A new version of Contribtastic, the 100% open source cache reading uploader, is now available. If you’ve been hit with the data.pickle corruption bug from previous versions, this is an essential upgrade.
Next release may actually add the CSV export option along with re-implementing login functionality. Contributions welcome!
I had the privilege of attending the Embedded Linux Conference in San Francisco this year. All in all it was a great experience, especially the networking opportunities with other developers working on core functionality. Personally, I found the following presentations and technologies the most memorable:
- Linux Without a Bootloader (Greg Ungerer) – A well paced example on booting Linux without a direct bootloader (for NOR flash) or without U-Boot (for NAND flash). Good demos, and a good discussion post presentation. This will be an approach I will try in future systems, combined with Kexec
- Kexec – Ready for embedded Linux? (Magnus Damm) – A good talk discussing the Kexec framework on embedded systems – especially relevant after Greg’s talk
- Android: A Case Study of an Embedded Linux Project – All around fun, and highlighting some of the problems with the current fork of Android. The only thing this keynote could have done better is presenting at least one concrete example of how mainlining reduces overhead for the developers. Not that I don’t agree with Greg, but it would be great to use this keynote as ammunition in all companies.
- Flattened Device Tree ARM Support Update (Grant Likely) – In the “things to watch” camp is the upcoming unification of the flattened device tree support in PowerPC and SPARC, adding ARM support. This will be something to hack on to make sure all the various system drivers work correctly, and something I will be tracking.
- Ftrace – Embedded Edition (Steven Rostedt) – A very energetic example of what FTrace can do for you, and the announcement of trace-cmd and kernelshark. This will be going into my toolchest.
- State of Embedded Linux (Tim Bird) – Overviews can be drab and boring, but this was enough context to bring in people who don’t follow lkml on a daily basis. And Tim, I will test out LogFS and ramzswap on my systems and report back
- Link Time Dead Code and Data Elimination Using GNU Toolchain (Denys Vlasenko) – A good overview on the current support and caveats with -function-sections and –gc-sections in the GNU toolchain. Could have used some more technical insight, but the discussions it triggered generally filled any holes.
- A Consideration of Memory Saving by Efficient Mapping of Shared Libraries – A very indepth technical discussion which is invaluable for very small systems. The slides are great as well.
This is hardly a complete list of the talks I went to, and only reflects some of the most interesting and relevant areas to me (sorry, I don’t do much RT or media). To those not mentioned, I still enjoyed hearing you speak!
And yes, I do have a shiny new free Nexus One thanks to Chris DiBona and all of Google. You still should work on mainlining your code though
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