Category Archives: Industry Analysis

GitHub Codespaces and online development

Director at Feabhas Limited
Co-Founder and Director of Feabhas since 1995.
Niall has been designing and programming embedded systems for over 30 years. He has worked in different sectors, including aerospace, telecomms, government and banking.
His current interest lie in IoT Security and Agile for Embedded Systems.
Niall Cooling

In our previous posting, we discussed using VSCode’s Dev Container extension to allow running workspaces directly within a Docker container.

In December 2020, I was granted early access to a new feature developed by GitHub called Codespaces. Codespaces offers an online VSCode development environment, enabling you to develop entirely in the cloud.

The great news is that Codespaces uses the same core process, and file structure, as Dev Containers; meaning once we have our .devcontainer folder setup (if you are unfamiliar with […]

Posted in Agile, C/C++ Programming, General, Industry Analysis, Testing | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Bugs do matter…(unsurprisingly)

Director at Feabhas Limited
Co-Founder and Director of Feabhas since 1995.
Niall has been designing and programming embedded systems for over 30 years. He has worked in different sectors, including aerospace, telecomms, government and banking.
His current interest lie in IoT Security and Agile for Embedded Systems.
Niall Cooling

Welcome to 2018! How did that happen?

Thank you to everyone who attended last week’s webinar on “Measuring Software Quality“, and thank you for the positive feedback, it really does help us shape our future webinars/blogs.

During the talk, I discussed a suggestion by Sally Globe,  along the lines of “Bugs don’t matter”/”Perfect software is the enemy of rapid deployment” as long as you are “Not wrong long”, which came from an initial exchange on Twitter back last year:The caveat was this […]

Posted in Agile, Industry Analysis, Testing | Tagged , | Leave a comment

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.
Andy McCormick

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

Security and Connected Devices

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.
Andy McCormick

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

goto fail and embedded C Compilers

Director at Feabhas Limited
Co-Founder and Director of Feabhas since 1995.
Niall has been designing and programming embedded systems for over 30 years. He has worked in different sectors, including aerospace, telecomms, government and banking.
His current interest lie in IoT Security and Agile for Embedded Systems.
Niall Cooling

I can’t imagine anyone reading this posting hasn’t already read about the Apple “goto fail” bug in SSL. My reaction was one of incredulity; I really couldn’t believe this code could have got into the wild on so many levels.

First we’ve got to consider the testing (or lack thereof) for this codebase. The side effect of the bug was that all SSL certificates passed, even malformed ones. This implies positive testing (i.e. we can demonstrate it works), but no negative testing […]

Posted in ARM, C/C++ Programming, Industry Analysis, Testing | Tagged , , , , , | 5 Comments

Can existing embedded applications benefit from Multicore Technology?

Director at Feabhas Limited
Co-Founder and Director of Feabhas since 1995.
Niall has been designing and programming embedded systems for over 30 years. He has worked in different sectors, including aerospace, telecomms, government and banking.
His current interest lie in IoT Security and Agile for Embedded Systems.
Niall Cooling

It feels that not a day goes by without a new announcement regarding a major development in multicore technology. With so much press surrounding multicore, you have to ask the question “Is it for me?” i.e. can I utilise multicore technology in my embedded application?

However, from a software developer’s perspective, all the code examples seem to demonstrate the (same) massive performance improvements to “rendering fractals” or “ray tracing programs”. The examples always refer to Amdahl’s Law, showing […]

Posted in ARM, Cortex, Design Issues, General, Industry Analysis | Tagged , , , | 6 Comments

Artisan – Aonix merger

Director at Feabhas Limited
Co-Founder and Director of Feabhas since 1995.
Niall has been designing and programming embedded systems for over 30 years. He has worked in different sectors, including aerospace, telecomms, government and banking.
His current interest lie in IoT Security and Agile for Embedded Systems.
Niall Cooling

Late last month the merger of Artisan and Aonix was announced. This is yet another interesting move in the supply of tools to the embedded systems community.

The tool market has seen a number of significant changes over the last year. It started just over a year ago with the acquisition of Telelogic by IBM.  At that time Telelogic were starting to become the dominant player in the embedded design tool market (predominately UML), based primarily around their Rhapsody tool […]

Posted in Industry Analysis | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments