As we work with larger and more complex systems (i.e. Linux), more and more of our time is spent on integration and pulling different pieces together. We often need to debug or understand code we did not write — especially in build systems. To work effectively in this scenario you must be able to quickly search through a lot of source code. Therefore, we are always looking for ways to make this more efficient.
In the previous post, it was noted that bit 30 needs to be set in the i.MX6UL pad config if you want to read the state of a GPIO output. Digging into this a bit more, we find the following text in the Documentation/devicetree/bindings/pinctrl/fsl,imx-pinctrl.txt file:
SION(1 << 30): Software Input On Field.
Force the selected mux mode input path no matter of MUX_MODE functionality. By default the input path is determined by functionality of the selected mux mode (regular).
(note, the article is also applicable to the i.MX6ULL as these processors are very similar)
The NXP i.MX6UL application processor has a very flexible pin multiplexer, that is somewhat difficult to understand at first glance. Most times when we’re configuring the pin mux in Linux, we modify Device Tree files, so perhaps that is the place to start. The pin mux options for the i.MX6UL are defined in the arch/arm/boot/dts/imx6ul-pinfunc.h file. The arguments to the macros in this file are defined as:
/* * The pin function ID is a tuple of * <mux_reg conf_reg input_reg mux_mode input_val> */
Some time back, I gave a presentation that included an overview of the Git version control system. I still occasionally get asked why Git should be used instead of Subversion, as it seems harder at first. Most developers don’t really understand Git until they have used it for awhile, and then they will have an “aha moment.” There are 3 features of Git that are especially interesting to me:
Recently I needed to calculate NAND partition tables for a project where we will be supporting a number of different flash parts from 500MB to 2GB. I first tried this in a spreadsheet, but found it difficult to work easily with hex numbers and do the calculations I needed. I then looked into options for formatting text in columns from a program and found the nice text/tabwriter Go library. With a few lines of code, I was then able to get the below output, which is quite easy to read. The only tricky part was figuring out that for right justified data, you need to:
Why Docker? When using OE to build software for products, we often run into the scenario where software needs to be built using the same version of OpenEmbedded over the course of several years. Production builds need to be predictable. We’ve also observed that old versions of OE often break as new Linux distros come out. This is just the result of the complexity of building tool chains. Additionally, for predictable builds you really don’t want to be changing the build OS. This requirement automatically rules out Arch Linux, Debian Unstable, Gentoo, etc as production build machines. Additionally, having developers debug OE build issues on varying workstation distributions is frustrating and time consuming.
Go has a pretty neat development environment, and its helpful to set up a standard GOPATH on your workstation up front. This is what I do:
Now, after you log in, you can do things like:
In the quest for technologies that work well for embedded Linux systems, I recently gave Go another try. The last time I tried this was very early on and there were some floating point issues on ARM that appear to be fixed now. Having spent a few days porting an existing application to Go, there is a lot to like about Go.
With the explosion of IOT (Internet of things), there are now more technologies we can use to build systems. In reality, we’ve been doing IOT for years. We’ve been networking devices for a long time. We’ve been collecting data from remote nodes. This is nothing new, but what the IOT movement brings to the table is technologies that are much lower cost, and more standardized. Two of these technologies are MQTT and CoAP. Both very interesting, and very useful. Recently, I helped a system manufacturer think through the architecture of a system with the following requirements:
Recently, I sent a survey to the OpenEmbedded and Yocto mail lists asking a series of questions about how they use OE. 38 people responded. The average number of years using OE is 4.8 years.