Infrastructure for Xen development and debugging

Published at July 4, 2022 ·  5 min read

Back in 2018 at OSFC, we've presented AMD IOMMU enabling for PC Engines apuX (GX-412TC) platforms. Our hypervisor of choice was Xen and we used it to verify the PCI pass-through feature. Unfortunately, the booting process was not exactly stable. In this article, you can check how to prepare infrastructure for Xen development and debugging...

Categories: firmware os-dev security

Open Compute Open System Firmware (OCP OSF) and its' importance

Published at June 10, 2021 ·  6 min read

Let's figure out what is OCP Open System Firmware, see how it relates to the Open Source Firmware (OSF) - and why it is important for your company to have one running on your product....

Categories: firmware miscellaneous

Thoughts around OSFC 2020 – day 1

Published at December 21, 2020 ·  6 min read

Lets share some thoughts that evolved during the OSFC 2020 talks and send kudos to many people who made this conference happen....

Categories: firmware security

GRUB2 and 3mdeb minisummit 2019

Published at February 19, 2020 ·  7 min read

In December 2019 we had pleasure to meet Daniel Kiper #GRUB2 maintanaer in 3mdeb office in Gdańsk. We dicussed various #GRUB2, #Xen, #firmware, #coreboot, #security and #TPM related topics. Results of that "minisummit" was presented in following blog post in form of presentations and videos....

Categories: firmware os-dev security

Platform Security Summit 2019 impressions. Part 1

Published at October 22, 2019 ·  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 ·  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

Qubes OS and 3mdeb 'minisummit' 2019

Published at August 7, 2019 ·  8 min read

In May we had pleasure to meet Marek Marczykowski-Górecki #QubesOS Project Lead in 3mdeb office in Gdańsk. We dicussed various #QubesOS, #Xen, #firmware, #coreboot, #security and #TPM related topics. Results of that "minisummit" was presented in following blog post....

Categories: firmware os-dev security

RTE for automated kernel deployment and everyday use

Published at October 3, 2018 ·  9 min read

We continue our effort to enable IOMMU and as side effect I have to play with various technologies to exercise reliable development environment which base on RTE. In this blog post I would like to present semi-automated technique to debug firmware, Xen and Linux kernel. The goal is to have set of tools that help in enabling various features in Debian-based dom0. We would like: update Linux kernel which is exposed over HTTP server update rootfs provided through NFS I will use following components:...

Categories: firmware os-dev

Optimize performance in Docker containers used by Embedded Systems Consulting business

Published at September 27, 2018 ·  11 min read

In 3mdeb we use Docker heavily. Main tasks that we perform using it are: firmware and embedded software building - each software in Embedded System requires little bit different building environment, configuring those development environments on your host may quickly make a mess in your system for daily use, because of that we created various containers which I enumerate below trainings/workshops - when we perform trainings we don’t want to waste time for users to reconfigure the environment....

Categories: firmware miscellaneous

Xen HVM guests on PC Engines apu2

Published at August 16, 2018 ·  15 min read

Continuing blog post series around Xen and IOMMU enabling in coreboot we are reaching a point in which some features seem to work correctly on top of recent patch series in firmware. What we can do at this point is PCI passthrough to guest VMs. Previously trying that on Xen caused problems: random hangs firmware cause Linux kernel booting issues (hang during boot) IOMMU disabled - unable to use PCI passthrough Now we can see something like that in dom0:...

Categories: firmware os-dev