From Rory Stewart’s book the places in between about his absurd/wonderful walk accross Afghanistan in 2002: That night we stopped in Dahan-e-Rezak, Dr. Habidullah’ mothers village. This was my first night in a tribal hill village. … Everyone in Rezak
The embedded enterprise
It is now possible to put together sophisticated and powerful embedded and control systems that are mostly composed of pre-existing working software. One of the demonstrations we showed at AMD’s recent embedded workshop was a small two processor (4 core)
Speculation on modularity and information theory
One way of defining modules is by what engineers have to know. If a program X consists of components X1 … Xn then we can say Xi is a module if a programmer can modify it without learning “much” about
multicore and virtualization and real-time provisioning
We added the “reservation” capability to RTCore real-time POSIX threads a couple of years ago. Normally, the client platform operating system shares the processor with RTCore threads as a completely pre-emptible low priority thread. This works exceptionally well. Worst case
Single core cell phone solution and marketing vs engineering
FSMLabs is finally able to discuss the single core cell phone handset solution we developed with Infineon Technologies last year. This system is cool technology – literally – since it allows parts count reduction on the handset and that reduces
Microkernels and why academic OS research is boring
Andy Tanenbaum writes a defense of microkernels that (1) misses the content of Linus Torvald’s critique, (2) ignores the most relevant paper on software development, David Parnas’ Software Jewels paper, and (3) pretends RTLinux does not exist. The problem with
GreenHills, foreigners, and the gummi bear threat
When GreenHills launched their anti-Linux offensive, they crossed a line – and I doubt they even knew it. To cast doubt on the value of Linux in critical applications, GreenHills tried to create a scare about the nationality and “loyalty”
Pitiful formal methods in computer science
FSMLabs is making its way through the DO178 requirements and we’ve given a lot of thought to Common Criteria over the last couple years. One of the advantages of DO178 is that it does not accept the totally untested and
Above all, the SUSPENSE: Wind River’s DSO with Robert Mitchum and hippies! (updated)
I’ve been meaning to write about DSO – WindRiver’s attempt to define synthetic “standards” (see the linuxdevices article for technical detail and a more serious approach). “Is DSO hype or substance?” asked Wind River CEO Ken Klein during the sponsored
Paul Erdös day
March 26 is Paul Erdös birthday. The book about Erdös by Paul Hoffman is a nice read and thought provoking. Erdös’ concept of the BOOK recording the most elegant proofs is one that is natural for both mathematicians and engineers