Mentor Blogs

The increasing complexity of cars has taught automakers the value of cooperating with competitors on technology that customers won’t see and don’t care about but would be prohibitively expensive for a single automaker to develop in-house. Automakers and suppliers formed the GENIVI Alliance, for example, to create an open source (Linux-based) development platform for in-vehicle infotainment, facilitating … Read More

Jaguar Land Rover, intel, Genivi Alliance, Visteon, Microltron, MontaVista Software, QNX, Linux, Android, PSA Peugeot Citroën, in-vehicle infotainment, Magneti Marelli, Mentor Graphics, XS Embedded, Renault, Delphi, Microsoft, ARM

Although readers in the US may think that it is a holiday today – and I hope you have a good one – it is just another regular Monday in Europe. Actually, as the Americans are celebrating getting rid of the Brits, maybe we should join in. I am traveling today to an ARM Development Conference in Stuttgart, Germany, which I am sure will be an interesting event. I actually find it curious that … Read More

ARM, MCAPI

Last week I attended the ARM Technical Conference in Santa Clara, California. I am not sure how many years this event has been running, but it seems to be going from strength to strength. There was a change to the management company this year, but the event format was basically the same: a 3 day multiple-stream technical conference, with a selection of keynotes and an associated exhibition area. Obviously, … Read More

Low Power, User Interface, MCAPI, ARM, Multicore, Android

ARM Ltd recently unveiled the virtualization capabilities in ARMv7-A, and they are impressive. Taking a step back though, here’s what impresses me the most: these guys jumped in with both feet. Consider for a moment the very measured approach Intel took with their virtualization extensions to the x86 architecture. They started by adding privilege modes beyond the traditional “ring” model. A later implementation … Read More

Virtualization, ARM

It’s nice to see that some groups can work together for the common good. I’m thinking of the companies participating in the GENIVI Alliance. BMW, Delphi, General Motors, Intel, Magneti Marelli, PSA Peugeot Citroën, Visteon, and Wind River formed the Alliance a year ago to create an open source in-vehicle infotainment (IVI) reference platform. The initial version of the platform was released just nine … Read More

Magneti Marelli, PSA Peugeot Citroën, Delphi, ARM, Visteon, Graham Smethurst, Will Tu, in-vehicle infotainment, General Motors, Wind River, Genivi Alliance

They say one of the first steps to fixing a problem is to acknowledge that you have one. Hi, I’m Russ, and I have a porting problem. If you work on software in the embedded world, you probably have a porting problem, too. Your code may be an embedded application, drivers, or diagnostics, but at some point the code probably started out on a desktop machine of some sort. When you moved it to run on … Read More

Debug, ARM

You know you shouldn’t, but you do. I do. We all do. Though we don’t like to admit it. Yes, I use print statements to debug my code. And I work on debug tools for programmers and hardware engineers. I guess that makes me even guiltier. Despite having a plethora of debugging tools and scripting languages, I’ll admit it - one of the first things I do to try to get a handle on a bug is to throw in a … Read More

Debug, ARM