Access windows share in Fedora 15

Needing an RPM based distro, I fired up Fedora on a VM. I was never a fan of Fedora and 15 felt right at home – half baked cutting edge features shoved into your face, leaving you struggling to find the equivalent of even the basic interaction. Still, I needed to connect to windows shares on a FreeNAS and google was of little to no help. Here’s what worked for me.

lpicp, the embedded Linux PIC programmer

This is probably not what you think it is. It is not an application that controls ICD2, PicKit2 or any form of custom LPT PIC programmer for a PC (you can use MPLAB X for that). What lpicp does is provide a user space application and kernel driver to perform the functionality of a PIC programmer on embedded systems running Linux.

Implementation notes for Embedded Linux

This post hosts a few blurbs about issues I ran into when developing for Embedded Linux and did not find decent documentation on google. It will update as I plow through more stuff.

Implementing a preemptive kernel within a single Windows thread

About three years ago I developed a real-time operating system aimed at the new generation of 32 bit microcontrollers. Seeing how I am a devotee of developing/testing embedded software on a PC and only then porting/testing to the target, one of my goals was to get a working simulation environment under Windows. I had thought at the time that I would have a lot of reference, seeing how most real-time operating systems (FreeRTOS, for example) have Windows ports. To my surprise no port implemented true preemption, instead opting for simply wrapping the Windows API with the equivalent RTOS API (for example, creating an RTOS thread would call Windows’ CreateThread).

Getting egress interface by destination IP in VxWorks 5.x

Here’s a small code snippet that may be useful to the 20 or so VxWorks programmers left on the planet. I thought this would be much easier than it turned out to be, but after gathering code examples from here and there in the VxWorks source tree, I was able to query the routing table as to which interface is used for a certain egress IP address.

VxWorks 5.x doesn’t really have a “user” and “kernel” space, so you’re kind of inclined to directly access the routing table (like how routeShow does it) should you need routing information. Looking at the code for rtalloc, rtalloc1 and ipRouteGet shows that this is a recipe for pain.