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Category Archives: Design Issues
Making things do stuff – Part 3
Technical Consultant at Feabhas Ltd
Glennan is an embedded systems and software engineer with over 20 years experience, mostly in high-integrity systems for the defence and aerospace industry.
He specialises in C++, UML, software modelling, Systems Engineering and process development.
He specialises in C++, UML, software modelling, Systems Engineering and process development.
Latest posts by Glennan Carnie (see all)
- Practice makes perfect, part 3 – Idiomatic kata - February 27, 2020
- Practice makes perfect, part 2– foundation kata - February 13, 2020
- Practice makes perfect, part 1 – Code kata - January 30, 2020
Previously, we’ve looked at the basics of hardware manipulation in C++ and applied that to a simple GPIO implementation.
In this article we’re going to have a look at encapsulating our code in a class and look at some of the design choices we have to make.
If you’re not familiar with hardware manipulation in C++ I’d highly recommend reading the previous articles in this series before continuing.
Even if you’re familiar with the concepts of hardware manipulation, if you haven’t read the […]
Posted in C/C++ Programming, Cortex, Design Issues
Tagged Class, GPIO, hardware manipulation, IO, Modern C++. C++11. C++14, Object-Oriented Design, OOD, STM32, STM32F4 Discovery
1 Comment
2016 – The Year of the Hack
Technical Consultant at Feabhas Ltd
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.
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.
Latest posts by Andy McCormick (see all)
- 2016 – The Year of the Hack - January 27, 2017
- An Introduction to Hypervisors - October 19, 2016
- Off to the Embedded Linux Conference Europe and Open IoT Summit, Berlin 11th-13th October 2016 - October 5, 2016
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 […]
Death and (virtual) destruction*
Technical Consultant at Feabhas Ltd
Glennan is an embedded systems and software engineer with over 20 years experience, mostly in high-integrity systems for the defence and aerospace industry.
He specialises in C++, UML, software modelling, Systems Engineering and process development.
He specialises in C++, UML, software modelling, Systems Engineering and process development.
Latest posts by Glennan Carnie (see all)
- Practice makes perfect, part 3 – Idiomatic kata - February 27, 2020
- Practice makes perfect, part 2– foundation kata - February 13, 2020
- Practice makes perfect, part 1 – Code kata - January 30, 2020
This time, we’ll have a more detailed look at one of those everybody-knows-that elements of C++ – virtual destructors.
More specifically, I want to reinforce under what circumstances you should make your destructor virtual; and when you don’t need to (despite what your compiler might say)
(*there’s no
An Introduction to Hypervisors
Technical Consultant at Feabhas Ltd
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.
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.
Latest posts by Andy McCormick (see all)
- 2016 – The Year of the Hack - January 27, 2017
- An Introduction to Hypervisors - October 19, 2016
- Off to the Embedded Linux Conference Europe and Open IoT Summit, Berlin 11th-13th October 2016 - October 5, 2016
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 ARM, embedded, hypervisor, linux, RTOS, virtualisation
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Great Expectations
Technical Consultant at Feabhas Ltd
Glennan is an embedded systems and software engineer with over 20 years experience, mostly in high-integrity systems for the defence and aerospace industry.
He specialises in C++, UML, software modelling, Systems Engineering and process development.
He specialises in C++, UML, software modelling, Systems Engineering and process development.
Latest posts by Glennan Carnie (see all)
- Practice makes perfect, part 3 – Idiomatic kata - February 27, 2020
- Practice makes perfect, part 2– foundation kata - February 13, 2020
- Practice makes perfect, part 1 – Code kata - January 30, 2020
Previously, we’ve looked at the basic concepts of function parameter passing, and we’ve looked at the mechanics of how parameters are passed at the Application Binary Interface (ABI) level.
Far too often we focus on the mechanisms and efficiency of parameter passing, with the goal: if it’s efficient then it’s good; that’s all there is to it. In this article I want to move past simple mechanics and start to explore function parameter design intent – that is, what can I […]
Posted in C/C++ Programming, Design Issues
Tagged C++0x, C++11, C++1y, copy policy, design, functions, Modern C++, move policy, move semantics
2 Comments
Memory consistency made simple(ish)
Technical Consultant at Feabhas Ltd
Glennan is an embedded systems and software engineer with over 20 years experience, mostly in high-integrity systems for the defence and aerospace industry.
He specialises in C++, UML, software modelling, Systems Engineering and process development.
He specialises in C++, UML, software modelling, Systems Engineering and process development.
Latest posts by Glennan Carnie (see all)
- Practice makes perfect, part 3 – Idiomatic kata - February 27, 2020
- Practice makes perfect, part 2– foundation kata - February 13, 2020
- Practice makes perfect, part 1 – Code kata - January 30, 2020
The C++11 memory consistency model is probably one of the most significant aspects of Modern C++; and yet probably one of the least well-understood. I think the reason is simple: it’s really difficult to understand what the problem actually is.
The memory consistency problem is a concurrency problem. That is, it’s a problem that occurs when we start writing multi-threaded code. More specifically, it’s a parallelism problem – the real subtleties occur when you have two or more processors executing code.
In the first […]
Posted in C/C++ Programming, Design Issues, General
Tagged C++, memory consistency, sequential execution
2 Comments
The Rule of Zero
Technical Consultant at Feabhas Ltd
Glennan is an embedded systems and software engineer with over 20 years experience, mostly in high-integrity systems for the defence and aerospace industry.
He specialises in C++, UML, software modelling, Systems Engineering and process development.
He specialises in C++, UML, software modelling, Systems Engineering and process development.
Latest posts by Glennan Carnie (see all)
- Practice makes perfect, part 3 – Idiomatic kata - February 27, 2020
- Practice makes perfect, part 2– foundation kata - February 13, 2020
- Practice makes perfect, part 1 – Code kata - January 30, 2020
In a previous article – ”The Rule of the Big Four (and a half)” we looked at resource management policies in C++.
Resource management is the general term for using the mechanisms in C++ to ensure that resources – files, dynamic memory, sockets, mutexes, etc – have their lifetimes automatically controlled so as to prevent resource leaks, deadlocks, etc. C++ refers to these mechanisms as RAII/RDID ( “Resource Acquisition Is Initialisation / Resource Destruction is Deletion”)
In this article we’ll have a […]
Software Duct Tape – Binding the C++ Universe Together
Technical Consultant at Feabhas Ltd
Glennan is an embedded systems and software engineer with over 20 years experience, mostly in high-integrity systems for the defence and aerospace industry.
He specialises in C++, UML, software modelling, Systems Engineering and process development.
He specialises in C++, UML, software modelling, Systems Engineering and process development.
Latest posts by Glennan Carnie (see all)
- Practice makes perfect, part 3 – Idiomatic kata - February 27, 2020
- Practice makes perfect, part 2– foundation kata - February 13, 2020
- Practice makes perfect, part 1 – Code kata - January 30, 2020
One of the cornerstones of object-oriented design is the concept of objects interacting by sending messages to form mechanisms – units of higher-order (or ‘emergent’) behaviour.
In order to send a message (in this case, invoke a member function) an object must have a ‘link’ to the target object. That link is formed by building in an association between the two classes as part of the type’s definition.
In this article we look at building associations between classes and forming run-time links […]
The hokey-cokey* of function calls
Technical Consultant at Feabhas Ltd
Glennan is an embedded systems and software engineer with over 20 years experience, mostly in high-integrity systems for the defence and aerospace industry.
He specialises in C++, UML, software modelling, Systems Engineering and process development.
He specialises in C++, UML, software modelling, Systems Engineering and process development.
Latest posts by Glennan Carnie (see all)
- Practice makes perfect, part 3 – Idiomatic kata - February 27, 2020
- Practice makes perfect, part 2– foundation kata - February 13, 2020
- Practice makes perfect, part 1 – Code kata - January 30, 2020
Functions are the lifeblood of a C program. The program flow is altered by passing parameters to functions, which are then manipulated. Conceptually function parameters are defined as being either:
Inputs (Read-only) – client-supplied objects manipulated within the function only
Outputs (Write-only) – objects generated by the function for use by the client.
Input-Outputs (Read-Write) – client objects that can be manipulated by the function.
Defining the use of a parameter gives vital information not only to the implementer, but (perhaps more importantly) to […]
Posted in C/C++ Programming, Design Issues
Tagged C Declarations, functions, interface, parameters, quality, safety, security
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Casting – what could possibly go wrong?
Technical Consultant at Feabhas Ltd
Glennan is an embedded systems and software engineer with over 20 years experience, mostly in high-integrity systems for the defence and aerospace industry.
He specialises in C++, UML, software modelling, Systems Engineering and process development.
He specialises in C++, UML, software modelling, Systems Engineering and process development.
Latest posts by Glennan Carnie (see all)
- Practice makes perfect, part 3 – Idiomatic kata - February 27, 2020
- Practice makes perfect, part 2– foundation kata - February 13, 2020
- Practice makes perfect, part 1 – Code kata - January 30, 2020
Type casting in C++ is a form of what is known in computer science as type punning – that is, circumventing the type system of a programming language.
C++ inherits its conversion and casting mechanism from C, but supplements it (although sensibly we should say, replaces it) with four, more explicit cast operations:
static_cast
reinterpret_cast
const_cast
dynamic_cast
In C and C++ – and particularly in embedded systems – casting is a necessary evil; so much so that many programmers just accept it […]
Posted in C/C++ Programming, Design Issues
Tagged casting, const_cast, dynamic_cast, reinterpret_cast, RTTI, static_cast
1 Comment