Here are the articles, videos, and tools that we’ve been excited about this October

We hope you enjoy these links, and we look forward to hearing what you’ve been reading in the comments or on the Interrupt Slack.

Articles & Learning

• The Power of Firmware Metrics - Memfault Webinar by Tyler Hoffman
  I’m doing a webinar on the most important metrics to monitor on battery-powered embedded devices. It will extend on my heartbeat metrics Interrupt post.

• Understanding Arm Cortex-M Intel-Hex (ihex) files - Feabhas Sticky Bits by Niall Cooling
  A post on the Intel Hex formats that many debuggers and programmers use when flashing firmware on devices.

• Make your QEMU 10 times faster with this one weird trick - Linus’s blog by Linus Heckemann
  Nice write-up about using perf to diagnose a QEMU performance issue.

• What is io_uring?
  Didn’t know much about io_uring myself, so was happy bout finding Lord of the io_uring with a quick summary but also deeper materials

• Call Stack Logger - Function instrumentation as a way to trace program’s flow of execution - DEV Community 👩‍💻👨‍💻 by Tomasz Augustyn
  Posted in the Interrupt community, a step by step guide to logging all function calls in C++ for debugging purposes on devices that are not currently connected to a debugger.

• Arm Assembly, Reverse Engineering, Exploitation - Azeria
  some cool cheatsheets for assembly!

• GPS by Bartosz Ciechanowski
  Lots of wonderful stuff on this website, but in particular I enjoyed this description of GPS and time.

• The HTTP crash course nobody asked for by amos, fasterthanlime
  Another spectacular article from an author we’ve featured before, this time all about HTTP

Projects & Tools

• Linux source code (v4.17.19) - Bootlin
  An Elixer-based source code browser that has indexed the Zephyr, Linux, FreeRTOS, and many more code bases.

• espressif/freertos-gdb: Python module for operating with freeRTOS kernel objects in GDB
  I try to look for new GDB Pythons scripts every year or so since I really like them. This time, I came across a parsing library for FreeRTOS internal data structures that was written by the Espressif folks. I like that they allow the package to be installed normally. Note that this can be used on any FreeRTOS installation.

• pigz/try.h at master · madler/pigz
  Interesting approach to implementing try-catch in C99.

• dottspina/dtsh: Shell-like interface to DeviceTrees
  This popped up in the Zephyr #devicetree channel, still in the PoC phase. We haven’t installed to give it a test yet, but seems promising for DeviceTree debugging and learning.

• Libcamera Official Repo
  Libcamera, a new camera control library for Linux, Android, and ChromeOS, had its first release!

• rbaron/b-parasite: 🌱💧 A Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) soil moisture sensor.
  An open-source hardware and software soil moisture monitor.

• ExtremeGTX/USBWatcher: A simple GUI tool to manage USB Serial Devices
  A tool to rename USB serial ports on Windows

• stawiski/Saleae-MIPI-DSI-LP-Analyzer: Saleae logic analyzer library for MIPI DSI Low Power mode commands
  A salae plug-in for MIPI DSI LP mode. I’ve looked for this before when debugging MIPI panel bring up code!

Random

• The Matthew Test: 2022 Survey Results - Cove Mountain Software by Matthew Eshleman
  A survey was done by the team at Cove Mountain Software to compare team and company size demographics against a best practices list for firmware development. The most shocking thing here is the 52% of teams that don’t use Continuous Integration. Yikes!

• Some remotely exploitable kernel WiFi vulnerabilities [LWN.net]
  Not great! 5 hardware-independent CVEs in the Linux WiFi stack.

• Announcing KataOS and Sparrow | Google Open Source Blog
  A new embedded OS by Google written in Rust. It looks like it will be in the same class of firmware as embedded Linux.