Memorias de un telemático

Linux support for graphics cards are very important for desktop and mobile users: they want to run games, composite their applications and have a nice and modern user experience. So it’s usual that all the eyes are on this area when you want to optimize your embedded device’s user experience… but how the graphics drivers communicate with user-space applications? Víctor Jáquez, from Igalia, wrote a very nice introduction to this…

Exactly one year ago, it was my first day as Igalia employee. I had arrived from Geneva some days before, I had rented an apartment here in Coruña the day before. I was very nervous and willing to start. Today, I can say I am more than happy to be working for this company: I started contributing drivers upstream, I became one of the official maintainers of them, I went…

This week I traveled to Madrid where the 7th White Rabbit workshop was held. It was a two day event where the White Rabbit community presented all the latest development efforts, installations, the White Rabbit standardization process and much more. It was amazing to find a broad range of experiments using or considering to use this technology, the applications, the new PCB designs to come, etc. Apart from Research institutions…

During last few months we have been involved in the development of FMC TDC software support for Linux, i.e., writing a driver for it along with an user-space library and a bunch of test programs. But first of all, let me show you what is a Time-to-Digital converter (TDC) In electronic instrumentation and signal processing, a time to digital converter (abbreviated TDC) is a device for recognizing events and providing…

Hello lazy web, For a number of reasons, I have set up a new OpenPGP key, and I will be transitioning away from my old one. I created a new 4096-bits key following Debian’s instructions. At the time of writing GnuPG unfortunately defaults to a 1024 bit DSA key as the primary with SHA1 as the preferred hash. Due to weaknesses found with the SHA1 hashing algorithm Debian prefers to use keys that…

Last week, I have been in Barcelona attending to LinuxCon Europe 2012 and the Embedded Linux Conference Europe 2012. This was actually my second LinuxCon Europe (the first was in Prague, last year) but I was there with the same feelings that the first time! It was very nice to find old friends there, chat with them or, even, drink some beers while talking about some funny anecdotes we shared…

Some weeks ago, I have created a project in Sourceforge to host the Industry Pack Linux kernel support that keeps the source available in a public repository and provides a mailing list for public discussion. This support started few months ago with the submission of three drivers into the Linux kernel. However, there was a lot of work to be done (improving the API, adding new features, fixing bugs, cleaning up the drivers…). Using the Sourceforge project,…

A few weeks ago, I have submitted a talk at OSHWCon 2012 and it got accepted… Yay! The talk will explain some concepts related to Industrial HW, the benefits of open development and collaborating upstream, the support of Industrial HW in the Linux kernel and how to test our drivers using virtualization software. So, if you are a hardware engineer or your company is interested on open development or you want to…

When you are developing in the Linux kernel you easily find yourself dealing with a kernel oops, kernel bugs or something alike. Sometimes you can recover from it and continue working, sometimes not. If you are developing drivers and testing them over the same machine… you are doing something wrong. It is recommended to have a virtual machine or another computer to test your code there, if not you might…

Last few weeks, as part of my work at Igalia, I have been involved in the submission of three drivers on the Linux kernel’s Staging area. These drivers manage boards that use the IndustryPack® bus following the architecture “carrier-mezzanine”. This kind of boards is design for applications like process control, medical systems, telecommunication and traffic control. The carrier board is a TEWS TPCI200 board, it’s just a bridge between PCIe and IndustryPack®…