The last few weeks I've been nose to the grindstone finishing up our first Wind River product release with a new p2-based installer. It's been a while since I've been involved in commercial development and, though it's been grueling and has taken me away from my CDT project lead duties, I can see the light at the end of the tunnel and it looks like we'll be able to ship on time and with good quality, but maybe without all the bells and whistles I had hoped for when we started.
It's good to work in the corporate structure again too. If there are any decisions to be made, we have the processes and organization in place to make sure those decisions get made and that all the loose ends get tied up. It's the only way to succeed. You need that structure to make sure everyone is going in the same direction and has the same objectives.
So that got me thinking. Looking at my involvement with the CDT, I have had feedback that people looked to me as the guy to make the decisions, or at least to adjudicate any conflicts. To be the benevolent dictator at times. And we ended up getting a lot of things done over the years and everyone working on the CDT was going in the same direction. We sort of made up a structure where one didn't really exist, because we needed it to be successful.
I have big fears for e4 on that front. McQ and the IBM gang has made it clear over and over again, including on today's e4 call, that they are working on what they find important, and everyone else should do the same, or nothing will get done. And there are a few things going on. I'm leading the resources effort and we're working on things that individually are important to us and our employers. And clearly the SWT team is doing the same. But as hard as I try, I can't figure out what the UI guys are trying to accomplish. And then there are lots of things in the Eclipse Platform that no one is looking at. Debug, for example.
I firmly believe that even with open source projects, you need that benevolent dictator to actually deliver things. Where would Linux be without Linus? Where would Eclipse be without the early dictatorship of IBM? And there are countless examples. Where you see a successful open source project, you find an individual, or a small team, who make decisions and ensures everyone is working together. I get the sense that people think that's anti-open, but I can't see how a project, open or not, can succeed with out one.
Thursday, November 27, 2008
Can Eclipse Survive Without IBM?
I bet you this title got your attention...
Let me tell you a story. It's one a lot of us Eclipse "insiders" know from our trip to Ludwigsburg, Germany. If you look at the program for Eclipse Summit Europe, you'll notice a distinct lack of Eclipse Platform committers, i.e. IBMers, presenting. And one of them was lucky enough to get his travel approval the Friday afternoon before the conference. The Summit was a resounding success despite that. The Eclipse community in Europe has gone well past caring about the traditional Platform and are looking at really cool technologies like OSGi with Equinox and Modeling (despite Dave Thomas' decree that modeling sucks, which it does, at least UML-like modeling).
Now, I'm not sure if this year is any different from previous ESE's. But with the discussions we're having on the EclipseCon program committee about how many IBMers will be able to attend to give their presentations, it's got me thinking. What happens if this apparent trend continues and we loose the commitment IBM has made to Eclipse. Can Eclipse survive without IBM?
Well, I can say Wind River is doing their part to help out. We have myself and Martin O working on the Platform Resources evolution for e4. And we have Pawel who's now a Platform Debug committer. And as always, we're doing major contributions to the CDT and DSDP projects. And the numbers show the Eclipse committer community continues to grow and a lot of projects are healthy.
So can we survive without IBM? Absolutely. In fact, I'd consider the Eclipse Platform feature complete, at least for the needs of IDE and RCP/OSGi vendors. Yeah, things could be cleaned up, and yeah, we could make Eclipse work with Web 2.0 (although I really question whether SWT is the right technology for that). But from what I saw in Germany, Eclipse is alive and well. There are some really cool things that are going on and while the platforms are stabilizing and are probably becoming less interesting (and I'll sadly include the CDT in that list), I get the sense that those relying on the platforms will keep them alive. They have too.
Let me tell you a story. It's one a lot of us Eclipse "insiders" know from our trip to Ludwigsburg, Germany. If you look at the program for Eclipse Summit Europe, you'll notice a distinct lack of Eclipse Platform committers, i.e. IBMers, presenting. And one of them was lucky enough to get his travel approval the Friday afternoon before the conference. The Summit was a resounding success despite that. The Eclipse community in Europe has gone well past caring about the traditional Platform and are looking at really cool technologies like OSGi with Equinox and Modeling (despite Dave Thomas' decree that modeling sucks, which it does, at least UML-like modeling).
Now, I'm not sure if this year is any different from previous ESE's. But with the discussions we're having on the EclipseCon program committee about how many IBMers will be able to attend to give their presentations, it's got me thinking. What happens if this apparent trend continues and we loose the commitment IBM has made to Eclipse. Can Eclipse survive without IBM?
Well, I can say Wind River is doing their part to help out. We have myself and Martin O working on the Platform Resources evolution for e4. And we have Pawel who's now a Platform Debug committer. And as always, we're doing major contributions to the CDT and DSDP projects. And the numbers show the Eclipse committer community continues to grow and a lot of projects are healthy.
So can we survive without IBM? Absolutely. In fact, I'd consider the Eclipse Platform feature complete, at least for the needs of IDE and RCP/OSGi vendors. Yeah, things could be cleaned up, and yeah, we could make Eclipse work with Web 2.0 (although I really question whether SWT is the right technology for that). But from what I saw in Germany, Eclipse is alive and well. There are some really cool things that are going on and while the platforms are stabilizing and are probably becoming less interesting (and I'll sadly include the CDT in that list), I get the sense that those relying on the platforms will keep them alive. They have too.
Friday, November 21, 2008
Code Analysis and Refactoring with the CDT
For those that missed my talk at Eclipse Summit Europe, here are my slides. Unfortunately, that's pretty much all the documentation we have on this capability, as I mention in the next steps slide. The community needs to step up and help with this if we want this capability to grow.
Code Analysis and Refactoring with CDT
View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own.
Thursday, November 20, 2008
CDT at Eclipse Summit Europe
Well, the closing session is about to start and the vendors are packing up their displays. Another successful Eclipse Summit Europe is about to go off into the sunset. For me, it was proof again why I love coming to this show. The CDT community in Europe is strong and a lot of them are doing and want to do interesting things with the CDT.
The talk I gave was on the code analysis capabilities of the CDT introducing the things you can do with the CDT's parsers and indexing framework. I also introduced the new refactoring engine that we have which really opens up a lot of cool automations you can do to analyze and refactor your code. The best part is that I had a few guys come up to me after to ask about certain analysis things they wanted to do. I'm glad I gave that talk and I hope more people take a look at what the CDT has to offer in this area.
I also had a number of people ask about the CDT managed build system. This is an area in a bit of trouble right now with the CDT. One of the key developers has left and we're struggling understanding the code that he left behind. Hopefully these vendors who have concerns about the build system will join us and get us rolling again. The CDT build model can do some pretty cool things and I look forward to seeing the different build integrations people are thinking of working.
I had a discussion with someone interested in working on the Windows debug integration I have on my wish list. I've given it a couple of tries and there is a start of one in the Target Communication Framework (TCF) agent. Hopefully we can finally get this together and have full support for the Visual C++ compiler with the CDT.
Speaking of TCF, there was a lot of interest in it from various embedded system vendors. It's a really good technology for building target agents with a clean communication protocol back to Eclipse and a services oriented architecture. I've been interested in component models for C/C++ applications and I can see how this agent could use something like that. I'll have to give it some thought and see if others are interested in getting involved in that.
It's been a fun and interesting week. Hopefully I talked to everyone who wanted to talk CDT with me. And hopefully we can get some momentum off of that to continue the growth of the CDT community. Those late nights in the hotel bar with the Eclipse gang was part of that community building and I'm going to sleep well on the flight home but it was worth it.
The talk I gave was on the code analysis capabilities of the CDT introducing the things you can do with the CDT's parsers and indexing framework. I also introduced the new refactoring engine that we have which really opens up a lot of cool automations you can do to analyze and refactor your code. The best part is that I had a few guys come up to me after to ask about certain analysis things they wanted to do. I'm glad I gave that talk and I hope more people take a look at what the CDT has to offer in this area.
I also had a number of people ask about the CDT managed build system. This is an area in a bit of trouble right now with the CDT. One of the key developers has left and we're struggling understanding the code that he left behind. Hopefully these vendors who have concerns about the build system will join us and get us rolling again. The CDT build model can do some pretty cool things and I look forward to seeing the different build integrations people are thinking of working.
I had a discussion with someone interested in working on the Windows debug integration I have on my wish list. I've given it a couple of tries and there is a start of one in the Target Communication Framework (TCF) agent. Hopefully we can finally get this together and have full support for the Visual C++ compiler with the CDT.
Speaking of TCF, there was a lot of interest in it from various embedded system vendors. It's a really good technology for building target agents with a clean communication protocol back to Eclipse and a services oriented architecture. I've been interested in component models for C/C++ applications and I can see how this agent could use something like that. I'll have to give it some thought and see if others are interested in getting involved in that.
It's been a fun and interesting week. Hopefully I talked to everyone who wanted to talk CDT with me. And hopefully we can get some momentum off of that to continue the growth of the CDT community. Those late nights in the hotel bar with the Eclipse gang was part of that community building and I'm going to sleep well on the flight home but it was worth it.
Thoughts on Dave Thomas' Keynote
Ed Merks already gave a summary of Dave Thomas' keynote yesterday morning here at Eclipse Summit Europe. It was the first time I saw Dave speak and I was warned he tended to say things that offended the audience. And to Dave's point, that is kind of what a keynote speaker should do. Spark thought. Break through the assumptions that we tend to fall into when we get comfortable in our skin. And I think he raised some serious points that are making me wonder about what's really happening in our industry.
I guess his main point is that Java for embedded has missed the boat. If you haven't gone through the pain of doing Java for embedded devices, don't worry, you didn't miss anything. I've been waiting to see when I need to care about Java in this space and I've talked to some of the people here at Eclipse Summit Europe about this. I think they quietly agree with Dave. Those that have figured out how to do Java on embedded are doing OK with it. But there are a lot of issues to face. The worst of them is the bloat that the Java VM continues to grow from release to release. The embedded VMs are horribly crippled, and if you want to use the Sun VM, you are crippled from paring down that bloat. The discussion is interesting, and we may still be proven wrong, but for now, I can ignore Java for embedded and I can sleep at night.
There were some other messages from Dave that hit home as well. Programming is horribly complicated. Normal people will never be able to figure it out. Which means if you have figured it out, you're not normal, and I guess that includes me. But it is true. I've blogged a lot about this in the past. We can barely get our programs to work as it is. Wait until you're trying to program 100 threads running through your mess all at the same time. We're doomed.
But there are some things we can do to give us a chance to survive. Dave talked a bit about how the lack of a software component model is making us look like fools in the eyes of the engineering community. Can you imagine if automakers had to custom build all the components that make up a car? Imagine now if we could go to a shop and pick up high quality software components and tie them together will few lines in a script.
Now Dave was be extreme in his position. There are a number of areas where component models are being used, OSGi is an obvious one, all these "Mash-ups" are doing things like this. But coming back to embedded, we can't rely on Java to provide the solution. Dave's answer was C++ with JavaScript. And I think that's a great idea. Build components in C++ and tie them together with a scripting engine. Dave picked JavaScript, which is OK but he did mention he's working with Google on their V8 JavaScript engine. Lua is another good choice. And actually Domain Specific Languages offer solutions as well (and I'm not just saying that because I'm sitting in Rich Gronback's DSL talk right now ;).
It was really interesting to spend time with Dave Thomas in his keynote and with a group of us at the hotel bar. I could learn a lot from him. This week it was to open up my mind and challenge the assumptions. If you read this blog regularly you find that I tend to do that anyway, but it's an important reminder to keep doing that and make sure we don't make the same mistakes over and over again.
I guess his main point is that Java for embedded has missed the boat. If you haven't gone through the pain of doing Java for embedded devices, don't worry, you didn't miss anything. I've been waiting to see when I need to care about Java in this space and I've talked to some of the people here at Eclipse Summit Europe about this. I think they quietly agree with Dave. Those that have figured out how to do Java on embedded are doing OK with it. But there are a lot of issues to face. The worst of them is the bloat that the Java VM continues to grow from release to release. The embedded VMs are horribly crippled, and if you want to use the Sun VM, you are crippled from paring down that bloat. The discussion is interesting, and we may still be proven wrong, but for now, I can ignore Java for embedded and I can sleep at night.
There were some other messages from Dave that hit home as well. Programming is horribly complicated. Normal people will never be able to figure it out. Which means if you have figured it out, you're not normal, and I guess that includes me. But it is true. I've blogged a lot about this in the past. We can barely get our programs to work as it is. Wait until you're trying to program 100 threads running through your mess all at the same time. We're doomed.
But there are some things we can do to give us a chance to survive. Dave talked a bit about how the lack of a software component model is making us look like fools in the eyes of the engineering community. Can you imagine if automakers had to custom build all the components that make up a car? Imagine now if we could go to a shop and pick up high quality software components and tie them together will few lines in a script.
Now Dave was be extreme in his position. There are a number of areas where component models are being used, OSGi is an obvious one, all these "Mash-ups" are doing things like this. But coming back to embedded, we can't rely on Java to provide the solution. Dave's answer was C++ with JavaScript. And I think that's a great idea. Build components in C++ and tie them together with a scripting engine. Dave picked JavaScript, which is OK but he did mention he's working with Google on their V8 JavaScript engine. Lua is another good choice. And actually Domain Specific Languages offer solutions as well (and I'm not just saying that because I'm sitting in Rich Gronback's DSL talk right now ;).
It was really interesting to spend time with Dave Thomas in his keynote and with a group of us at the hotel bar. I could learn a lot from him. This week it was to open up my mind and challenge the assumptions. If you read this blog regularly you find that I tend to do that anyway, but it's an important reminder to keep doing that and make sure we don't make the same mistakes over and over again.
Friday, November 14, 2008
You want to see a busy mailing list?
Just check here: http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/qemu-devel/2008-11/threads.html
I was looking to see when qemu, a very cool virtual machine for many hosts and many target CPU architectures, was going to come out with a new release. As part of that, I was checking to see if it was under active development. Well, with 55 e-mails on November 13'th when I looked, I guess it is :).
I did find a conversation back in October about 0.9.2 which will likely include some new technology called TCG that will eliminate qemu's dependency on the gcc 3.x compiler. That's good news since I want to release Wascana 1.0 with the gcc 4.x compiler and I want to use Wascana 1.0 as the base IDE for my EcilpseCon tutorial on working with cross-development environments. I hope it all comes together by March.
Speaking of which, only 11 more days until submissions close for EclipseCon. Get them in early and get them in often. And soon!
I was looking to see when qemu, a very cool virtual machine for many hosts and many target CPU architectures, was going to come out with a new release. As part of that, I was checking to see if it was under active development. Well, with 55 e-mails on November 13'th when I looked, I guess it is :).
I did find a conversation back in October about 0.9.2 which will likely include some new technology called TCG that will eliminate qemu's dependency on the gcc 3.x compiler. That's good news since I want to release Wascana 1.0 with the gcc 4.x compiler and I want to use Wascana 1.0 as the base IDE for my EcilpseCon tutorial on working with cross-development environments. I hope it all comes together by March.
Speaking of which, only 11 more days until submissions close for EclipseCon. Get them in early and get them in often. And soon!
Wednesday, November 12, 2008
Now that's small.
Just ran into this article on LinuxDevices.com. It talks about a tiny computer that looks like this:
That's all there is to it. This ethernet jack has an ARM9 processor in it with 8 MB RAM, 4 MB Flash, and some interfaces that you can hook up electronic devices to. The idea is to add network connectivity to devices that normally don't, like air conditioners and stuff. Apparently there's even a WiFi version of the thing.
I found a couple of neat things about this device. First it gives you network access to pretty much anything allowing for centralized controllers to manage those things. This is probably old news to guys who work on building maintenance automation systems and stuff like that. But this device somehow made it all real for me.
The other thing to note is the memory size here. 4 MB Flash for the file system isn't very big. And neither is the 8MB RAM you run with. If anyone ever asks if C is still important, I'll just point to this thing.
And finally, I had to have a chuckle when I saw this: "the kit includes an IDE based on Eclipse 3.1.2 and CDT 3.0.2. It supports C/C++ devlopment, CVS code management, and visual debugging via Ethernet." Yet another vendor using the CDT to build cool things :).
That's all there is to it. This ethernet jack has an ARM9 processor in it with 8 MB RAM, 4 MB Flash, and some interfaces that you can hook up electronic devices to. The idea is to add network connectivity to devices that normally don't, like air conditioners and stuff. Apparently there's even a WiFi version of the thing.
I found a couple of neat things about this device. First it gives you network access to pretty much anything allowing for centralized controllers to manage those things. This is probably old news to guys who work on building maintenance automation systems and stuff like that. But this device somehow made it all real for me.
The other thing to note is the memory size here. 4 MB Flash for the file system isn't very big. And neither is the 8MB RAM you run with. If anyone ever asks if C is still important, I'll just point to this thing.
And finally, I had to have a chuckle when I saw this: "the kit includes an IDE based on Eclipse 3.1.2 and CDT 3.0.2. It supports C/C++ devlopment, CVS code management, and visual debugging via Ethernet." Yet another vendor using the CDT to build cool things :).
Tuesday, November 11, 2008
Design like you'll be there in 10 years
I probably blogged about this a long time ago. I remember watching the news conference for the landing of the Mars Spirit rover. I had watched the landing live over the web and remember the jubilation of the team members as they received the first signal alerting to the safe landing. At the news conference one of the project managers mentioned he had been working on the project for 10 years (through one previous cancellation that is, but still pretty darn good). He was beaming to see the success. And it was well deserved.
That idea entered into my book of software design philosophy: design like you'll be working on the project for 10 years. Think of the responsibility that would mean. In 10 years, you'll be paying for the short cuts and short sightedness. So don't.
Well preparing for my talk on static analysis and refactoring for Eclipse Summit Europe next week (yeah a bit of a late start, it'll be great, though), I finally have my own version of this story to tell.
6 years ago, my good colleague and friend, John and I started down the road of building a C++ parser for the CDT. My mentor at the time thought it was a crazy idea but we had a feeling that we could do it and we plowed ahead and actually got it to work. The parser allowed us to build a more accurate way of populating the Outline View (via the CModel). It then lead the way to indexing to allow for C/C++ Search and Open Declaration to work well. It was tough and we fought the performance battles for most of it, but we soldiered on.
Somewhere along the way we started dreaming of C/C++ refactoring a la JDT. Everyone thought that was a crazy idea (despite secretly wanting it too). With all the madness of the C preprocessor mucking with the source code before it gets to the parser, how could you properly create the TextEdits that the LTK (which the JDT guys generously pushed into a common plug-in, BTW), needed to do the refactoring?
Well John put in a lot of effort and forethought and created a way to map AST nodes to location objects which allowed you to unravel where all the text came from to create the node. It wasn't perfect, but it was a start. And unfortunately due to the untimely end of our funding, we never got to finish it.
Well, I finally got a deep look at the work that Emanuel and is team at the HSR Hochschule für Technik Rapperswil have done on the CDT refactoring engine and early refactorings. Following it through the debugger, I hit it, IASTNodeLocation - that work that John had started years ago but never got to see in action for what it was intended for. It's been fixed up by Emanuel and CDT Indexer Master Markus, but it was doing what we had dreamed about many years ago. Weird, but it actually brought a tear to my eye.
But it really does prove the point. Design as if you'll be working on a project for 10 years. Even if you end up not being there, someone will be, and your work will live on, and it will be much appreciated.
That idea entered into my book of software design philosophy: design like you'll be working on the project for 10 years. Think of the responsibility that would mean. In 10 years, you'll be paying for the short cuts and short sightedness. So don't.
Well preparing for my talk on static analysis and refactoring for Eclipse Summit Europe next week (yeah a bit of a late start, it'll be great, though), I finally have my own version of this story to tell.
6 years ago, my good colleague and friend, John and I started down the road of building a C++ parser for the CDT. My mentor at the time thought it was a crazy idea but we had a feeling that we could do it and we plowed ahead and actually got it to work. The parser allowed us to build a more accurate way of populating the Outline View (via the CModel). It then lead the way to indexing to allow for C/C++ Search and Open Declaration to work well. It was tough and we fought the performance battles for most of it, but we soldiered on.
Somewhere along the way we started dreaming of C/C++ refactoring a la JDT. Everyone thought that was a crazy idea (despite secretly wanting it too). With all the madness of the C preprocessor mucking with the source code before it gets to the parser, how could you properly create the TextEdits that the LTK (which the JDT guys generously pushed into a common plug-in, BTW), needed to do the refactoring?
Well John put in a lot of effort and forethought and created a way to map AST nodes to location objects which allowed you to unravel where all the text came from to create the node. It wasn't perfect, but it was a start. And unfortunately due to the untimely end of our funding, we never got to finish it.
Well, I finally got a deep look at the work that Emanuel and is team at the HSR Hochschule für Technik Rapperswil have done on the CDT refactoring engine and early refactorings. Following it through the debugger, I hit it, IASTNodeLocation - that work that John had started years ago but never got to see in action for what it was intended for. It's been fixed up by Emanuel and CDT Indexer Master Markus, but it was doing what we had dreamed about many years ago. Weird, but it actually brought a tear to my eye.
But it really does prove the point. Design as if you'll be working on a project for 10 years. Even if you end up not being there, someone will be, and your work will live on, and it will be much appreciated.
Friday, November 07, 2008
Cross Compiling Fun for EclipseCon
It's been a busy couple of weeks for me as we get our commercial Eclipse p2-based installer into product testing. It's looking good but there's always those last minute fires (i.e. bugs) to fight.
In the background I've been trying to set up an environment that will allow me to use the CDT to build Linux applications from my Windows box, and then run and debug those applications on a customized version of the Qemu emulator that is also built using the CDT. Once I get this environment together, I plan on presenting how to do it at EclipseCon as either a tutorial or long talk. It's a great demonstration on how well the CDT works for multi-platform development.
My first step was to put together a cross compiler. The gcc compiler suite is great at it, but it's not obvious how to do it on Windows. Most GNU packages are hard to build on Windows, even with the MSYS environment from the MinGW gang, or Cygwin.
I first tried with MSYS. I copied over the C library headers and libraries and then tried to build binutils to get the assembler and linker, and gcc itself for C and C++. I was generally following the instructions here. I got really close, but unfortunately I ended up with a linker error when creating the gcc compiler support library (libgcc). Grrr.
Thinking about my reference article a little more, I remembered that even the MinGW developers build MinGW on Linux. I then discovered that the Linux distribution I am using (Debian lenny) already has the MinGW cross-compiler and libraries as a package. So I installed that and I suddenly had the ability to build Windows executables on Linux. So given that, I built binutils and gcc on Linux so that it would run on Windows to build executables for Linux. Wow. That's quite a few levels of indirection. But it worked!
Now all I need to do is build a CDT integration that puts the i686-linux-gnu- prefix on gcc and puts the location of the tools in the PATH and I'm ready to build Linux apps from my Windows laptop.
I'm looking forward to showing this off at EclipseCon. It's talks like this that show practical uses of the CDT and extensions people can build for it that we really need to highlight to the community at EclipseCon. Mine is only one, we need a few more. So if you have an idea, feel free to go to the EclipseCon site and submit a proposal.
In the background I've been trying to set up an environment that will allow me to use the CDT to build Linux applications from my Windows box, and then run and debug those applications on a customized version of the Qemu emulator that is also built using the CDT. Once I get this environment together, I plan on presenting how to do it at EclipseCon as either a tutorial or long talk. It's a great demonstration on how well the CDT works for multi-platform development.
My first step was to put together a cross compiler. The gcc compiler suite is great at it, but it's not obvious how to do it on Windows. Most GNU packages are hard to build on Windows, even with the MSYS environment from the MinGW gang, or Cygwin.
I first tried with MSYS. I copied over the C library headers and libraries and then tried to build binutils to get the assembler and linker, and gcc itself for C and C++. I was generally following the instructions here. I got really close, but unfortunately I ended up with a linker error when creating the gcc compiler support library (libgcc). Grrr.
Thinking about my reference article a little more, I remembered that even the MinGW developers build MinGW on Linux. I then discovered that the Linux distribution I am using (Debian lenny) already has the MinGW cross-compiler and libraries as a package. So I installed that and I suddenly had the ability to build Windows executables on Linux. So given that, I built binutils and gcc on Linux so that it would run on Windows to build executables for Linux. Wow. That's quite a few levels of indirection. But it worked!
Now all I need to do is build a CDT integration that puts the i686-linux-gnu- prefix on gcc and puts the location of the tools in the PATH and I'm ready to build Linux apps from my Windows laptop.
I'm looking forward to showing this off at EclipseCon. It's talks like this that show practical uses of the CDT and extensions people can build for it that we really need to highlight to the community at EclipseCon. Mine is only one, we need a few more. So if you have an idea, feel free to go to the EclipseCon site and submit a proposal.
Sunday, October 26, 2008
Why a good platform can't be free
I sure am having fun thinking about OpenConsole, i.e., a Linux based set top box that plays in the same space as Microsoft and Sony and Nintendo, but is really an evolution of the Home Theater PC (HTPC) into gaming, but all using open licensing so you don't have to pay the big boys to write applications for this platform. The underlying technologies are pretty cool as I play with adding OpenGL graphics to the qemu emulator. But the business side of it is interesting as well.
In particular, my thoughts turned to multimedia support on open platforms. This is where the insistence on Linux being free is really biting the hand that feeds you. Not all good software can be free. We do live in a world of patents and a lot of the key technology that goes into a multimedia system is protected by patents and require a license to legally distribution implementations of that technology.
You know, I have no problem with that. As I've stated in the past, complex algorithms are hard to get right and multimedia is complex to get good quality results. And I don't blame the creators of this work wanting to get something out of it. If they didn't, they probably wouldn't have created it to begin with and we'd be waiting for some kind soul to donate this for free. Wishful thinking I'd think.
But you know, the costs aren't that bad. One I was looking at was the DVD format licensing. There is a company in Japan that controls this and their pricing information is here. It's about $5K for the book (under NDA), $15K for the license, then another $10K or so for verification. That's not too bad if you're selling thousands of units. But it's also not zero. And the NDA also prevents the implementation from being open source to begin with anyway.
And there are similar fees for the very popular MP3, (minimum $15K). Blu-ray is similar. And some of these are yearly fees. So as you can see, if you want to produce a multimedia platform you can redistribute, the costs are non-zero. So why do people expect these platforms to cost zero...
In particular, my thoughts turned to multimedia support on open platforms. This is where the insistence on Linux being free is really biting the hand that feeds you. Not all good software can be free. We do live in a world of patents and a lot of the key technology that goes into a multimedia system is protected by patents and require a license to legally distribution implementations of that technology.
You know, I have no problem with that. As I've stated in the past, complex algorithms are hard to get right and multimedia is complex to get good quality results. And I don't blame the creators of this work wanting to get something out of it. If they didn't, they probably wouldn't have created it to begin with and we'd be waiting for some kind soul to donate this for free. Wishful thinking I'd think.
But you know, the costs aren't that bad. One I was looking at was the DVD format licensing. There is a company in Japan that controls this and their pricing information is here. It's about $5K for the book (under NDA), $15K for the license, then another $10K or so for verification. That's not too bad if you're selling thousands of units. But it's also not zero. And the NDA also prevents the implementation from being open source to begin with anyway.
And there are similar fees for the very popular MP3, (minimum $15K). Blu-ray is similar. And some of these are yearly fees. So as you can see, if you want to produce a multimedia platform you can redistribute, the costs are non-zero. So why do people expect these platforms to cost zero...
Friday, October 24, 2008
BMW wants to go open
Ian Skerrett, our fine director of Marketing at the Eclipse Foundation, pointed out this article from MotorAuthority.com. BMW apparently is feeling out the market to see if there is an appetite by tier one manufacturers to work together on an open source stack for in-car infotainment systems.
The concept BMW has in mind reminds me a lot of Google's Android who just recently released all the source to the Android platform for cell phones. Android is Google's attempt to open up the software stack for much the same reason BMW wants it for automotive, to ensure leading edge software applications can be built for those platforms with minimal obstacles. We'll see how well the master plan works, but I like the concept.
That would be quite a twist from the current proprietary mindset that these guys have today, and I'm not sure they are ready for the co-opetition this would take. Of course, we're pretty used to it at Eclipse where platform vendors fighting in this space work together on open source tools. That's fine, since that isn't our core competency and we're building a much better IDE together than we could independently. But that's where we draw the line.
Ian concluded his blog entry by inviting BMW to the Automotive Symposium at Eclipse Summit Europe (I am looking forward to ESE as well!) But this brings up a sore point that we often talk about but one that seems impossible to solve. If they want the software stack to be completely open like Android, then they aren't doing it at Eclipse. The Eclipse Board forbids GPL code within it's walls. But I would think such a stack really could only be done on Linux and that's a non starter. You could look at Symbian which will be EPL in the next few years, but I'm not sure Symbian is the right choice for this, especially if they want to link up with Android.
And this bugs me to no end. We are seeing some serious investment happening in open source platforms, the whole platform. The culture of commercial co-operation on open platforms at Eclipse makes it a natural to host such endeavors, which in turn would raise its profile immensely in the embedded and mobile community. Too bad the Eclipse Board shoots itself in the foot on this.
The concept BMW has in mind reminds me a lot of Google's Android who just recently released all the source to the Android platform for cell phones. Android is Google's attempt to open up the software stack for much the same reason BMW wants it for automotive, to ensure leading edge software applications can be built for those platforms with minimal obstacles. We'll see how well the master plan works, but I like the concept.
That would be quite a twist from the current proprietary mindset that these guys have today, and I'm not sure they are ready for the co-opetition this would take. Of course, we're pretty used to it at Eclipse where platform vendors fighting in this space work together on open source tools. That's fine, since that isn't our core competency and we're building a much better IDE together than we could independently. But that's where we draw the line.
Ian concluded his blog entry by inviting BMW to the Automotive Symposium at Eclipse Summit Europe (I am looking forward to ESE as well!) But this brings up a sore point that we often talk about but one that seems impossible to solve. If they want the software stack to be completely open like Android, then they aren't doing it at Eclipse. The Eclipse Board forbids GPL code within it's walls. But I would think such a stack really could only be done on Linux and that's a non starter. You could look at Symbian which will be EPL in the next few years, but I'm not sure Symbian is the right choice for this, especially if they want to link up with Android.
And this bugs me to no end. We are seeing some serious investment happening in open source platforms, the whole platform. The culture of commercial co-operation on open platforms at Eclipse makes it a natural to host such endeavors, which in turn would raise its profile immensely in the embedded and mobile community. Too bad the Eclipse Board shoots itself in the foot on this.
Monday, October 20, 2008
Fun with RSE
I love my home office setup. I still have an @work office that I go to, but with an Autistic son who's home schooled, I never know when I need to work at home for a day or two so it's good to have something setup so I can continue working when I do. In the office, I have a TV which I'm using to watch the great baseball playoffs happening right now and I'll watch hockey whenever I get the chance too. And while doing that, I get to play on my laptop, like writing here in this blog.
At any rate, tonight I thought I'd try hooking together the virtual machines running in my Windows environment. One is qemu running my simulated OpenConsole thing to which I'll be adding OpenGL support. The other is VirtualBox running a desktop version running the same distro, i.e. Debian, where I'll be building the device driver and app prototypes. VirtualBox has nicer desktop control than plain qemu.
The question comes: how do I get the stuff I'm building on the dev machine to the target. I thought of NFS, which is probably the best choice, but I'd need to spend time figuring out how to set up NFS for this. Instead, I thought I'd try an Eclipse solution, the Remote System Explorer, and hook up everything using SSH.
First, I had to redirect a port on my laptop towards the qemu SSH port 22. The qemu option '-redir tcp:2222::22' did nicely there and I was able to use it to log into my qemu using PUTTY on my laptop. I also decided to forward another port, 2345 to the same port on qemu to allow gdb on my dev machine to talk to a gdbserver on the target using that port.
I then set up the SSH connection in RSE on the dev machine. I used the 'router' address so that the dev machine would connect to Windows on my laptop, which then forwarded the SSH connection to qemu. It was tricky to figure out how to set the port number to 2222 instead of 22, but I found it and it worked like a charm. I used the Terminal view to log into the qemu session from VirtualBox. Cool!
I then tried the C/C++ Remote Launch feature that uses the RSE connection to download and launch into the CDT debugger. When I first tried, the executable on the target didn't have the execute permission set, but once I fixed that, the debugger launched fine. Very cool.
Apart from being fun and interesting, this OpenConsole thing is giving me some real experience on using Eclipse tools to do embedded development with Linux and exercise all that it offers. I am very pleased with it and I think we really need to get the word out how well it does, like a Webinar or something :)
BTW, Go Rays!
At any rate, tonight I thought I'd try hooking together the virtual machines running in my Windows environment. One is qemu running my simulated OpenConsole thing to which I'll be adding OpenGL support. The other is VirtualBox running a desktop version running the same distro, i.e. Debian, where I'll be building the device driver and app prototypes. VirtualBox has nicer desktop control than plain qemu.
The question comes: how do I get the stuff I'm building on the dev machine to the target. I thought of NFS, which is probably the best choice, but I'd need to spend time figuring out how to set up NFS for this. Instead, I thought I'd try an Eclipse solution, the Remote System Explorer, and hook up everything using SSH.
First, I had to redirect a port on my laptop towards the qemu SSH port 22. The qemu option '-redir tcp:2222::22' did nicely there and I was able to use it to log into my qemu using PUTTY on my laptop. I also decided to forward another port, 2345 to the same port on qemu to allow gdb on my dev machine to talk to a gdbserver on the target using that port.
I then set up the SSH connection in RSE on the dev machine. I used the 'router' address so that the dev machine would connect to Windows on my laptop, which then forwarded the SSH connection to qemu. It was tricky to figure out how to set the port number to 2222 instead of 22, but I found it and it worked like a charm. I used the Terminal view to log into the qemu session from VirtualBox. Cool!
I then tried the C/C++ Remote Launch feature that uses the RSE connection to download and launch into the CDT debugger. When I first tried, the executable on the target didn't have the execute permission set, but once I fixed that, the debugger launched fine. Very cool.
Apart from being fun and interesting, this OpenConsole thing is giving me some real experience on using Eclipse tools to do embedded development with Linux and exercise all that it offers. I am very pleased with it and I think we really need to get the word out how well it does, like a Webinar or something :)
BTW, Go Rays!
Friday, October 17, 2008
Open Console you say
Linux powers "cloud" gaming console.
More info here.
I hate the term cloud, but this is close to the internet appliance/open gaming console I have been thinking about. Specs are damn close too. Although I'm not sure the ATI HD 3200 class graphics (I assume it's the 780G chipset) will do a good job at the games. But it's good to see someone with money came up with a similar idea and has made this concept a reality, or at least is marketing it.
Update
Looking closer to the EVO website, this thing isn't as open as I was thinking. Game developers have to sign and NDA to get the SDK. Odd. They do mention proprietary features that are only in their version of the Linux. What I had more in mind was an open distro that ran on specific hardware specs, but was truly open. Looking at the games they have listed on their web site, they are all open as well that can run on any Linux distro that has OpenGL support and drivers. You don't need to be proprietary...
More info here.
I hate the term cloud, but this is close to the internet appliance/open gaming console I have been thinking about. Specs are damn close too. Although I'm not sure the ATI HD 3200 class graphics (I assume it's the 780G chipset) will do a good job at the games. But it's good to see someone with money came up with a similar idea and has made this concept a reality, or at least is marketing it.
Update
Looking closer to the EVO website, this thing isn't as open as I was thinking. Game developers have to sign and NDA to get the SDK. Odd. They do mention proprietary features that are only in their version of the Linux. What I had more in mind was an open distro that ran on specific hardware specs, but was truly open. Looking at the games they have listed on their web site, they are all open as well that can run on any Linux distro that has OpenGL support and drivers. You don't need to be proprietary...
Windows as a host for Linux development?
Here's something I'm trying to decide as I work through the ultimate development environment for a Linux based "OpenConsole" (and to be clear, I'm talking about set top box class consoles, not mobile). As I mentioned in previous blog entries, I've figured out how to extend qemu to do OpenGL calls on the host and present a PCI interface to the guest to make those calls. All I need is a Linux driver and user space library to use that interface and present the OpenGL (or OpenGL ES) interface to applications that can do games, or what have you.
I figure Linux is a natural host development environment for the device driver. You need to reuse the kernel build system to build it and from what I understand, that build system doesn't work on Windows, not even with Cygwin. So that's a lock, and I can use the Linux version of CDT to build it.
But when it comes to applications, I am wondering how many developers would prefer to use Windows as their development host. From what I understand (again, and I keep guessing here), most game development is done on Windows, even when targeting the "closed" consoles. Actually, XBOX development is obviously done on Windows. But I believe the others have Windows hosted SDKs and tools as well.
However, as with device drivers, Linux should be an obvious choice for application development targeting Linux. This is especially true when targeting PC-type platforms since the host tool chain can actually be used to target the console, and even more true when you're actually using the same run-time lineup.
I get the feeling that there's more to life than writing your Linux targeted application. If, as the developer, you're still relying on a lot of Windows tools or you just plain prefer Windows as a work environment, you would probably want to write your application on Windows as well.
It's funny how we sometimes forget history and the fact that we abandoned our Unix environments for Windows because it had much better tools. And as I (and many others) have discussed, Linux hasn't caught up yet to make us want to go back. So I firmly believe that Windows is an expected host development environment for Linux development, especially embedded. And with the help of gcc's cross compilation abililty and the gcc support in the CDT, it's shouldn't be that hard to put together.
I figure Linux is a natural host development environment for the device driver. You need to reuse the kernel build system to build it and from what I understand, that build system doesn't work on Windows, not even with Cygwin. So that's a lock, and I can use the Linux version of CDT to build it.
But when it comes to applications, I am wondering how many developers would prefer to use Windows as their development host. From what I understand (again, and I keep guessing here), most game development is done on Windows, even when targeting the "closed" consoles. Actually, XBOX development is obviously done on Windows. But I believe the others have Windows hosted SDKs and tools as well.
However, as with device drivers, Linux should be an obvious choice for application development targeting Linux. This is especially true when targeting PC-type platforms since the host tool chain can actually be used to target the console, and even more true when you're actually using the same run-time lineup.
I get the feeling that there's more to life than writing your Linux targeted application. If, as the developer, you're still relying on a lot of Windows tools or you just plain prefer Windows as a work environment, you would probably want to write your application on Windows as well.
It's funny how we sometimes forget history and the fact that we abandoned our Unix environments for Windows because it had much better tools. And as I (and many others) have discussed, Linux hasn't caught up yet to make us want to go back. So I firmly believe that Windows is an expected host development environment for Linux development, especially embedded. And with the help of gcc's cross compilation abililty and the gcc support in the CDT, it's shouldn't be that hard to put together.
Monday, October 13, 2008
It's all about the Stack
Someone recently pointed me to a presentation that Tim Sweeney (Mr. Unreal engine) from Epic Games gave at POPL (Principles of Programming Languages) 2006. The focus of the presentation was on "The Next Mainstream Programming Language" where he discussed the challenges game developers have with performance and quality and what the next generation language needs to have to help with their problems. I truly believe game developers are at the forefront of software engineering and have the heaviest requirement set for IDEs. And that's why I'm trying to figure out how they work.
Tim's slides talk about the technologies that went into the game "Gears of War" and it's a very interesting mix. While the bulk of the code is C++, there is extensive use of scripting languages as well. And, of course, most modern games make extensive use of Shading languages to manipulate vertices and pixels using the almost teraflop class GPUs we have today. So they could really benefit from an IDE that did more than just C++ or more than just scripting while integrating shader development into the fold.
The other interesting point I got out of Tim's slides was the breadth of software libraries that they were using - DirectX for 3D graphics, OpenAL for sound, Ogg Vorbis for music, wxWidgets for 2D widgets, Zlib for compression, and the list goes on. Apparently they used a mix of 20 libraries to build Gears of War. And it only makes sense as the quality of the software components out there removes any need to build the same functionality yourself.
And I think this is another area where IDEs could improve on, integration of SDKs and automatic setup of build and indexing environments. We do a bit of that in the CDT, at least on the indexing front. And it is something we've talked about on the Build side but we've never really come up with a generic mechanism that would allow you to add SDKs to a project.
Building an IDE to help game developers be more productive would be beneficial to all users of the IDE as I think all developers run into these issues. Maybe not to the same scale but I can see how everyone would benefit from multi-language and software component management support. And, of course, I can't see a better platform to build this other than Eclipse. If we look hard, we'll see that we have lot of this already.
Tim's slides talk about the technologies that went into the game "Gears of War" and it's a very interesting mix. While the bulk of the code is C++, there is extensive use of scripting languages as well. And, of course, most modern games make extensive use of Shading languages to manipulate vertices and pixels using the almost teraflop class GPUs we have today. So they could really benefit from an IDE that did more than just C++ or more than just scripting while integrating shader development into the fold.
The other interesting point I got out of Tim's slides was the breadth of software libraries that they were using - DirectX for 3D graphics, OpenAL for sound, Ogg Vorbis for music, wxWidgets for 2D widgets, Zlib for compression, and the list goes on. Apparently they used a mix of 20 libraries to build Gears of War. And it only makes sense as the quality of the software components out there removes any need to build the same functionality yourself.
And I think this is another area where IDEs could improve on, integration of SDKs and automatic setup of build and indexing environments. We do a bit of that in the CDT, at least on the indexing front. And it is something we've talked about on the Build side but we've never really come up with a generic mechanism that would allow you to add SDKs to a project.
Building an IDE to help game developers be more productive would be beneficial to all users of the IDE as I think all developers run into these issues. Maybe not to the same scale but I can see how everyone would benefit from multi-language and software component management support. And, of course, I can't see a better platform to build this other than Eclipse. If we look hard, we'll see that we have lot of this already.
Saturday, October 11, 2008
On the Future of C++
There's been talk for a number of years now on the decline of C++ and the rise of virtual machine and scripting language. But certainly from where I sit, the C/C++ community is still very strong. In fact, I still see many more C applications than C++, especially in the Linux and embedded worlds. Though, everyone agrees, for large applications, doing them in C++ instead of C makes sense.
But I have to admit, for desktop applications, I'm not sure C++ is the right answer like it was in the 1990's. We're certainly seeing Java, with the help of Eclipse, and C# on the .Net side, take a much bigger chunk of the pie chart. And I think that's the right approach. The richness of these environments naturally enables a developer to be much more productive than in the C++ world, especially when dealing with the user via graphical interfaces. I'm pretty much ready to concede this space to those languages. Sad, but true.
But there are a few areas where I don't think C or C++ will every go away. And that's the areas where the developer has the need for speed and where they want to work close to and take advantage of the native processing hardware underneath their application. I often hear from people who would know, that modern Java VMs can actually do better than C/C++ in performance, thanks to run-time optimizations. But projects like LLVM which provides similar optimizations to native applications, may balance the scale there. And at any rate, out of the box, native applications will start with the better performance.
When your writing a high performance application, like 3D gaming, or scientific simulations, or if your working on mobile applications where you need to balance CPU cycles versus battery life, C/C++ will always be the obvious choice. There may be exceptions to the rule, and Microsoft with .Net Compact and OSGi for Java are trying to make a splash, but C/C++ will be difficult to replace.
But I have to admit, for desktop applications, I'm not sure C++ is the right answer like it was in the 1990's. We're certainly seeing Java, with the help of Eclipse, and C# on the .Net side, take a much bigger chunk of the pie chart. And I think that's the right approach. The richness of these environments naturally enables a developer to be much more productive than in the C++ world, especially when dealing with the user via graphical interfaces. I'm pretty much ready to concede this space to those languages. Sad, but true.
But there are a few areas where I don't think C or C++ will every go away. And that's the areas where the developer has the need for speed and where they want to work close to and take advantage of the native processing hardware underneath their application. I often hear from people who would know, that modern Java VMs can actually do better than C/C++ in performance, thanks to run-time optimizations. But projects like LLVM which provides similar optimizations to native applications, may balance the scale there. And at any rate, out of the box, native applications will start with the better performance.
When your writing a high performance application, like 3D gaming, or scientific simulations, or if your working on mobile applications where you need to balance CPU cycles versus battery life, C/C++ will always be the obvious choice. There may be exceptions to the rule, and Microsoft with .Net Compact and OSGi for Java are trying to make a splash, but C/C++ will be difficult to replace.
Thursday, October 09, 2008
OpenGL 3.0 or OpenGL ES 2.0?
First, I have to admit, I'm a newbie at this whole 3D programming world. I watch from a far with a lot of interest but no real experience working in that world. So I apologize ahead of time if this is a stupid question. But I know a lot of CDT users are using the CDT to work with 3D graphic APIs and game engines so I thought I'd bounce this off you.
It was interesting to watch the response to the release of the latest major version of the OpenGL spec. The reception from the game development community was especially interesting. They were furious, at least according to Slashdot. But I can see disappointment in other articles I've read. The question came up: do we declare Microsoft the victor in the OpenGL versus DirectX wars? To which I add, does this spell the end of the dream of gaming on Linux?
From what I gather, there were a couple of issues with the OpenGL 3.0 release. One, the group writing the spec disappeared behind closed doors and sprung it on the world when they were done without really getting the ordinary game developer's input. And in the end, it appears a lot of compromises were made to keep the non-game developer, the big CAD companies from what I hear, happy. So despite discussion of big architectural changes to compete with DirectX, it ends up not even worthy of the major version number.
It highlights the problem of trying to be everything for everyone and how that is impossible in many situations. Maybe the game developers need a special version of OpenGL spec'ed out just for them. If not, they're all jumping on the DirectX bandwagon and see you later.
But that got me taking another look at OpenGL ES, the OpenGL APIs reduced for embedded applications and gaining wide acceptance in the smartphone market. It was interesting to see that the Playstation 3 uses ES as one of it's available 3D APIs. And reading a few forums I've seen comments from experts who think OpenGL ES, at least the 2.0 version centralized around shaders, is OpenGL done right. The drivers are a lot easier to write and the API cuts out almost all the duplication and focuses on efficiency. It does make one think.
For the future of Linux gaming then, should we be looking to OpenGL ES? I don't know how many OpenGL experts read this blog but I'd be interested to hear your comments on this. I recently bought a book on OpenGL ES programming to see what it was all about and it started to make sense to me that maybe this is the right direction. Heck, it almost seems like Khronos's master plan...
It was interesting to watch the response to the release of the latest major version of the OpenGL spec. The reception from the game development community was especially interesting. They were furious, at least according to Slashdot. But I can see disappointment in other articles I've read. The question came up: do we declare Microsoft the victor in the OpenGL versus DirectX wars? To which I add, does this spell the end of the dream of gaming on Linux?
From what I gather, there were a couple of issues with the OpenGL 3.0 release. One, the group writing the spec disappeared behind closed doors and sprung it on the world when they were done without really getting the ordinary game developer's input. And in the end, it appears a lot of compromises were made to keep the non-game developer, the big CAD companies from what I hear, happy. So despite discussion of big architectural changes to compete with DirectX, it ends up not even worthy of the major version number.
It highlights the problem of trying to be everything for everyone and how that is impossible in many situations. Maybe the game developers need a special version of OpenGL spec'ed out just for them. If not, they're all jumping on the DirectX bandwagon and see you later.
But that got me taking another look at OpenGL ES, the OpenGL APIs reduced for embedded applications and gaining wide acceptance in the smartphone market. It was interesting to see that the Playstation 3 uses ES as one of it's available 3D APIs. And reading a few forums I've seen comments from experts who think OpenGL ES, at least the 2.0 version centralized around shaders, is OpenGL done right. The drivers are a lot easier to write and the API cuts out almost all the duplication and focuses on efficiency. It does make one think.
For the future of Linux gaming then, should we be looking to OpenGL ES? I don't know how many OpenGL experts read this blog but I'd be interested to hear your comments on this. I recently bought a book on OpenGL ES programming to see what it was all about and it started to make sense to me that maybe this is the right direction. Heck, it almost seems like Khronos's master plan...
Sunday, October 05, 2008
What would I do without CDT
While waiting for my VOBs to sync from Salburg to Ottawa, I thought I'd poke around qemu to figure out exactly what I would need to do to add a PCI device. Apparently, there's very little, if any, documentation on how to do that. And I even saw one response to a similar query that told the guy to go look at the source. So I did.
I started by grabing the source for the latest qemu release 0.9.1. I created a CDT Makefile project and untared the release into the project directory. I created an External Tool to run configure with the options I wanted and then I did a project build which ran the resulting makefiles. So far so good. Looking at the Includes folder on the project, I see it caught the mingw gcc standard headers as well as my project as an include path.
So off I went. First I looked for things beginning with pc_ in the Open Element dialog (Shift-Ctrl-t). There I found the pc init code and went looking there for PCI devices. I found the LSI SCSI device init and hit F3 to go look at the implementation. There I started seeing some generic PCI type things. To see what other PCI devices I could look at, I selected the call to register a PCI I/O region and did a search for references. In the Search results view I quickly saw other PCI devices - VGA displays, the IDE device, some networking things, USB. All good examples.
It wasn't long before I figured out what I needed to do. It got me thinking. How did I ever do this before the CDT and how are the poor guys still stuck in the command line world doing stuff like this. I guess I used to do the same thing but used grep which does simple text searches. But there's no way I could do the same navigation with the same speed. And things like Alt left and right arrow to go back and forth along my path doesn't happen in that environment.
No, CDT rocks. I hear a lot lately about how there are still many people hesitant to leave the safety and comfort of the command line world. I think that's too bad. They're missing out on some real productivity gains.
I started by grabing the source for the latest qemu release 0.9.1. I created a CDT Makefile project and untared the release into the project directory. I created an External Tool to run configure with the options I wanted and then I did a project build which ran the resulting makefiles. So far so good. Looking at the Includes folder on the project, I see it caught the mingw gcc standard headers as well as my project as an include path.
So off I went. First I looked for things beginning with pc_ in the Open Element dialog (Shift-Ctrl-t). There I found the pc init code and went looking there for PCI devices. I found the LSI SCSI device init and hit F3 to go look at the implementation. There I started seeing some generic PCI type things. To see what other PCI devices I could look at, I selected the call to register a PCI I/O region and did a search for references. In the Search results view I quickly saw other PCI devices - VGA displays, the IDE device, some networking things, USB. All good examples.
It wasn't long before I figured out what I needed to do. It got me thinking. How did I ever do this before the CDT and how are the poor guys still stuck in the command line world doing stuff like this. I guess I used to do the same thing but used grep which does simple text searches. But there's no way I could do the same navigation with the same speed. And things like Alt left and right arrow to go back and forth along my path doesn't happen in that environment.
No, CDT rocks. I hear a lot lately about how there are still many people hesitant to leave the safety and comfort of the command line world. I think that's too bad. They're missing out on some real productivity gains.
Saturday, October 04, 2008
QEMU Manager
Shh, I'm supposed to be working, don't tell my boss ;)
I wrote in a previous entry about the VirtualBox SDK, and the potential for using that SDK to add 3d graphics support. I was pretty excited. All I needed to do was create a DLL that could be loaded into the VirtualBox I used for running Linux on my Windows laptop. Well, I tried a simple example, but could never get the DLL to load. Looking at the source code for VirtualBox, I noticed that there's a "hardened" mode for building it. For security, it prevents rogue DLLs from getting loaded. I guess my DLL looked pretty rogue :(. And the complexity of building VirtualBox myself scared me off.
I've also been a pretty big fan of the Qemu emulator, especially for emulating mobile devices. But you can use it for emulating a PC and there is an accelerator driver that apparently makes it fast. So I guess I could give that a try. I've mucked around in the qemu source in the past and I have an idea on how to add a device. It's not as clean as the VirtualBox SDK promised, but it could be done.
Along the way, I found Qemu Manager, a nice GUI that manages virtual machines and launching them on Windows. Very cool. And it's extensible so that if a new version, or a cleverly hacked version, of qemu comes out, you can have it manage launches for them as well.
So this weeks "Open Source Tools Kudos" go to David Reynolds for building the Qemu Manager. Very cool and thanks!
I wrote in a previous entry about the VirtualBox SDK, and the potential for using that SDK to add 3d graphics support. I was pretty excited. All I needed to do was create a DLL that could be loaded into the VirtualBox I used for running Linux on my Windows laptop. Well, I tried a simple example, but could never get the DLL to load. Looking at the source code for VirtualBox, I noticed that there's a "hardened" mode for building it. For security, it prevents rogue DLLs from getting loaded. I guess my DLL looked pretty rogue :(. And the complexity of building VirtualBox myself scared me off.
I've also been a pretty big fan of the Qemu emulator, especially for emulating mobile devices. But you can use it for emulating a PC and there is an accelerator driver that apparently makes it fast. So I guess I could give that a try. I've mucked around in the qemu source in the past and I have an idea on how to add a device. It's not as clean as the VirtualBox SDK promised, but it could be done.
Along the way, I found Qemu Manager, a nice GUI that manages virtual machines and launching them on Windows. Very cool. And it's extensible so that if a new version, or a cleverly hacked version, of qemu comes out, you can have it manage launches for them as well.
So this weeks "Open Source Tools Kudos" go to David Reynolds for building the Qemu Manager. Very cool and thanks!
Friday, October 03, 2008
Another Awesome CDT Summit
I just realize I haven't blogged about our CDT Summit last week. Shame on me, because it was a great three days. It was smaller than previous summits, only 16 people. But this time, we didn't have the guys there that were just lurking in person. Everyone was there representing real Eclipse contributions. So we ended up getting a lot of real work done.
We started on the first day by updating eachother on what we were planning for the next release, Galileo, which we determined by the end of the week will be CDT 6.0. It's much more of a marketing number since I don't anticipate huge API changes, but there will be some, especially in the build area.
We then talked a lot about development process and how we can improve the way we work on the CDT. It's a challenge since many of us are only part time on the CDT. But we all agreed that becoming more formal in the way we do things is necessary and we have plans on doing just that.
The next day we broke up into two groups to do some deep dives into specific areas. One group dove deep into indexer issues. They talked a lot about some of the tougher areas that the CDT index and parsing technologies need to deal with, like C++ templates. The biggest new thing from them was discussion on how to represent inactive code, i.e. code that is ifdef'ed out given the current configuration. They settled on starting with doing so in the Outline View at least. Any more is a research activity.
The other group talked about debug. The biggest move there is the integration of the Debug Service Framework from the Device Debugging project into the CDT. I anticipate DSF will be the future standard debugger integration point for the CDT, and maybe even for the Platform. At the same time we will continue to support our existing CDT Debugging Interface (CDI) integrators. I'm also excited about the potential disassembly debugging editor that should hopefully make it easier to look at the object code being debugged.
On the last day we talked about e4 resources and the start of my straw man proposal I have put together. We also talked about the CDT build system, and in particular, the CDT project model that serves as the common model for them all. We've unfortunately lost the main developer of this work before it finished and we need to take another look at it and hopefully simplify it. It's a good lesson that you shouldn't be hands off if you totally depend on an open source component. The people working on that component may vanish and you have no way of getting fixes in.
I really wasn't sure what to expect from this year's summit. In many ways, the CDT is feature complete. And the plan will show that. But we still have a lot of usability and quality issues to address and the team is committed to focusing on that this year. And that will help solidify the CDT's place on the developers desktop. And that was exemplified by Red Hat's presence there. They are committed to making Eclipse the Visual Studio for Linux development. And that's a good place to be.
We started on the first day by updating eachother on what we were planning for the next release, Galileo, which we determined by the end of the week will be CDT 6.0. It's much more of a marketing number since I don't anticipate huge API changes, but there will be some, especially in the build area.
We then talked a lot about development process and how we can improve the way we work on the CDT. It's a challenge since many of us are only part time on the CDT. But we all agreed that becoming more formal in the way we do things is necessary and we have plans on doing just that.
The next day we broke up into two groups to do some deep dives into specific areas. One group dove deep into indexer issues. They talked a lot about some of the tougher areas that the CDT index and parsing technologies need to deal with, like C++ templates. The biggest new thing from them was discussion on how to represent inactive code, i.e. code that is ifdef'ed out given the current configuration. They settled on starting with doing so in the Outline View at least. Any more is a research activity.
The other group talked about debug. The biggest move there is the integration of the Debug Service Framework from the Device Debugging project into the CDT. I anticipate DSF will be the future standard debugger integration point for the CDT, and maybe even for the Platform. At the same time we will continue to support our existing CDT Debugging Interface (CDI) integrators. I'm also excited about the potential disassembly debugging editor that should hopefully make it easier to look at the object code being debugged.
On the last day we talked about e4 resources and the start of my straw man proposal I have put together. We also talked about the CDT build system, and in particular, the CDT project model that serves as the common model for them all. We've unfortunately lost the main developer of this work before it finished and we need to take another look at it and hopefully simplify it. It's a good lesson that you shouldn't be hands off if you totally depend on an open source component. The people working on that component may vanish and you have no way of getting fixes in.
I really wasn't sure what to expect from this year's summit. In many ways, the CDT is feature complete. And the plan will show that. But we still have a lot of usability and quality issues to address and the team is committed to focusing on that this year. And that will help solidify the CDT's place on the developers desktop. And that was exemplified by Red Hat's presence there. They are committed to making Eclipse the Visual Studio for Linux development. And that's a good place to be.
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