Category Archives: Linux

TDD in C with Ceedling and WSL2 – performance issues

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

Ceedling is still probably the best Test-Driven Development (TDD) environment for C programmers out there. But, as with many Free Open-Source Software ( FOSS ), tools getting it to work natively on a Windows environment involves the odd hoop-jumping exercise; either involving messing around with the likes of Cygwin or Mingw; or using a full Virtual Machine (VM) environment such as VirtualBox or VMware.

However, with the introduction of Windows-Subsystem-for-Linux (WSL) and the much-improved update to WSL2, running Linux centric FOSS […]

Posted in Build-systems, C/C++ Programming, Linux, Testing | Tagged , , , , , | 3 Comments

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.
Andy McCormick

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 […]

Posted in Design Issues, General, Linux | 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

Using your Feabhas USB stick on a Mac

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

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 […]

Posted in General, Linux, training | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Boot Times in Linux/Android

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

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

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

Static and Dynamic Libraries on Linux

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

A Quickstart Guide

We’re going to look at how to create and use libraries on Linux and try to gain some insight on how libraries work behind the scenes.

Decisions Decisions!

Often when working with 3rd party code you may be limited on the options available. Some well known open-source projects have dual-licensed binaries that dictate different terms for static or dynamic linking.

Writing a library is a good way to provide an interface to customers, get code reuse and can be […]

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