Another week, another Intel vulnerability becomes public. I don’t say it in any sarcastic way. I just wonder how many of this kind of vulnerabilities there is in the microprocessor we use in our beloved embedded systems. Should we worried about it?
Enjoy the issue #74!
Hardware
Demystifying Microcontroller GPIO Settings
You always wanted to know what are the different configurations possible for a GPIO. The whats, the Hows and the Whys? Phillip Johnston article is a nice, consice and complete explanation of GPIOs configuration.
Cheatsheet for KiCad
If you design electronic cards, you must know KiCad. It’s an advanced free EDA software. Let’s pretend that you don’t know it. From now you don’t have any excuse to not try it because of this cheatsheet given by Foalyy, professor and KiCad forum member.
Introduction to clash for FPGA development
In the wider software field we currently live the rise (again?) of the functional programing paradigm. Therefore It’s normal that some people try to code hardware in a functional way. This introductory article let us discover Clash that is described as a functional hardware description language based on Haskell. If you like functional programming and you are coding FPGAs, you have to read that.
Software
Guide to Implementing Communication Protocols in C++ (for Embedded Systems)
Embedded systems have to communicate and this trend is there to stay. This guide provides a solid list of best practices to implement properly these communications. If you agree with the content of the guide the author provides ready to use libraries as well. The
COMMS library
is open source under a dual license GPLv3 / Commercial.
modm: a barebone embedded library generator
When I read about modm I have been very impressed by the goal of the project. It generates all the libraries that you may need for your specific hardware to boot, access the hardware or communicate. From the list of boards and drivers they support it looks like they are in a really good way to achieve their goal. The list of examples is impressive.
A Big Little Hypervisor for IoT Development
ACRN is an hypervisor specifically designed for IoT development. It runs directly on the bare-metal hardware with extra care for real-time and safety-criticality aspects.
ELF – Executable and Linkable Format
A direct (raw) description of the ELF format with a big list of references.
Misc
Happy 40th Anniversary to the Original Intel 8086 and the x86 Architecture
The 8th of June was the 40th anniversary of the 8086. It’s funny to read quotes from Stephen P. Morse (8086 development lead) that say the CPU “was intended to be short-lived and not have any successors.”
Overcoming transistor miniaturization limits due to ‘quantum tunneling’
Miniaturization of transistors looks like a dead end nowadays because of quantum tunneling. Research may have found a way to remove this limitation. Interesting to read.
The Biggest and Weirdest Commits in Linux Kernel Git History
Keep your commit clean and keep your commits history clean are two basics mantra of every git users. This article proves that if your project is big and old enough you may have some weirds things happening in your git repository