Like many of you I keep mirrors of my projects on a small VPS —
partly as insurance, GitHub is lovely until it isn’t, and partly
because I like having my own corner of the web. For years gitweb
did the honors, showing its age but doing the job. When I went
looking for something nicer I found legit, which looks great —
but on my single-core droplet it pegged the CPU just rendering a
repo page. Add the AI scraper herds that graze on every public git
frontend these days, and the poor machine never had a quiet moment.
Well, this has been quiet for a while. Not because I stopped tinkering
— quite the opposite. Almost all of my time these days goes into Infix
OS, a Linux-based network operating system by Wires. The OS is
maintained under an independent organization, KernelKit, where I blog a
lot — so check out the KernelKit blog.
In my Reminder to Self series, this week we turn to some tricks I learned while porting U-Boot to a new board. First, a few tools:
vbindiff: Linux tool to examine, e.g., flash.bin binwalk: Linux tool to examine an unknown binary file bdinfo: U-Boot command to list board info When poking through such binaries, the FDT (flattened device tree) header magic to look for is 0xd00dfeed.
Huge props to wkz for all the help and sparring, cheers!
Here are a few Buildroot tricks I use to develop and test my packages. This post will likely evolve over the years to come.
For the basics, please see my post Buildroot Development Checklist. It covers how to use the check-package and test-pkg tools shipped with Buildroot.
Tip: if stuck, always check the Buildroot documentation!
introduction I often need to rebuild from scratch to verify fundamental changes to the structure of my embedded systems.
Very brief intro to building GNU Emacs from GIT, with GCC JIT enabled to greatly speed up our favorite editor, GNU Emacs!
Perquisites You need a lot of development packages installed to check out and build Emacs. How to install these are outside the scope of this blog post. The output of the configure script and some intuition is usually sufficient. On Debian, Ubuntu, or Linux Mint, systems at least the following is needed:
Daniel Lipovetsky’s Typometer results.
Ever since I first learned about Terminator I’ve been a huge fan! It’s a great replacement for the standard Gnome terminal with its built-in support for horizontal and vertical splits.
It’s not a race car though … like Gnome terminal it’s built around libvte. So on a bad day of clashing with Ubuntu, GDM, systemd and the new handling of capabilities, two of my colleagues went all-in on Alacritty and now swear by it!
Finit is an alternative to SysV init and systemd, originally reverse engineered from the EeePC fastinit by Claudio Matsuoka — “gaps filled with frog DNA …”
Latest release available on GitHub
Features Runlevels, defined per service One-shot tasks, services (daemons), or SysV init start/stop scripts Runparts and /etc/rc.local support Process supervision similar to systemd Sourcing environment files Conditions for network/process/custom dependencies Pre/Post script actions Tooling to enable/disable services Optional built-in getty Optional built-in watchdog, with support for hand-over to watchdogd Built-in support for Debian/BusyBox /etc/network/interfaces, automatically calls ifup/ifdown Cgroups v2, both configuration and monitoring in initctl top Plugin support for customization Proper rescue mode with bundled sulogin for protected maintenance shell (optional) Blog Posts Some of these feature are presented below, for more, see the online documentation and the following blog posts:
This post shows how you can extend Finit with your own conditions. The
example we will use is a simple Internet connectivity checker. When it
triggers we start BusyBox ntpd which, if started with any other type of
condition (none, default route, etc.) may get stuck trying to resolve
pool.ntp.org.
I believe there is a gap in the market between BusyBox init and
systemd. In particular in the embedded space. This blog post shows how
easily it is to get up and running quickly with FastInit (Finit)!
I’m a really bad salesman, and an even worse writer, so instead of
trying to convince you with my poor English, I’ve made a demo. It is a
Buildroot external
that can be used to add Finit to your own projects.
