Open Source Engineering

MIPS Technologies has ported Google's Android operating system to the MIPS processor architecture, aiming to expand the use of Android beyond phones, into digital TVs, mobile internet devices, digital picture frames and set-top boxes.

Recent years have seen a rapid increase in the use of multicore devices in the PC market. This trend is now being replicated in the device software environment with dual-core and many-core devices being released by a wide range of silicon vendors.

Earlier this year there was a discussion with my technial sales colleagues regarding what is the right level of virtualization. This may sound a bit superfluously these times as there are plenty of technical excellent implementations like KVM for Linux out there. But do we need to use a sledgehammer to crack a nut?

News from Embedded Systems Conference 2009, in San Jose: "Accomplished for the first time in a commercially available phone, Chicago-based Open Kernel Labs's mobile virtualisation solution enabled Linux and an RTOS to run side by side on a single ARM processor." Many years ago Henry Spencer wrote down what he considered to be ten of the most fundamental rules all C programmers should follow. Reading them now they seem almost funny (anyone still program for a VAX?). But for an embedded engineer they still ring true.

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

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

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?

Time is an illusion, UNIX time doubly so… This is one for all the numerologists out there to ponder. Next Friday, 13th Feb 2009, at 11:31:30 PM GMT/UTC UNIX time, the number used by UNIX systems such as Linux to calculate the current date and time, will be 1234567890. And here is a neat web page to watch that momentous ...

.Net; The life raft and framework of Windows based programming, now conquered by the penguin.