Linuxlink Radio By Timesys

Gene and guest host Jeremiah Lott discuss various profiling tools to get the most efficiency out of your hardware. In this episode they focus on using profiling tools to optimize the kernel.

Maciej and guest host Scott Gilbertson discuss their experience at the Embedded World Conference in Nurnberg, Germany.

For this topic, Maciej invited Timesys engineers, Justin and Scott, to participate. Both engineers, having enjoyed using Nokia's software on the Neo phone and having experience with Qt/Embedded for Linux at Timesys, share their insight into the recently released graphics toolkit. The trio spends time introducing historical perspective on Qt and unsuccessfully tries to figure out the long list of names the package has had over the years. Scott talks about other open source graphics frameworks, such as GTK+ and Glade, and Justin introduces concepts around QtCreator.

For this episode, Maciej invited two Timesys engineers, Daniel and Jason (both of whom have been working with the Timesys desktop build system and a number of open source ones, including buildroot and LTIB), to participate. After introducing Timesys' approach to building complete Linux platform, the trio talks about the differences and similarities between buildroot, open embedded and LTIB, and also touch on mainstream distributions like Fedora and Ubuntu. Lastly, Daniel addresses a question received from a listener regarding tradeoffs in latency vs. throughput when migrating from a micro-kernel solution to Linux.

In this episode Maciej and Daniel, one of Timesys' Linux gurus, talk about what's new in the 2.6.28 Linux kernel. The conversation focuses on several aspects of the 2.6.28 kernel that are particularly relevant to an embedded Linux engineer. The pair seems to enjoy in particular talking about the concept of the staging driver area in the kernel and the newly introduced Boot Tracer.

In this episode, our hosts talk about what's new in the 2.6.27 Linux kernel. Various new features are covered in detail, including support for UBIFS. The hosts discuss the benefits of UBIFS for developers and how UBIFS compares to JFFS2. Other topics touched on in this episode include valuable tidbits about embedded Linux features.

In this episode, Maciej and Gene interview Mike Erickson of Logic, a leading board design and manufacturing company, and discuss weighty topics such as today's hottest processors, Linux acceptance, Pittsburgh's Mt. Washington incline, minimizing boot time and if the consultant who claimed he was lead through a government building with a bag over his head (as not compromise security) was pulling Gene's leg. Write podcast@timesys.com if you have something interesting to share.

In this episode, Maciej and Gene talk about what free software means in practice, both for companies that create free software and those who use it as part of their business. The pair gets upset when some vendors follow the letter but not the spirit of free software by being coy about providing source code or through licensing software that attempts to node lock basic tools like GCC.

Maciej and Gene talk about what "Free Software" means and the rights and obligations of Free Software users. The pair talk about what's different about GPL3, tivoization, and the Lesser GPL among other topics.

After a bit of a break, Gene and Maciej talk about 2.6.26 from an embedded developer's perspective. The pair also discuss the ins and outs of using MPatrol: how it works, what it's good for, and some of its more nifty features.

Maciej and Gene talk about what new in the 2.6.25 version of the kernel that's relevant to embedded developers, like CANBUS (thanks Volkswagen) and real time features that all allocation of processor time by process group. Gene also talks about debugfs and how engineers can use this light-weight file system to fetch data from kernel modules, like its name implies, it debugfs is a great debugging tool.

Last month, TimeSys was at the ESC West show and brought along the LinuxLink radio gear. In this episode, Maciej and Gene interview Jeff Martin about the technology behind his company's product, the Propeller chip. What interested Maciej and Gene was the interruptless nature of the Propeller chip's design and how the chip handles some real-time requirements at the hardware level.

Gene and reluctant guest host Jeremiah Lott talk about how to do basic system profiling when you're low on resources. By using some basic library functions, coding in an interrupt handler and using the proc filesystem, you can get a good look at how your application is using resources. Gene wastes time talking about how the Windows-running car wash POS system crashed last week.

Gene interviews Fahd Abidi, Sr. FAE with Ultimate Solutions. Gene and Fahd discuss hardware debuggers. What are they? When do you need one and When you might not need one.

Gene and maciej discuss various updates to the release of the 2.6.24 Linux Kernel as well as the latest release of GCC. They also start a series on inter-process communication.

This week Gene and Maciej get back to their series on porting a Linux kernel to a new platform. In this episode Gene and Maciej focus on what it takes to write a device driver. They cover device driver initialization and use an example of parallel port.

In this episode Gene and Maciej explain network infrastructure and network services that are used in the Linux development for an embedded system. The two hosts cover different network connection scenarios as well as use cases for amongst other things dhcp, tftp and nfs services.

This week’s episode is a continuation of the last week’s introduction to porting a Linux kernel to a new platform. In this episode Gene and Maciej focus on various areas of the Linux kernel that are looked at or changed in the porting process.

This week Gene and Maciej begin a new series where they discuss the process a developer goes through to get a kernel running on a new device.

This week we are releasing a bonus episode where Maciej interviews Gene on his experience at the CELF Embedded Linux Conference where Gene was a guest speaker. His topics included GCC, embedded Linux for beginners, using RPM as a build system and a panel debating "what is the ideal Linux distribution."