Articles in the 2020 category

1. Meet the Codethings: Ben Dooks talks about Linux kernel and RISC-V

   Ben Dooks is our Senior Engineer and Open Source Consultant with more than 15 years’ experience contributing to Linux Kernel. Dooks joined Codethink 8 years ago, and since then he's been involved in a range of projects involving the Linux kernel, such as the MEG project, amongst others.

2. Here we go 2021: 4 open source events for software engineers and project leaders

   Conferences and events are a valuable way to grow an open source project. They're a space for software engineers, team leaders, architects and open source enthusiasts to discuss ideas, share points of views, identify solutions and introduce new software developments.

3. Xmas Greetings from Codethink

   We got this open source cartoon as an Xmas gift... hope you like it

4. Call for Papers: FOSDEM 2021 Dev Room Safety and Open Source Software

   FOSDEM is coming, 6th and 7th of February 2021! In addition to attending the virtual event, this time Codethink engineers will be curating the Safety and Open Source Software Dev Room.

5. Building the abseil-hello Bazel project for a different architecture using a dynamically generated toolchain

   Bazel and BuildStream are tools which are commonly used to organize and delegate the building of software. There are a few key differences between them but largely they are concerned with the same development problems.

6. Advent of Code: programming puzzle challenges

   It's that happy time of the year again! And we are not only talking about hearing "All I Want For Christmas Is You" every time you go to the supermarket. We are talking about Advent of Code.

7. Improving performance on Interrogizer with the stm32

   In our previous blog post we introduced the Interrogizer project. Interrogizer is a logic analyser, which means it samples binary signals and sends the samples to a host computer as fast as possible.

8. Introducing Interrogizer: providing affordable troubleshooting

   Interrogizer is an Open Source project, aimed at providing developers with an affordable and easily producible tool to aid troubleshooting by enabling measurement of digital signals. Started from a desire to share hardware knowledge around Codethink, the device uses a small microcontroller placed on a simple PCB that can be easily and cheaply produced; allowing for iterations of the product as development progresses.

9. Improving software security through input validation

   In an evermore software-intensive world, the security of software systems has become a critical part of product design and implementation. One way in which attackers exploit software systems is by crafting malicious inputs. The defence to such attacks is a combination of defensive programming techniques including input validation.

10. More time on top: My latest work improving Topplot

    In this post I'm going to talk about the recent tranche of work I've put into a tool I wrote called topplot, which plots graphs from the data produced by the system utility top.

11. Orchestrating applications by (ab)using Ansible's Network XML Parser

    There are various roles out there on ansible-galaxy that will take care of installing this application for you, but their main advantage is the ability to install on platforms we don't use, and the ones we looked over didn't provide any configuration of openvas itself.

12. My experience of the MIT STAMP workshop 2020

    I recently digitally attended the 2020 STAMP workshop, hosted by MIT. This was originally planned to be in Boston in March, but for obvious reasons was moved.

13. Red Hat announces new Flatpak Runtime for RHEL

    We’re excited to see that Red Hat has decided to offer flatpak runtimes for RHEL with a ten year security fix plan...

14. How to keep your staff healthy in lockdown

    Codethink staff have been predominantly based at home now for over three months. In that time the way we all interact with the world has changed considerably.

15. Bloodlight: A Medical PPG Testbed

    Codethink is working on a project to design a fully open-source (hardware and software) research device for experimenting with shining light into skin and detecting the light that reflects, gets absorbed and passes through. This kind of technology is widely deployed for measuring heart rates.

16. Bringing Lorry into the 2020s

    In the mid-2010s, Codethink developed the software suite for specifying, developing, and building Linux-based systems. The work has been used by several long-standing customers and Codethink even uses it for some of our own infrastructure. This blog will take you through work done to modernise one of the components of Baserock - Lorry.

17. How to use Tracecompass to analyse kernel traces from LTTng

    Codethink is a software company that works on various client projects; ranging from medical, finance, automotive. In these different areas of engagement; we are trusted to work on various types of problems that clients face with their systems. One such problem encountered required us looking at a userspace software where the program was occasionally not responding on time.

18. Fixing Rust's test suite on RISC-V

    In my previous blog post I introduced my work to improve Rust's support for RISC-V Linux systems. Since then I have fixed a couple of interesting compiler bugs. This blog post describes my process to track down these issues; explains some rustc internals; and discusses movement in the broader Rust community regarding RISC-V.

19. The challenges behind electric vehicle infrastructure

    In 2019, electric vehicles accounted for 7.4% of total passenger car registrations in the UK. For an ever-more environmentally conscious population, this presents a very low number. Electric vehicles are often seen as a next step, or even a solution for greener transportation. Indeed, electric vehicles are becoming a more accessible option for an increasing number of consumers, and getting closer to a wider public adoption.

20. Investigating kernel user-space access

    In 2018, Codethink worked with Lukas Bulwahn from BMW on a project investigating some core functionality of the Linux kernel that is relevant to safety considerations of an assumed system. We wanted to share some of our findings from this work, as it could prove useful to communities interested in using Linux in a safety-critical context.

21. Consuming BuildStream projects in Bazel: the bazelize plugin

    Buildstream projects can easily be consumed by Bazel projects by use of a bazelize element, offering greater flexibility and an easier path to integrating third party dependencies

22. Improving RISC-V Linux support in Rust

    RISC-V is a new Instruction Set Architecture developed in the open and available for use without paying a license fee. This means there are no barriers to achieving open hardware implementations, which opens the door to performant (mostly) open hardware processors...

23. Creating a Build toolkit using the Remote Execution API

    Building and testing at scale often involves codebases with millions of lines of code, worked upon by thousands of developers. One solution to the problem of building as quickly as possible is simply delegating that responsibility — not to the machine that the developer is working on, or even to a server that the CI job has been dispatched to, but to a server farm...

24. Trusting software in a pandemic

    As concerns about the privacy and security implications of contract tracing apps for COVID-19 show, establishing trust in software is still a real challenge. I’ve been following reports about these apps closely, and have been interested to read medical, technical and ethical analysis from around the world. What all of these perspectives underline for me is the critical role of public trust in the success or failure of such applications.

25. The Case For Open Source Software In The Medical Industry

    Medical Devices are utilising software more than ever before. Recent challenges from COVID-19 have outlined some of the great benefits of utilising open source within the Medical industry. Chris looks at the benefits Open Source Software and projects could bring to the industry, as well as potential drawbacks of implementing an open-source initiative

26. My experiences moving to remote working

    I’ve now been working at home since early March. My colleagues and I have all adapted to be able to work at home following the coronavirus outbreak and the subsequent measures taken by the UK government and other governments around the world. This shift is one that we have all had to come to terms with quickly.

27. Impact of COVID-19 on the Medical Devices Industry

    Industry leading Medical companies are turning their attention to helping combat the fight. Manufacturers of ventilators and respiratory care such as Philips and Medtronic are committing to doubling production of ventilators over the next couple of months.

28. COVID-19 (Coronavirus) and Codethink

    Codethink has switched into home-working mode to minimise the possibility of COVID-19 infections for our team, families, customers and partners.

29. Codethink develops Open Source drivers for Microsoft Azure Sphere MediaTek MT3620

    Codethink recently worked on platform libraries for the real-time M4 cores of the MediaTek MT3620, the first Azure Sphere chip certified by Microsoft focusing on the development of a set of drivers for the peripheral subsystems (SPI, I2C, I2S, ADC, PWM, GPIO and Timers).