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.