Posted by Cliff Brake on 2010-06-14 | 
Comments are off for this article
This article and screen-cast is a continuation of that last couple posts describing the BEC OE build template. The purpose again for a build system is to automate tedious manual tasks, and in doing so, we end up documenting how the build system works. Having a good build system is important during product development so [...]
Posted by Cliff Brake on 2010-02-08 | 19 Comments to Read
Based on the interest and number of embedded modules currently available, it appears that the OMAP3 CPU from TI will be very popular in the general purpose embedded Linux market. One of the OMAP3 modules available is the Overo from Gumstix. As the company name suggests, this module looks about like a stick of gum, [...]
Posted by Cliff Brake on 2009-12-07 | 3 Comments to Read
One of the most common power management modes for ARM processors is the suspend mode. In this mode, peripherals are shut down when possible, the SDRAM is put into self-refresh, and the CPU is placed in a low power mode. A useful bit of information is to know how soon the system can respond to [...]
Posted by Cliff Brake on 2009-11-23 | 9 Comments to Read
This article provides an overview of the Linux kernel support for the suspend state in the TI OMAP3. Power management has always been one of the more difficult parts of a system to get right. The OMAP3 power management is quite extensive. There are many levels of very granular control over the entire system. Initially, [...]
Posted by Cliff Brake on 2009-07-30 | 2 Comments to Read
The Gumstix Overo Pinout Spreadsheet has been updated with the Palo board connector pinouts, and a few mistakes have been fixed.
Posted by Cliff Brake on 2009-06-20 | Read the First Comment
Occasionally I am asked how Embedded Linux compares with Windows CE. I have spent the past 5 years doing mostly embedded Linux development, and the previous 5 years doing mostly WinCE development with a few exceptions, so my thoughts are no doubt a little biased toward what I understand best. So take this with a [...]
Posted by Cliff Brake on 2009-03-04 | 4 Comments to Read
Marcin just published an interesting article about memory performance on various embedded systems using the hdparm -T as a simple benchmarq. This test gives a pretty good indicator of memory performance in the system. From the hdparm man page: Perform timings of cache reads for benchmark and comparison purposes. For meaningful results, this operation should [...]
Posted by Cliff Brake on 2009-01-22 | 5 Comments to Read
As we look at new projects, both the Intel Atom and the TI OMAP3 processors generate considerable interest. As we have already shown, the OMAP3 does offer a considerable performance improvement over earlier generations of ARM CPUs. The following video I found on YouTube shows a similar comparison of a OMAP3 and Atom systems rendering [...]
Posted by Cliff Brake on 2009-01-21 | 6 Comments to Read
Several of my customers have built applications using the GTK+ tookit. While GTK+ works fairly well for what we have done, I have been wondering how the performance compares on the new Omap3 processors from TI. As we are evaluating the OMAP3 for several projects, I did a simple comparison with an existing application. Below [...]