Hello,

Welcome to the 44th issue of TMPDIR, a weekly newsletter covering Embedded Linux, IoT systems, and technology in general. Subscribe to future issues at https://tinyletter.com/tmpdir and pass it on to anyone else you think might be interested. Please send any tips or feedback to info@tmpdir.org.

Thanks for reading!

Khem and Cliff

Linux

Yocto 4.1 (langdale) Released

The Yocto project released version 4.1 (October release), it is tested against 5.19 kernel, glibc 2.36, key recipes among 250 odd recipe updates, rust compiler and infrastructure supports building target rust, rust SDKs and crate fetcher supports externalsrc, which should help developers. Initial new layer setup tooling has been added which can help in setting up workspace.

CPU, I/O and memory pressure regulation is added in bitbake, which should help in adjusting system load during builds and avoid overloading the system which can cause random build failure due to build pressure.

IoT

XOR Hash Algorithm

In SimpleIoT we are continuing to explore hashing algorithms. The XOR operation has some interesting proprieties:

  • Commutative: A ⊕ B = B ⊕ A (the ability to process elements in any order and get the same answer)
  • Associative: A ⊕ (B ⊕ C) = (A ⊕ B) ⊕ C (we can group operations in any order)
  • Identity: A ⊕ 0 = A
  • Self-Inverse: A ⊕ A = 0 (we can back out an input value by simply applying it again)

An XOR hash is being used in the upstream syncing algorithm. This big advantage to this hash algorithm is that it can be applied incrementally instead of recalculating the hash from scratch every time there is an update, so it is blazing fast.

Implementation is in process and should be finished soon.

SIOT releases

A handful of minor releases which include cleanup of SIOT main.go, switch to go-embed for embedded assets, etc. Now it's possible to do: go run github.com/simpleiot/simpleiot/cmd/siot@latest

Other

The problem with Threads

Many modern languages and language runtimes have started to include concurrency as standard primitive making it part of the language. A typical example is the Go language which implements the concurrency primitives in the Go runtime and provides features like channels/goroutines which releases the developers of the cognitive load of thinking in terms of threads. This enables writing complex concurrent programs without many of the pitfalls traditional threading approaches have.

Quote for the week

Perfection is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but rather when there is nothing more to take away. – Antoine de Saint-Exupery

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