I have been happy with them all (I still use RCS, CVS and Subversion) so why do I find myself changing to Git?

It's an exciting fair this year. Not only the number of exhibitors raised by a two digit number while another fair the same week had a signifcant drop in numbers, but also the new solutions presented here raised vistors interest.

On tuesday ...