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Bottom Line Up Front​

I've developed conventions to reuse partial Dockerfiles to construct complete Dockerfiles for creating Docker images. These Dockerfile fragments can be dynamically manipulated and aggregated to allow for building of diverse sets of Docker images that are nothing more than loosely coupled and highly cohesive partitions of system configuration.

Overview​

When attempting to run through some exercises for a previous article I ran into an issue where I couldn't get dropbear to work until some undeterministic time in the future. At first glance, this was an extremely mysterious issue that had me digging in google results that were over at least 10 years old. (And with no apparent solution.)

Overview​

When learning embedded development, its a good prerequisite to really understand how software is assembled and behaves during execution. I'm not talking about knowing the behavior of if, when, goto, and other high level constructs. When learning how software behaves you should understand the expectations of the instruction set you are using, such as:

  • Is memory partitioned between code and data?
  • Does the stack grow towards zero or does it grow up?
  • What is the bit size of the address bus?
  • What is the bit size of the general purpose registers?

Overview​

For several reasons I have a need for a simple/minimal system that can be used in an existing userspace or as its own userspace. Usually I would jump to tools like buildroot or openwrt for such things. I've used buildroot several times in my other articles for building cross toolchains, rootfs environments, and kernels for several use cases. Instead of going with an end-all-be-all solution like buildroot, I'd like to take a more simple approach that leans more on the tools readily available by the Ubuntu/Debian distribution.

The Problem​

I recently ran into an issue where my Raspberry Pi file share server fell over because of hardware currosion due to some unfortunate moisture exposure. In response, I had planned to replace the file share server with a Mac Mini that was available until I could get a replacement RPi. The service is basically SFTP and the users are responsible for having SFTP clients that meet their needs.

For years now I've always found process to be a facinating area of software engineering. But please don't misunderstand my meaning ... most processes in my experience not only feel painful to the individual contributors but also seem wastful to the overall organization.

Overview​

By far, the most common use case for a toolchains (compiler, assembler, linker) is for building applications that run on top of an Operating System. A lesser used use case, but still common is to use toolchains for building drivers or modules for the Operating System. What I can only assume is one of the more rare uses cases is using the toolchain to build firmwares that do not have an Operating System. This has become abundantly apparent to me while exploring the possibilities of building firmwares outside of the GNU ecosystem. (Note: I'm focusing on big toolchain suites like LLVM, GNU, and MSVC. I'm aware of other tools like Keil and other proprietary toolchains.)

Situation​

Its a common pattern to store user authentication tokens in a user's home directory. This way we can login to a service that has a command line interface without having to enter credentials each time we use the command. The one service I know that has done this for me for decades is Subversion. Recently, I've also been logging into services like Firebase, Google Cloud Engine, and Expo.io. All of these services store their user authentication tokens in the user's home directory.