Hello,
Registration is now open for the fifty-seventh meeting, which will be an
evening workshop, providing a hands-on introduction to NetBSD on
embedded platforms. Details of which can be found below.
Regards,
Andrew
//
OSHUG #57 — Getting started with NetBSD on embedded platforms
On the 20 April 2017, 17:30 - 20:00 at BCS London, 1st Floor, The
Davidson Building, 5 Southampton Street, London, WC2E 7HA.
Registration: http://oshug.org/event/57
— Workshop scope
You're hired at the latest startup as a hardware engineer and required
to build the firmware which will run on "The Greatest Next Generation
Appliance" (GNA). The GNA boots, prints a message and interacts with a
device (in this case an LED).
In this workshop we cover how a person with an interest and a focus on
hardware can make progress with the software side by using the NetBSD
operating system and the features it offers to save considerable time
and effort.
* NetBSD supports a wide & diverse range of systems & CPU architectures.
* Support for cross compilation is offered by default and works out of
the box.
* There is a high level language interface to interact with the system
internals.
* File integrity verification support to detect tampering of binaries
and preventing execution is builtin.
* An instance of the kernel can be run as a user process on different
operating systems where rapid development can take place.
Things we will cover:
1. An introduction to cross-compilation with build.sh and constructing
an image to boot on your hardware.
2. Interacting with the system using Lua (which is embedded in the
kernel, avoiding having to write C or have knowledge of OS internals) to
e.g. access GPIO.
3. Preventing the execution of tampered or unauthorised binaries with
veriexec.
4. Using rump kernel for rapid development away from a potentially slow
dev board.
** Note: Due to budgeting cuts, "The Greatest Next Generation Appliance"
has not yet been purchased, so, the workshop will target the development
of the firmware on a Raspberry Pi or BeagleBone Black.**
— Participant requirements
You will need to bring:
* Your own laptop (running Windows, Linux or Mac OS X);
* A Raspberry Pi or BeagleBone Black;
* An appropriate SD card for your board;
* USB card reader to write a new OS image onto said SD card;
* An ethernet cable to connect board to laptop and/or a USB UART/FTDI
adapter to access the board via the serial console.
— Hosted by
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.
Note: Please aim to arrive by 17:15 as the workshop will start at 17:30
prompt.
--
Andrew Back
http://abopen.com