[GLLUG] OSHUG #46 — Embedded Platforms (BSD, OpenWRT, Plan 9 & Inferno), Thurs 17th March.

[Andrew Back]

Hello,

Details below of next week's Open Source Hardware User Group meeting,
which will hopefully be of interest.

Cheers,

Andrew

//

OSHUG #46 — Embedded Platforms (BSD, OpenWRT, Plan 9 & Inferno)

On the 17 March 2016, 18:00 - 20:00 at BCS London, 1st Floor, The
Davidson Building, 5 Southampton Street, London, WC2E 7HA.

  Registration: http://oshug.org/event/46

The forty-sixth OSHUG meeting will take a look at embedded platforms,
with talks on the BSD family of operating systems, Linux and OpenWRT,
and Plan 9 and Inferno in distributed systems.

— The BSD Family of Operating Systems

A familiar environment for your VAX, PIC32 or RISC-V ISA and many
other platforms.

The Berkeley Software Distribution started out as a patch set to AT&T
UNIX in the 70's and grew to a complete Operating Systems. Today
several projects continue to develop variant operating systems based
on the work originally started by the Computer Science Research Group,
each with a different area of focus.

This presentation will cover some of the benefits these operating
systems can offer to aid the workflow of a hardware project.

Sevan Janiyan is founder of Venture 37, which provides system
administration & consultancy services. As a fan of operating systems
and computers with different CPU architectures, in his spare time he
maintains builds of open source software on a variety of systems
featuring PowerPC, SPARC and armv7l CPUs. He hopes to own a NeXTcube &
OMRON LUNA-88K2 one day.

— Developing Linux based products in the connected devices ecosystem
-- The OpenWRT Approach

Linux is accepted as a standard component of the Internet of Things
domain. With the abundance of development platforms and the abhorrent
state of vendor provided SDKs, getting started with and more
importantly the maintenance of Linux powered devices is pretty much a
dark art these days.

This talk focuses on the mass market hardware platforms of interest to
folks building the Next Great IoT ProductTM and how the development
could be sped up with OpenWRT. To supplement the topic of product
development, a couple of noteworthy System-on-Chip devices and how
they could be adopted will also be discussed.

Ivan Iacono is an Embedded Systems Engineer interested in the
development of Linux based products and the surrounding periphery of
embedded devices, cloud and the overall architecture of connected
systems. He is the Firmware Wrangler at Den Automation.

Omer Kilic is an Embedded Systems Engineer who likes tinkering with
small computers of all shapes and sizes. He works at the various
intersections of hardware and software engineering practices, product
development and manufacturing. He is the Chief Hacker at Den
Automation.

— Embedded devices are often now part of a distributed system: my
Pebble watch is linked to my Nexus phone, which is coupled to Google.

Plan 9 and Inferno are two distributed systems originally developed by
the Bell Labs research centre that produced Unix. They allow a single
large system to be composed from smaller cooperating systems
performing specific tasks. (In other areas they illustrate an
alternative time line that diverged from strict adherence to Unix's
details of the 1970's.)

Distributed systems infrastructure often focuses on algorithmic
aspects, such as Paxos, and the operating system is largely irrelevant
when it is not merely obstructive. Plan 9 and Inferno provide
structural support for distribution, at the operating system level.
Their defining novelty is the representation of all distributable
resources as hierarchical name spaces, which can be composed in useful
ways, and simplify design, development, testing and integration. This
talk will give a brief summary of both systems, then begin to name
names, including their use in embedded appliances in distributed
systems.

Dr Charles Forsyth is a founder and Technical Director of Vita Nuova,
which specialises in systems software and distributed systems.

He is interested in compilers, operating systems, networking
(protocols and services), security, and distributed systems and
algorithms. He specialises in the design and implementation of systems
software, from low-level drivers through compilers to whole operating
systems. He has published papers on operating systems, Ada
compilation, worst-case execution analysers for safety-critical
applications, “resources as files”, and the development of
computational grids.

-- 
Andrew Back
http://carrierdetect.com