It’s already 2024 and we have absolutely no idea what happened to January – it’s been pretty busy so far this year. However, as we come up for air we thought it would be the perfect opportunity to look back at our highlights of 2023. We’d also like to give thanks and appreciation for our …
Xmas Charity Fundraiser 2023
This Xmas The Good Penguin is raising money for Macmillan Cancer Support, a charity that supports people living with cancer. The UK population is growing and shifting towards older ages – these two changes, combined with improvements in cancer diagnosis and treatment mean that more people will be affected by cancer and will live longer …
The Good Penguin achieves ISO 9001:2015 Certification
At The Good Penguin, customer satisfaction has always been of utmost importance to us – we know that keeping our customers happy results in long term relationships which provide mutual benefits. For our customers, they gain a reliable and trusted software partner that delivers excellent value. And for us it provides repeat business and customer …
Everything you ought to know (and more) about Yocto’s SDK and Extensible SDK (eSDK)
Yocto is so widely used because of the many benefits it provides to engineers that wish to build customised Linux distributions. However, it does have pain points. One such pain point relates to the difficulty of getting a Yocto development environment setup in the first place – this often involves using third-party tools such as …
Embedded Linux Conference 2023
At The Good Penguin we like to keep up to date with the latest developments in our community, so that’s why we sent most of our team to the Embedded Linux Conference a couple of weeks ago. This year it was hosted as part of the wider Embedded Open Source Summit and located in Prague. …
The Journey of I/O from Userspace to Device
When a Linux userspace application performs disk I/O – such as writing to an SD card, those requests go through a complex journey across multiple kernel components. These components aim to deliver optimal I/O performance whilst balancing a variety of needs such as latency and fairness. However, when things go wrong, it can be challenging …
Automated Testing with GitHub Actions, pytest and a Board Farm
When developing software it can be a real challenge to consistently deliver new features on time and without regressions. It can often feel like development gets stuck at the point of trying to get a new release out of the door with mountains of issues suddenly appearing. In an effort to improve development velocity many …
Linux Yocto layer for the ARM Morello board
We have recently developed and now maintain the meta-morello Yocto layer for ARM’s Morello board which has now became part of the official software stack. The layer is capable of providing the firmware image that goes on the SD card and a bootable image with Linux that goes on the USB stick, these two images …
Self-installing Yocto Image from a USB drive
We are all familiar with the process of installing a desktop operating system onto a PC; simply insert the installation media, typically a USB stick, and boot the device. A minimal version of the OS then runs to perform the process of partitioning discs and installing the full OS. Yocto also has the ability to …
SWUpdate, Suricatta and Unreliable Connectivity
Many product makers choose to use the open-source SWUpdate software to provide an off the shelf method of software update for their embedded devices. For internet connected devices this is typically configured in Suricatta daemon mode which allows for SWUpdate to poll for software updates from an update server such as the open-source Eclipse Hawkbit. …