pfSense firewall boot process optimization under Xen hypervisor. Part 2
Published at December 13, 2019 · Piotr Kleinschmidt · 10 min read
In previous article we introduce our implementation of pfSense under Xen. Now, we want to show how you can improve boot process and reduce virtualized pfSense boot time to minimum....
Published at November 22, 2019 · Łukasz Wcisło · 5 min read
Web Summit 2019 - the biggest tech event in the World. Take a short brake and read about our journey and impressions....
Categories:
miscellaneous
pfSense firewall boot process optimization under Xen hypervisor. Part 1
Published at November 6, 2019 · Piotr Kleinschmidt · 5 min read
Running applications in Virtual Machines is not a trivial task. We made such pfSense firewall implementation. That article is an introduction about what we made and what actual goals we set to improve its performance....
Platform Security Summit 2019 impressions. Part 1
Published at October 22, 2019 · Piotr Król · Łukasz Wcisło · 5 min read
We are happy to announce that 3mdeb representation took part in Platform Security Summit 2019. In the next weeks we are going to briefly refer what took our attention and enclose the course of this conference....
Categories:
miscellaneous
security
How to build an Embedded Systems Consulting business?
Published at September 6, 2019 · Piotr Król · 11 min read
At some point in engineer career we may consider building our own consulting business. In following blog post I share the experience that I gained building 3mdeb Embedded Systems Consulting....
Categories:
miscellaneous
Published at August 19, 2019 · Artur Raglis · Łukasz Wcisło · 2 min read
Thrilled about what we are doing to change the world right now? Interested in the fancy stuff we make? Check out our plan for August 2019, find out more about our recent projects and stay tuned with the most sophisticated tech-team in the neighborhood....
Categories:
miscellaneous
Qubes OS and 3mdeb 'minisummit' 2019
Published at August 7, 2019 · Piotr Król · 8 min read
In May we had pleasure to meet Marek Marczykowski-Górecki #QubesOS Project Lead in 3mdeb office in Gdańsk. We discussed various #QubesOS, #Xen, #firmware, #coreboot, #security and #TPM related topics. Results of that "minisummit" was presented in following blog post....
ESP8266 - quick guide for embedded C developers
Published at July 24, 2019 · Łukasz Łaguna · 6 min read
Would you like to start the Internet of Things adventure, but you don't know exactly how? There's no better chip to play with IoT than ESP8266. If you would like to learn how to program it in C then this article is for you....
How to safely update your firmware - fwupd and LVFS to the rescue!
Published at July 11, 2019 · Artur Raglis · 7 min read
Many people come out of the mistaken belief that changing the firmware is a very complicated task and fears that they can "brick" their platform or personal computer. Others do not know where to find matching updates. There is a simple answer - meet fwupd with LVFS....
The smallest Embedded Linux System - Yocto vs Buildroot
Published at June 26, 2019 · Łukasz Łaguna · 4 min read
Fully working Linux based system below 5 MB. Is it even possible? It turns out that yes. What's more, you can get even lower values! Comparison of results obtained with Yocto and Buildroot....
Categories:
os-dev
RTE v1.1.0 - enhanced remote testing now available!
Published at June 21, 2019 · Artur Raglis · 4 min read
Get familiar with new RTE revision - what has been changed, which features are now more sophisticated and which items have been added to the RTE kit available at our online shop....
Categories:
manufacturing
miscellaneous
Hummingboard Pulse - first impression
Published at June 12, 2019 · Tomasz Żyjewski · 5 min read
In this post, we will take a look at one of the SolidRun product - the HummingBoard Pulse. After power up the board we will try to boot operating system on it....
Categories:
firmware
MuxPi - surprisingly powerful validation kit
Published at June 7, 2019 · Artur Raglis · 6 min read
Wish to start real hardware and firmware testing? This post is what you are looking for! Start your validation journey with MuxPi testing board. Easy setup, rich user interface, full remote control over Device Under Test and much more...
Categories:
manufacturing
miscellaneous
Meltdown and Spectre on PC Engines apu2
Published at May 29, 2019 · Michał Żygowski · 9 min read
As a continuation the Meltdown and Spectre blog post, this post present the vulnerability status and mitigation with microcode update on PC Engines apu2. Read the post and get to know the open source tools for vulnerability and mitigation checks, as well as exploiting proof of concepts....
Published at May 22, 2019 · Krystian Hebel · 3 min read
Recently we made sure that every build of PC Engines' firmware is built in a reproducible manner. This short post shows what exactly does it mean and why this should be important to firmware developers....
Categories:
firmware
Building and running Bareflank
Published at May 15, 2019 · Krystian Hebel · 13 min read
In this second post of a series, we will build and start our first hypervisor. It won't do much just yet, but it is good to get known with its build system....
Categories:
firmware
Published at May 8, 2019 · Łukasz Wcisło · 4 min read
RTE used to control tested devices could be used as a programmer. But RTE doesn't have SWD interface, which is crucial. We tried to walk around this using Bit Banging method....
Categories:
firmware
manufacturing
miscellaneous
5 terms every hypervisor developer should know
Published at April 30, 2019 · Krystian Hebel · 11 min read
This is the first post of a series about developing bare-metal hypervisors. It introduces to Intel's VMX technology, describes interactions between a virtual machine and a hypervisor as well as gives some insight on the control structures required. This post should give some theoretical knowledge base required for the next ones, in which we will implement a basic hypervisor....
Categories:
firmware
Published at April 24, 2019 · Łukasz Wcisło · 11 min read
OpenVizsla allows to passively monitor the communication between a USB host and USB peripheral. It is a tool for developers working with USB and especially those who are using USB in embedded designs. We have tested its possible use cases and see it is really valuable, and has a lot of potential for further development....
Categories:
miscellaneous
security
How to mitigate ROCA TPM vulnerability?
Published at April 17, 2019 · Krystian Hebel · 10 min read
ROCA vulnerability was discovered (October 2017) in a software library, RSALib, provided by Infineon Technologies. That library is also used in TPM modules. When this vulnerability is present, a pair of prime numbers used for generating RSA keys is chosen from a small subset of all available prime numbers. This results in a great loss of entropy. Details and exact numbers can be found here. UPDATE 2021-10-20: provided new link for TPM firmware updates (old one was no longer working), added info about patch for openssl-1....
Meltdown and spectre. What are they and what they are not?
Published at March 20, 2019 · Michał Żygowski · 6 min read
Meltdown and Spectre At the turn of the year 2017 and 2018, the world of security and computing has shaken. It was the time when we first heard about vulnerabilities that affect almost every modern processor (mainly x86 architecture) manufactured during the last 20 years. They have been named as Meltdown and Spectre and belong to one family of flaws caused by speculative execution. In this post, I will describe what they are and how they are threatening the users of modern machines....
Categories:
security
Yocto meta-rte is now open for everyone
Published at March 13, 2019 · Marta Szelecka · 3 min read
Yocto meta-rte is now open for everyone We are happy to announce that our 3mdeb’s Yocto meta-rte is now available on our GitHub. But let’s say briefly what the Yocto Project is and why we decided to work with it. First of all, like everything that we love the most, Yocto Project is open sourced. The project is hosted by the Linux Foundation and gives you templates, methods, and set of interoperable tools for creating OS images for embedded Linux systems....
Categories:
os-dev
Flashing eMMC on Hummingboard Edge using fastboot? part 2
Published at March 8, 2019 · Maciej Pijanowski · 11 min read
Second part of the HummingBoard Edge flashing guide with the help of fastboot tool. In this post we will get acquainted with U-Boot configuration and fastboot client and try to boot our platform from DRAM, SD card and finally EMMC....
Published at February 23, 2019 · Marta Szelecka · 2 min read
3mdeb at Embedded World 2019 We are excited to inform You that 3mdeb will take part in embedded world Exhibition & Conference - Embedded World 2019 next week! In place full of enthusiasts You can meet us personally between 26.02-28.02 in Nuremberg, Germany. Come and talk with us about amazing world of embedded systems. We will tell You not only about our work and innovations, but also share our knowledge, help and present to You our products and demos:...
Categories:
miscellaneous
How to enable Core Performance Boost on AMD platforms?
Published at February 14, 2019 · Michał Żygowski · 13 min read
Pushing hardware to its limits In the epoch of efficient and fast processors, performance becomes one of the most crucial aspects when choosing and working with hardware. We want our computers to execute their tasks with possibly highest speeds. But what really influences the performance of our platforms? It’s the processor’s manufacturer design one may say. In this post, I will show You how firmware may boost Your silicon to higher performance level....
Categories:
firmware
Quick start guide to kas - best tool for setting up the Yocto projects
Published at February 7, 2019 · Maciej Pijanowski · 8 min read
Introduction If you are using the Yocto Project, you certainly have encountered the hassle of managing multiple layers and tracking their revisions. I’ve been using the Yocto Project for nearly 3 years by now and have mostly been using the tool for this purpose. While I’m not a huge fan of it, it is relatively simple to use and gets the job of fetching layers and controlling their revisions done properly....
Categories:
os-dev
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