Hello,

Welcome to the 47th issue of TMPDIR Weekly, a newsletter covering Embedded Linux, IoT systems, and technology in general. Please pass it on to anyone else you think might be interested and send any tips or feedback to our forum or news@tmpdir.org.

Subscribe Here Welcome to the 47th issue of

Thanks for reading!

Khem and Cliff

Linux

Yocto Vs Ubuntu Core

This whitepaper discusses use cases of Embedded Linux, especially if developers should build their own custom embedded Linux distributions using build infrastructures like Yocto project or rely on commercial-supported Ubuntu-core, the paper does not consider that there are a number of commercially well-supported distributions based on the Yocto project e.g. WindRiver Linux, Montavista Linux, Mentor Graphics Linux, (and of course the Yoe Distribution to name a few -- for details see Operating System Vendors section. Criticisms that the article draws about Yocto project are fair. This paper also means that there are things that the Yocto project is doing right.

Using unsigned char defaults in Linux Kernel

A patchset has been proposed to switch the default char type to be unsigned char in the kernel via using -funsigned-char compiler option explicitly via kbuild. C standards do not mandate the defaults and leave it to architectures to decide and sure enough, there are differences e.g. for ARM/PPC default char is unsigned type, but for x86 it is signed. This change will cause some churn in codebase since as said in the commit message it will fix some bugs but uncover some at the same time. I think a better fix would have been to not use naked-char type and qualify it with unsigned/signed as needed since this would have made it readable at the same time independent of architecture.

IoT

Simple IoT v0.6.2 release

• moved the node type from node point to edge field. This allows us to index this and make queries that search the node tree more efficient.
• support for processing clients in groups. Previously, client nodes had to be a child of the root device node.
• fix issue with siot log due to previous NATS API change

The store and sync code is hopefully nearing production quality. At this point, most of the know issues have been worked through.

Simple IoT v0.7.0 release -- CAN bus support

• add CAN bus client
• add File node (can be used to upload and store file data)

SIOT can now help make your vehicle application development easier.

Other

Go for IIoT Systems

This article explains the many benefits of using Go for IIoT systems and is based on our experience in multiple projects over the past 6 years.

Quote for the week

The better you become at writing, the more the world conspires to prevent you from writing. -- Ryan Holiday

(I think this probably holds true for many things ...)

Thoughts, feedback? Let us know: info@tmpdir.org.

Join our Discourse forum to discuss these or new topics. Find past issues of TMPDIR here. Listen to previous podcasts at https://tmpdir.org/.