Author Archives: Andy McCormick

About Andy McCormick

I provide expertise and training for Embedded Linux courses.

I have over 20 years of experience in the embedded sector, gained at companies such as Pace, Open TV and Sony Semiconductor Europe.

I've led work on numerous projects at all stages in the design cycle with comprehensive expertise in software engineering design, support and integration.

2016 – The Year of the Hack

IoT security has been headline news for at least the past 12 months, and we’ve also had an unprecedented number of incidents affecting consumers in more traditional areas: online banking account thefts, online fraud, OS vulnerabilities, you name it, it’s probably happened. In researching this blog, I found over 400 hack-related stories in The Register alone.

With increasing numbers of embedded devices becoming connected, we are going to hear more and more about security breaches, and guaranteeing security in increasingly sophisticated […]

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An Introduction to Hypervisors

Hypervisors are becoming commonplace in the embedded world, especially in high-end multi-core systems. If you’d asked me about virtualisation or hypervisors 2 years ago, like most people I didn’t know much about them. A hypervisor, that’s a super-supervisor, right? Virtualisation, you mean Virtual Machines, right? Running Linux on Windows using VMware, right? Not any more!

Here at Feabhas we’ve noticed a lot of our clients and contacts are starting to look at designs using hypervisors in embedded systems for a number of […]

Posted in ARM, Design Issues, General, Industry Analysis, Linux | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Off to the Embedded Linux Conference Europe and Open IoT Summit, Berlin 11th-13th October 2016

It’s hard to believe another year has passed and it’s time once again for the Embedded Linux Conference, and next week I’ll be off to Berlin to join a couple thousand other Linux enthusiasts for our annual bash.

A lot has happened in the past 12 months especially in the fields of security and the Internet of Things (IoT). A lot of people were talking about the IoT a year ago, we’re now seeing a lot more projects being completed, especially […]

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Using your Feabhas USB stick on a Mac

Nearly all our Feabhas courses now have their tools/lab exercises on a bootable Linux USB stick, either Fedora or Ubuntu. These USB sticks were designed to boot laptop PCs, but Macbook Pros are becoming increasingly popular in the laptop market, with 10% of the market in 2015.

Our USB sticks won’t boot a Macbook Pro, but we can run them in a virtual machine on a Mac.

Here I’ll talk you through what needs to be done in nine easy steps to […]

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Boot Times in Linux/Android

There’s a vast amount of material out there on boot times and people showcasing boot times of as little as one second [1]. But the reality is often different for many devices in the field: some devices boot in 10s or less, others take over 3 minutes. Here’s a handful of devices I measured:

Raspberry Pi 2 Model B with Raspbian GNU/Linux 8

11s to shell prompt

Garmin Nüvi 42 Sat Nav
14s (detects power off after 9s)

Beaglebone Black with Angstrom Distribution
17s […]

Posted in Linux | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

Security and Connected Devices

With the Internet of Things, we are seeing more and more devices that were traditionally “deep embedded” and isolated from the outside world becoming connected devices. Security needs to be designed into connected products from the outset as the risk of outside attacks is very real. This is especially true if you’re migrating from embedded RTOS systems to Linux and encountering a smorgasbord of “free” connectivity functionality for the first time.

Here we list 10 top tips to help make your […]

Posted in General, Industry Analysis, Linux, RTOS, training | Tagged | 1 Comment