It’s the issue #96, and I can’t believe it’s already the 13th issue since the hard reset of the newsletter end of January. One more time this week, there are many interesting articles and I hope the ones I selected for you will help you in your job. Or, maybe, they will just open interesting discussions with your colleagues and friends. It’s already a success for the newsletter from my point of view!
Thank you to GreatScott! for the header’s picture .
Happy reading!
Articles
The state of static analysis in the GCC 12 compiler
The effort started with version 10 and with the soon to be released version 12 many interesting built-in additions
to improve C code quality will be available. To discover the most interesting ones, this article is a must read.
Advantages of RISC-V vector processing over x86 SIMD
A great article that explains in details with clear and beautiful illustrations how work SIMD instructions and of course how
RISC-V vector processing is working.
Hacking the Linux Kernel in Ada
In this 3 parts series we discover how to build a Linux driver in Ada. This is not a theoretical article but a very concrete
one. The working code source of the project is open source and available on Github:
NVIDIA Jetson Nano LED Linux driver experiment in Ada
.
Building Embedded Systems Like It’s 1996
In the past years, several attack mitigations were added to the Linux kernel. This paper is analysing the state of the
adoption of these mitigations on embedded devices. A paper published in 2022.
Reverse-engineering the LM185 voltage reference chip and its bandgap reference
Another interesting Ken Shirriff’s article. If like me, you’re curious, you didn’t know what is a bandgap reference and how it can
be implemented, you obviously must read this one.
Breaking PCBs for Science
Hardware engineers must read this article and even more the white paper linked at the beginning. I have to confess,
I enjoyed reading it as well even though I’m a software engineer. This attention to details is enjoyable.
Bit Twiddling Hacks
Dozens and dozens of tips and tricks on bits manipulation in C.
News / Business
Introducing the Arduino secure boot
Arduino released this week its secure bootloader MCUboot. It comes with all the features expected (firmware authentication,
secure update..) and it already supports zephyr, nuttx, mynewt, and mbed.
Jobs
Pantacor, Senior Embedded Linux Engineer, Madrid, Spain or Hamburg, Germany and/or Remote (Full remote)
Pantacor is a platform for IoT innovation.
Misc
NVIDIA — Securing the Future of Safety and Security of Embedded Software
I was curious to hear that NVIDIA is working toward using Ada and SPARK to improve its firmwares robustness.
This video is an overview of the efforts NVIDIA is doing to test this path.
Reversing Sound Blaster X7 Control for fun and Linux support
In this article the author shares with us how he captured, replayed and analysed the bluetooth communication. Than, like
a bonus for us, he describes how the communication protocol works.