Mind has put its new website online. The new site has been totally redesigned to provide the users with an improved navigation experience and a comprehensive overview of Mind's expertise and range of services. Visitors to the site will also find a more modern and sophisticated layout, as well as more detailed pages with information about Open Source Software technologies for Embedded Systems.

For more details, please visit: www.mind.be

During the recent weeks, Mind has participated to several major exhibitions in Europe:

• FOSDEM '08 which took place on February 23rd and February 24th in Brussels. FOSDEM is a free and non-commercial event organized by the Free and Open Source community, for the community. Its goal is to provide Free and Open Source developers a place to meet and exchange ideas.
• Embedded World 2008, which took place from February 26th to February 28th in Nuremberg, Germany. Embedded World is the world's biggest exhibition of its kind with more than 600 exhibitors from 29 countries and 14,000 trade visitors.
• RTS Embedded Systems 2008, which took place from April 1st to 3rd in Paris, France. RTS is the biggest exhibition about embedded systems in France, with products and innovations of some 150 manufacturers and software publishers, suppliers and integrators of hardware and software solutions, services and engineering.

These exhibitions allowed us to meet existing and potential customers, present our technical expertise in Open Source Software for Embedded Systems and monitor the latest trends in embedded technologies. We're looking forward to meeting you again at these exhibitions next year.

For more details about these exhibitions, please visit the Events page on our website.

In the Linux kernel, malloc() is not available. Instead, the kernel has to define its own memory allocation functions. However, many different allocation mechanisms exist. This article gives an overview of them, with a bit more insight in the use of high memory and of DMA. It serves as a starting point for kernel developers that need different memory allocation mechanisms.

The complete article can be found on Kernel Newbies.

This article describes the control flow (and the associated data buffering) through the networking kernel of Linux. It starts at the socket system calls, goes down through the networking layers to the network device, and back up for received packets. The article describes which functions are called and when data and headers are copied. It serves as a starting point for people who want to modify, optimise or debug the networking kernel.

The complete article can be found on The Linux Foundation.

In this project, we added a device driver for the CP2200 Ethernet chip to the RTEMS operating system for one of our customers. Because the application for which this project was meant is very time-critical and the CP2200 chip itself has a low performance (data has to be transferred byte per byte, at 4MHz rate), special attention had to be given to the performance of the driver. Also, the customer required changes to DHCP and implementation of power management.

The results of this project were contributed to the RTEMS core development. Also, as a side-effect, we extended one of the RTEMS demo applications. More details will soon be available on the Software Contributions page on our website.