A quick recap

This diary is supposed to trace my personal experiences, while
reaching my goals and getting into embedded software development.

Also, I would like to get into technical details, at least for those
things that are general, and not too entangled with the intellectual
property of the company I'm working for.

In reality I'm often way too busy or tired for annotating what is
going on, so I might have missed some entries.  I will make up by
briefly listing a few achievements of the last few months.


== I worked on flash memory

In the very beginning of my career as embedded system developer, I was
assigned with the task of ensuring that security-sensitive information
can be properly erased from flash memory, and specifically of MMC/eMMC
([embedded] multi-media card).

The takeaway from it is that disk encryption is always good, even if
eMMC devices support the secure erasure of the content.  The standards
mandate vendors to expose specific knobs for secure erasure.
Unfortunately it is pretty much impossible distinguish a plain erasure
from a "secure" one, at least from software.  Everything boils down to
trust the memory vendors to do their job correctly.  I can trust
people to be in good faith, but legitimate errors also happen.
Hardware is usually closed source, thus not verifiable.

Multi-layer security is *always* a good idea.  Use disk encryption.


== I'm currently writing a device driver

It is an interesting experience.  It is not trivial, it takes a lot of
reading, but it is also extremely satisfying to see the device
responding as expected.


== I've learned a few things

I'm improving my knowledge of the GNU Debugger.

I've learned some TCL.  It is old, but still somewhat popular in this
field.  It is quite kinky too.

I'm getting more comfortable with acronyms.  As a software developer,
I tend to be disoriented by the [ab]use of acronyms, which turns out
to be typical in the hardware club.  Sometimes they're just not
meaningful at all.  For example, "IP" indicates a hardware component.
What does IP stand for? "Intellectual Property"[1].  I find this quite
ridiculous, which paradoxically makes it easy to remember.


Let's go on.


[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiconductor_intellectual_property_core

You are viewing proxied material from dacav.org. The copyright of proxied material belongs to its original authors. Any comments or complaints in relation to proxied material should be directed to the original authors of the content concerned. Please see the disclaimer for more details.