Hello,

Welcome to the 46th 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

Y2038 in Yocto

As many desktop and server distributions are getting rid of 32bit architectures, it's not happening in the embedded space any time soon. The Yocto project supports ARM, MIPS, PPC32, x86 which are all 32bit. There are discussions and proposals on how to tackle the Y2038 problem. Y2038 problem in nutshell is an issue when UNIX time will overflow on machines storing time in 32bit integer. 64-bit time_t support has been added to kernel and glibc well in time, it's time to start enabling it for building full systems, for that a discussion on proposal to fix this in OE is happening on architecture mailing lists. We will need to enable largefile support ( LFS64 ) especially 64bit off_t as a pre-requisite for this some patches as been proposed to enable "-D_TIME_BITS=64 -D_FILE_OFFSET_BITS=64" via configuration metadata globally in TARGET_CFLAGS. This is fine however it will be beginning of fixing packages to support 64-bit time_t for a preview of what these problems can look like.

Yoe Distro 2022.11 Release

Yoe released 2022.11 monthly release. Python 3.11 needed several packages fixed which are available in this release. Nodejs, clang and rust compiler has been upgraded. Sip3 was removed because it's not portable to python 3.11 this is used in meta-qt5 package python3-pyqt5 which will not work anymore with this release.

IoT

Simple IoT release v0.6.1 release

  • fix bug in influx db client due to recent API changes
  • fix bug in client manager where Stop() hangs if Start() has already exited
  • don't allow deleting of root node
  • allow configuring of root node ID, otherwise, UUID is used
  • sync:
    • add option to configure sync period (defaults to 20s).
    • if upstream node is deleted on the upstream, it is restored
    • don't include edge points of root node in hash calculation. This allows node to be moved around in the upstream instance and other changes.

SIOT CAN Client

Collin has been working on a CAN client for Simple IoT, and a canparse library for parsing CAN Database files (KCD, etc). This is a great addition to SIOT and will allows us to use SIOT in all kinds of vehicles where CAN is prevalent.

Other

Paul Graham on Writing

This is a collection of Paul Graham's essays that address the topic of writing, and why this is such a valuable activity.

Quote for the week

Programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute. -- Abelson & Sussman, SICP, preface to the first edition

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