Embedded Linux Workshop

About two weeks back, I went to embedded Linux workshop. The workshop was basically split into two sessions, one is the theory and programming part (2 days) lead by Dr. B. Thangaraju, CEO Wipro Technologies, India, and the other was the hands on part on an embedded box (2 days) led by Mr. Yutaka Niibe, Free Software Initiative Japan(FSIJ) President. Basically, the whole 4 days was an enlightening experience. I never thought I could learn so much, but I did. Among the topics that we discussed and learned are:


Day 1 & Day 2:

• Signals and signal handling
• Processes (orphan, zombie, and daemon) and of course forking
• Memory Management
• POSIX Threads
  
• IPC (Interprocess Communication) which includes:
• Communication Via Files
• Pipes
• System V IPC
• Message Queues
• Shared Memory(shm)
• and Semaphores

Day 3 & Day 4:

• Opening the Kurobox and understanding whats on the board
• Understand the OS that runs on the Kurobox and the services runned
• Understand the booting process by an open source bootloader (Das U-Boot)
• Understand the use of Busybox, a light weight linux command utilities for embedded boxes
  
• Building our own, Arms kernel from scratch, bootstrapping and cross compile
• Loading the image into the embedded box
  
• Implementing modules to work with IO ports, for example to drive a servo motor
  

I did take some pictures to capture this memorable events.
Here is a picture of my first embedded kernel loading,.....JORILBOX, which stands for Joey and Azrel (my lab partner).



And here is my embedded box driving a servo motor, i would really like to try to build my robot now, embedded linux robot, that would be cool.


And here is the remaining few people, we started of about 12 people, by the end of day 4, only this few remained.


I did try to include the gory details of this worshop, but it would be too geeky here and I thought some of the readers might find it too boring since this blog is mostly social stuff, so if you would like to get your hands dirty with some coding stuff on embedded and kernel programming, i am slowly trying to document it and putting it in http://debianmalaysia.blogspot.com. I feel the readers there would be more interested in the gory details.....if you are a geek, go to debianmalaysia......and check out my post....on signals and signal handling