The content below is taken from the original ( Retire your tech debt: Move vSphere 5.5+ to Google Cloud VMware Engine), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

The content below is taken from the original ( Commodore 64 Emulator in VR Delivers a Full 80s Experience), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

One way to play with vintage hardware without owning the hardware is to use an emulator, but [omni_shaNker] announced taking it to the next level by using VR to deliver a complete Commodore 64 system, in its full glory, complete with a native 80s habitat playset! This is a pretty interesting angle for simulating vintage hardware, especially since the emulator is paired with what looks like a pretty convincing CRT monitor effect in VR, not to mention a virtual 5.25″ floppy drive that makes compellingly authentic sounds.

The project is hosted on GitHub and supports a variety of VR hardware, but for owners of Oculus headsets, the application is also available on SideQuest for maximum convenience. SideQuest is essentially an off-the-books app store for managing software that is neither approved nor distributed by Facebook. Oculus is owned by Facebook, and Facebook is keen to keep a tight grip on their hardware.

As functional as the application is, there are still improvements and optimizations to be made. To address this, [omni_shaNker] put out a call for beta testers on Reddit, so if that’s up your alley be sure to get in touch. A video demonstration and overview that is chock-full of technical details is also embedded below; be sure to give it a watch to see what the project is all about.

The content below is taken from the original ( Absolutely everything you need to go bikepacking: the complete guide to what you need to take), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

Bikepacking is a wonderful way to spend a holiday or weekend. You get to know the area far more intimately that just staying in some accommodation or camping. Even travelling somewhere fairly local, you’ll experience a very different side of it on a bike than you ever would otherwise. Like with any holiday or bike […]

The content below is taken from the original ( RISC OS Awards poll open for votes), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

The annual RISC OS Awards poll, undertaken by RISCOSitory, is now open for votes. The voting form went live a little over a week ago, and should remain available until… Read more »

The content below is taken from the original ( Major BGP leak disrupts thousands of networks globally), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

A large BGP routing leak that occurred last night disrupted the connectivity for thousands of major networks and websites around the world. Although the BGP routing leak occurred in Vodafone’s autonomous network (AS55410) based in India, it has impacted U.S. companies, including Google, according to sources. […]

The content below is taken from the original ( Homebrew RISC-V Computer Has Beauty and Brains), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

Building your own CPU is arguably the best way to truly wrap your head around how all those ones and zeros get flung around inside of a computer, but as you can probably imagine even a relatively simple processor takes an incredible amount of time and patience to put together. Plus, more often than not you’re then left with a maze of wires and perfboards that takes up half your desk and doesn’t do a whole lot more than blink some LEDs.

But the Pineapple ONE, built by [Filip Szkandera] isn’t your average homebrew computer. Oh sure, it still took two years for him to design, debug, and assemble, his 32-bit RISC-V CPU and all its associated hardware; but the end result is a gorgeous looking machine that runs C programs and offers a basic interactive shell over VGA. In fact with its slick 3D printed enclosure, vertically stacked construction, and modular peripheral connections, it looks more like some kind of high-tech scientific instrument than a computer; homebrew or otherwise.

[Filip] says he was inspired to build this 500 kHz (yes, kilohertz) beauty using only discrete logic components by [Ben Eater]’s well known 8-bit  breadboard computer and [David Baruch]’s LMARV-1 (Learn Me A RISC-V, version 1). He spent six months simulating the machine before he even started creating the schematics, let alone design the individual boards. He tried to keep all of his PCB’s under 100 x 100 mm to take advantage of discounts from the fabricator, which ultimately lead to the decision to align the nine boards vertically and connect them together with pin headers.

In the video below you can see [Filip] start up the computer, call up a bit of system information, and even play a rudimentary game of snake before peeking and poking some of the machine’s 512 kB of RAM. It sounds like there’s still some work to be done and bugs to squash, but we’ve already seen enough to say this machine has more than earned entry into the pantheon of master-crafted homebrew computers.

The content below is taken from the original ( How to deploy Certificate Authority Service), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

The content below is taken from the original ( Remove ALL Saved Passwords at once in Chrome, Firefox and Edge browser), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

Whenever you visit a website that requires you to sign in, Firefox, Edge, and the Chrome browser offer you to save passwords to save time on frequently accessed sites. It helps you to avoid going through the unnecessarily sign-in process. However, saving passwords sometimes can disclose your hidden information when someone uses your computer. To […]

This article Remove ALL All Saved Passwords at once in Chrome, Firefox and Edge browser first appeared on TheWindowsClub.com.

The content below is taken from the original ( What do different WD Hard Drive colors mean?), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

If you have ever shopped for Western Digital Hard Disk Drives (WD HDD), you have seen that they are available in different color codes. This might create confusion in your mind about which type of WD HDD you have to buy. The different color WD HDDs are manufactured for different purposes. In this article, we […]

This article What do different WD Hard Drive colors mean? first appeared on TheWindowsClub.com.

The content below is taken from the original ( Free AI and machine learning training for fraud detection, chatbots, and more), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

The content below is taken from the original ( Manage Microsoft’s 90-day license assignment rules with AWS License Manager), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

AWS License Manager makes it easier to manage your software licenses across AWS and on-premises environments. AWS License Manager lets administrators create customized licensing rules that emulate the terms of their licensing agreements, apply these rules to keep track of licenses used, and control whether an Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instance should be launched.

In the case of Microsoft workloads such as Windows and SQL Server, you can use the simplified bring-your-own-license (BYOL) opportunities in AWS License Manager to effectively govern and automate the management of software licenses that require dedicated physical hardware.

In a BYOL scenario where licenses are not covered by Software Assurance with mobility rights, Microsoft requires customers to manage the 90-day license reassignment restriction, under which you cannot reassign a license to a new device unless 90 days have passed from the initial assignment. To help customers simplify managing Microsoft’s 90-day license reassignment restriction, AWS License Manager has added the ability to enforce license assignment rules with EC2 Dedicated Hosts. By using License Manager, you can ensure that you are compliant with the 90-day license assignment rule.

In this blog post, I show you how to create and enforce a 90-day license limit rule for SQL Server.

Prerequisites

Walkthrough

Step 1: Create a license configuration

Figure 1: Customer managed licenses page

You will need the following details for your license configuration:

Figure 2: Create license configuration page

Step 2: Associate an AMI (optional)

When you associate an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) with a license configuration, EC2 instances can be launched into the host resource group associated with that license configuration. A host resource group is a collection of Dedicated Hosts that you can manage as a single entity.

Figure 3: Associate AMI option in Actions menu

Step 3: Create a host resource group

The next step is to create a host resource group.

Figure 4: Host resource groups page

You will need the following details for your host resource group:

Note: Microsoft’s 90-day assignment rule does not apply if the reassignment is due to permanent hardware failure or loss. Because there is no definition of what constitutes a permanent hardware failure or loss in Microsoft’s license terms, AWS encourages customers to do their own due diligence when using the Recover hosts automatically setting with license affinity rules.

Figure 5: Create host resource group page

Step 4: Launch instances into the host resource group

Now use a launch template to launch an r5.xlarge instance into the host resource group. For information about how to create launch templates, see Launch an instance from a launch template in the Amazon EC2 User Guide for Linux Instances.

Launching an instance through the launch template provisions the Dedicated Host in the SQL_Server_group. Figure 6 shows that the license configuration you created is now tracking Core usage.

Figure 6: SQL_Server_group

Choose the Dedicated Host ID. Figure 7 shows that the r5.xlarge instance has been launched and is operational.

Figure 7: Dedicated Host details

In the AWS License Manager console, choose Customer managed licenses to verify that licenses are being tracked and all 48 cores configured in step 1 are assigned and consumed.

Figure 8: SQL Server Enterprise licenses

The AWS License Manager dashboard shows that a license limit is enforced, as configured in step 1. This means that you can launch r5 instances in the host resource group as long as they fit into the one Dedicated Host. AWS License Manager will block the launch of any additional hosts because the license limit has been reached.

Figure 9: AWS License Manager Dashboard

Step 5: Release the Dedicated Host and confirm 90-day limit assignment rule is enforced

Terminate the r5.xlarge instance on the provisioned Dedicated Host. Because you have created the host resource group with the Release hosts automatically setting, AWS License Manager releases the host after all instances on that host are terminated. You can also release the host manually.

Figure 10 shows that after the instances are terminated, the Dedicated Host’s utilization drops to 0%.

Figure 10: Dedicated Hosts page

Shortly after the host is released, it no longer appears in the host resource group.

Figure 11: Dedicated Hosts for SQL_Server_group

The 48 Core licenses assigned to that host remain reserved. They are unavailable for reuse elsewhere for 90 days from the time the Dedicated Host was launched.

Figure 12 shows this information is also displayed in the dashboard.

Figure 12: Cores in use in the dashboard

Cleanup

Conclusion

In this blog post, I showed how AWS License Manager helps you manage and enforce the 90-day reassignment limit for Microsoft licenses. For more information about AWS License Manager, see the AWS License Manager User Guide.

About the Author

Andreas is a Senior Specialist Solutions Architect for Microsoft workloads at Amazon Web Services. He has more than 20 years of experience on Microsoft technologies, Systems Security, Identity, Datacenter Migrations, and Enterprise Architecture. He is passionate about helping customers migrate to, and realize the full benefits of the cloud.

The content below is taken from the original ( A Crash Course on Sniffing Bluetooth Low Energy), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) is everywhere these days. If you fire up a scanner on your phone and walk around the neighborhood, we’d be willing to bet you’d pick up dozens if not hundreds of devices. By extension, from fitness bands to light bulbs, it’s equally likely that you’re going to want to talk to some of these BLE gadgets at some point. But how?

Well, watching this three part video series from [Stuart Patterson] would be a good start. He covers how to get a cheap nRF52480 BLE dongle configured for sniffing, pulling the packets out of the air with Wireshark, and perhaps most crucially, how to duplicate the commands coming from a device’s companion application on the ESP32.

The first video in the series is focused on getting a Windows box setup for BLE sniffing, so readers who aren’t currently living under Microsoft’s boot heel may want to skip ahead to the second installment. That’s where things really start heating up, as [Stuart] demonstrates how you can intercept commands being sent to the target device.

It’s worth noting that little attempt is made to actually decode what the commands mean. In this particular application, it’s enough to simply replay the commands using the ESP32’s BLE hardware, which is explained in the third video. Obviously this technique might not work on more advanced devices, but it should still give you a solid base to work from.

In the end, [Stuart] takes an LED lamp that could only be controlled with a smartphone application and turns it into something he can talk to on his own terms. Once the ESP32 can send commands to the lamp, it only takes a bit more code to spin up a web interface or REST API so you can control the device from your computer or other gadget on the network. While naturally the finer points will differ, this same overall workflow should allow you to get control of whatever BLE gizmo you’ve got your eye on.

The content below is taken from the original ( Announcing antivirus in Cloudflare Gateway), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

Today we’re announcing support for malware detection and prevention directly from the Cloudflare edge, giving Gateway users an additional line of defense against security threats.

Cloudflare Gateway protects employees and data from threats on the Internet, and it does so without sacrificing performance for security. Instead of backhauling traffic to a central location, Gateway customers connect to one of Cloudflare’s data centers in 200 cities around the world where our network can apply content and security policies to protect their Internet-bound traffic.

Last year, Gateway expanded from a secure DNS filtering solution to a full Secure Web Gateway capable of protecting every user’s HTTP traffic as well. This enables admins to detect and block not only threats at the DNS layer, but malicious URLs and undesired file types as well. Moreover, admins now have the ability to create high-impact, company-wide policies that protect all users with one click, or they can create more granular rules based on user identity.

Earlier this month, we launched application policies in Cloudflare Gateway to make it easier for administrators to block specific web applications. With this feature, administrators can block those applications commonly used to distribute malware, such as public cloud file storage.

These features in Gateway enable a layered approach to security. With Gateway’s DNS filtering, customers are protected from threats that abuse the DNS protocol for the purposes of communicating with a C2 server, downloading an implant payload, or exfiltrating corporate data. DNS filtering applies to all applications generating DNS queries, and HTTP traffic inspection complements that by going deep on threats that users might encounter as they navigate the Internet.

Today, we are excited to announce another layer of defense with the addition of antivirus protection in Cloudflare Gateway. Now administrators can block malware and other malicious files from being downloaded onto corporate devices as they pass through Cloudflare’s edge for file inspection.

Stopping malware distribution

Protecting corporate infrastructure and devices from becoming infected with malware in the first place is one of the top priorities for IT admins. Malware can wreak a wide range of havoc: business operations may be crippled by ransomware, sensitive data may be exfiltrated by spyware, or local CPU resources may be siphoned for financial gain by cryptojacking malware.

In order to compromise a network, malicious actors commonly attempt to distribute malware through an email attachment or malicious link sent via email. More recently, in order to evade email security, threat actors are beginning to leverage other communication channels, such as SMS, voice, and support ticket software for malware distribution.

The devastating impact of malware, coupled with the large attack surface for potential compromise, makes malware prevention a top-of-mind concern for security teams.

Defense in Depth

No single tool or approach provides perfect security, necessitating a layered defense against threats that make their way past these different tools. Not all threats are previously known to threat researchers, requiring admins to fall back on additional inspection tools once a user successfully connects to a site containing potentially malicious content.

Highly sophisticated threats may make their way into a user’s network and the primary task for security teams is to quickly determine the scope of the attack against their organization. In these worst case scenarios, where a user accesses a domain, website, or file that is deemed malicious, the last line of defense for a security team is achieving a clear understanding of the source of the attack against their organization and what resources were affected.

Announcing File Scanning

Today, with Cloudflare Gateway, you can augment your endpoint protection and prevent malicious files from being downloaded onto employee devices. Gateway will scan files inbound from the Internet as they pass through the Cloudflare edge at the nearest data center. Cloudflare manages this layer of defense for customers the same as it manages intelligence used for DNS and HTTP traffic filtering, freeing admins from purchasing additional antivirus licenses or worrying about keeping virus definitions up to date.

When a user initiates a download and that file passes through Gateway at Cloudflare’s edge, that file is sent to the malware scanning engine. This engine contains malware sample definitions and is updated on a daily basis. When Gateway scans a file and detects the presence of malware, it will block the file transfer by resetting the connection which is then displayed to the user in their browser as a download error. Gateway also logs the URL where the file was downloaded, the SHA-256 hash of the file, and the fact that the file was blocked due to the presence of malware.

A common approach to security is to “assume breach.” This assumption by security teams acknowledges that not all threats are previously known and optimizes for responding to threats quickly. With Gateway, administrators have complete visibility over the impact the threat had on their organization by leveraging Gateway’s centralized logging, providing clear steps for threat remediation as part of an incident response.

Detecting malware post-compromise

When using an “assume breach” approach, security teams rely on surfacing actionable insights from all available information around an attack. A more sophisticated attack might unfold this way:

• After exploiting a user’s system through any number of means (leading to the “assume breach” approach), a stage 0 implant (or dropper) is placed on the exploited device.
• This file may be complete or need additional pieces of a larger implant, and sends a DNS query to a domain previously unknown to threat research as being associated with C2 for an attack campaign.
• The response to the query to the C2 server encodes information indicating where the implant can download additional components of the implant.
• The implant uses DNS tunneling to a different domain, also unknown to threat research as being malicious, to download additional components of the implant.
• The fully constructed implant performs any number of tasks assigned by another C2 server. These include exfiltrating local files, moving laterally in the network, encrypting all the files on the local machine, or even using the local CPU for the purpose of mining cryptocurrency.

Cloudflare Gateway goes beyond simply detecting and blocking queries to domains previously known to be associated with C2, DNS tunneling, or that appear to be generated by a Domain Generation Algorithm (DGA). Gateway uses heuristics from threat research to identify queries that appear to be generated by a DGA for the purposes of an attack outlined above, detects these previously unknown threats from an organization’s log data, and proactively blocks them before a security admin needs to manually intervene.

Threat research is continually evolving. Cloudflare Gateway takes the burden of keeping pace with security threats off IT admins by delivering insights derived from Cloudflare’s network to protect organizations of any size anywhere they are.

What’s Next

Our goal is to provide sophisticated, but easy to implement, security capabilities to organizations regardless of size so they can get back to what matters to their business. We’re excited to continue to expand Gateway’s capabilities to protect users and their data. DNS tunneling and DGA detection is included in Gateway DNS filtering at no cost for teams up to 50 users. In-line detection of malware at Cloudflare’s edge will be included with Teams Standard and Teams Enterprise plans.

Stay tuned for filtering at the network level and integration with GRE tunnels — we’re just getting started. Follow this link to sign up today.

The content below is taken from the original ( Getting Compute Engine resources for batch processing just got easier), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

The content below is taken from the original ( Getting Started With FreeRTOS And ChibiOS), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

If operating systems weren’t so useful, we would not be running them on every single of our desktop systems. In the same vein, embedded operating systems provide similar functionality as these desktop OSes, while targeting a more specialized market. Some of these are adapted versions of desktop OSes (e.g. Yocto Linux), whereas others are built up from the ground up for embedded applications, like VxWorks and QNX. Few of those OSes can run on a microcontroller (MCU), however. When you need to run an OS on something like an 8-bit AVR or 32-bit Cortex-M MCU, you need something smaller.

Something like ChibiOS (‘Chibi’ meaning ‘small’ in Japanese), or FreeRTOS (here no points for originality). Perhaps more accurately, FreeRTOS could be summarized as a multi-threading framework targeting low-powered systems, whereas ChibiOS is more of a full-featured OS, including a hardware abstraction layer (HAL) and other niceties.

In this article we’ll take a more in-depth look at these two OSes, to see what benefits they bring.

Basic feature set

FreeRTOS supports a few dozen microcontroller platforms, the most noticeable probably being AVR, x86 and ARM (Cortex-M & Cortex-A). In contrast, ChibiOS/RT runs on perhaps fewer platforms, but comes with a HAL that abstracts away hardware devices including I2C, CAN, ADC, RTC, SPI and USB peripherals. Both of them offer a preemptive multi-tasking scheduler with priority levels and multi-threading primitives, including mutexes, condition variables and semaphores.

The corollary of this comparison then seems to be that FreeRTOS is good for basic multi-threading features, whereas ChibiOS/RT offers a more holistic approach through its HAL. The presence of the HAL also means that one can theoretically target ChibiOS/RT and recompile the same code for different MCU platforms. For FreeRTOS one would still have to use another framework to use hardware peripherals, whether this would be CMSIS, ST’s HAL or something else, and this decreases portability.

In the next sections we’ll be working through a basic example for each of these two OSes, to gain a deeper understanding of what developing with them is like.

FreeRTOS with CMSIS-RTOS

For a simple example of how to work with FreeRTOS, the HTTP server example by ST for the Nucleo-746ZG STM32 development board is a good start. I have also made a self-contained version with all dependencies and a Makefile for use with the Arm Cortex-M GCC toolchain.

This example project demonstrates how to combine the CMSIS-RTOS API, FreeRTOS and the LwIP networking stack to create a Netconn-based HTTP server which can serve documents and images. The Netconn API of LwIP is a higher-level API than the raw API, which makes it the preferred choice if one has no special needs when it comes to networking.

The entry point of the demo project is found in Core/Src/Main.cpp. Its purpose is mostly to set up the firmware: configure peripherals and clocks, then initialize the first threads. Here we see not the syntax for FreeRTOS threads (tasks) being used, but that of CMSIS-RTOS, e.g.:

osThreadDef(Start, StartThread, osPriorityNormal, 0, configMINIMAL_STACK_SIZE * 5);
osThreadCreate (osThread(Start), NULL);

static void StartThread(void const * argument)
{
    /* .. */ 
}

CMSIS-RTOS is part of the Cortex Microcontroller Software Interface Standard, or CMSIS for short. It is a vendor-independent hardware abstraction layer (HAL) for Arm Cortex-based MCUs. In the case of embedded RTOSes, CMSIS provides the CMSIS-RTOS specification, which allows software to be written for a generic RTOS API and thus made portable across Cortex-M (and Cortex-A). Each supported RTOS then provides a CMSIS-RTOS implementation that maps the two sets of API calls.

In this example we are using the more basic CMSIS-RTOS v1 API with FreeRTOS. For newer MCUs with ARMv8 support as well as multi-core and Cortex-A, the RTOS v2 interface is a better match. The RTOS v2 interface is also supported by FreeRTOS, and the necessary files for this are found under Middlewares/Third_Party/FreeRTOS/Source/CMSIS_RTOS_V2, next to the folder with files for RTOS v1.

In the code snippet from earlier we saw how a new thread gets created. At the moment when we created the Start thread, there was however no scheduler running yet. We start this with a call to osKernelStart(). After this the code in the startThread function is scheduled and executed. Not surprisingly, this function starts the main threads which will form our HTTP server:

static void StartThread(void const * argument)
{ 
  /* Create tcp_ip stack thread */
  tcpip_init(NULL, NULL);
  
  /* Initialize the LwIP stack */
  Netif_Config();
  
  /* Initialize webserver demo */
  http_server_netconn_init();
  
  /* Notify user about the network interface config */
  User_notification(&gnetif);
  
#ifdef USE_DHCP
  /* Start DHCPClient */
  osThreadDef(DHCP, DHCP_thread, osPriorityBelowNormal, 0, configMINIMAL_STACK_SIZE * 2);
  osThreadCreate (osThread(DHCP), &gnetif);
#endif

  for( ;; )
  {
    /* Delete the Init Thread */ 
    osThreadTerminate(NULL);
  }
}

We first call tcpip_init(), which creates the LwIP TCP/IP processing thread (tcpip_thread). Netif_Config() is the network interface configuration function in our code. It calls the LwIP NETIF functions netif_add() and netif_default() to add and set our new network interface as the default. With this, we have LwIP fully

The http_server_netconn_init() function is found in httpserver-netconn.c. It creates a new thread called HTTP, which runs the code in http_server_netconn_thread. This sets up the server socket on port 80 and waits for new incoming connections. These are then handled by the http_server_serve() function, which is a simple if/else block for parsing HTTP requests and serving either the static file content (hard-coded in byte arrays), or showing the dynamic information (for a /STM32F7xxTASKS.html request) generated by DynWebPage():

void DynWebPage(struct netconn *conn)
{
  portCHAR PAGE_BODY[512];
  portCHAR pagehits[10] = {0};

  memset(PAGE_BODY, 0,512);

  /* Update the hit count */
  nPageHits++;
  sprintf(pagehits, "%d", (int)nPageHits);
  strcat(PAGE_BODY, pagehits);
  strcat((char *)PAGE_BODY, "


<pre>
Name          State  Priority  Stack   Num" );
  strcat((char *)PAGE_BODY, "
---------------------------------------------
");
    
  /* The list of tasks and their status */
  osThreadList((unsigned char *)(PAGE_BODY + strlen(PAGE_BODY)));
  strcat((char *)PAGE_BODY, "

---------------------------------------------");
  strcat((char *)PAGE_BODY, "
B : Blocked, R : Ready, D : Deleted, S : Suspended
");

  /* Send the dynamically generated page */
  netconn_write(conn, PAGE_START, strlen((char*)PAGE_START), NETCONN_COPY);
  netconn_write(conn, PAGE_BODY, strlen(PAGE_BODY), NETCONN_COPY);
}

The interesting part about this function is that it gives an insight in the active threads, as obtained from a call to osThreadList(). Although not an official part of the v1 CMSIS-RTOS API, it does provide useful functionality. This does however show that although the CMSIS-RTOS HAL is useful, it is imperfect and may not by default cover more exotic use cases, or fail to expose APIs from the underlying OS.

That aside for now, the rest of the StartThread() function holds few surprises: the User_notification() function (found in app_ethernet.c) sets the LEDs on the Nucleo development board to indicate the connection status. If we have enabled DHCP support, a thread is created for this as well, using DHCP_thread() from that same source file. The DHCP thread tries to obtain an IP address using the DHCP functionality in LwIP and set this for the interface which we created earlier.

At this point we can compile the project. Assuming we have obtained the arm-none-eabi GCC toolchain via the Arm download page or via our operating system’s package manager so that the compiler is on the system path, compiling the Makefile-based project can be done with a simple call to make. Flashing to a Nucleo-746ZG development board requires that OpenOCD is installed, after which a simple make flash with the board connected suffices.

Chibi: Perhaps not so small

As alluded to earlier, ChibiOS is (ironically) a lot larger than FreeRTOS in terms of its feature set. This becomes also apparent when it comes to simply getting started with a new ChibiOS project. Whereas FreeRTOS as we saw earlier can comfortably be just the RTOS within a HAL like CMSIS-RTOS, ChibiOS has a lot of functionality which is not covered by that API. For this reason, the ChibiOS project has its own (Eclipse-based) IDE in the form of ChibiStudio, which comes with demo projects preinstalled.

On the website Play Embedded, a large number of tutorials and articles on ChibiOS can be found, such as this introduction article, which also covers getting started with ChibiStudio. ChibiOS’s complexity also shows in the configuration files, which include:

• chconf.h, for configuring kernel options.
• halconf.h, for configuring the HAL.
• mcuconf.h, containing information pertaining to the specific MCU that is being targeted.

The ‘Blinky’ example project as provided with the ChibiOS download package for the STM32F042K6 MCU (as found on the ST Nucleo-F042K6 board) gives a pretty solid overview of what a ChibiOS project looks like. Of note here is the use of the ChibiOS/HAL module, which allows for the use of the UART2 peripheral, using ChibiOS’s serial driver.

Retargeting the code to another MCU should be a matter of updating the configuration files and recompiling, though one gets the impression that this is meant to be done via the IDE, and not so much by hand. The integration with other IDEs does not appear to be a thing either, from a cursory look. This would likely mean becoming very cozy with the Doxygen-generated documentation and other information out there.

At the same time, ChibiOS does support CMSIS-RTOS, and also offers two different kernels: the RT (real-time) one, and NIL, which is basically just trying to be as small as possible in terms of code size. This trade-off doesn’t appear to affect performance too much if their benchmarks are to be believed, making it an interesting option for a new embedded (RT)OS project.

Wrapping up

In this article we had a look at some of the things which one will encounter when deciding to develop using either FreeRTOS or ChibiOS. While both have their strong and weak points, the main point which one should take away is that they’re two very different beasts when it comes down to it. Both in the features which they provide, and the needs they target.

If one already uses CMSIS, then slotting in FreeRTOS is simple and straight-forward, allowing one to use other CMSIS-targeting code out there with few if any changes. ChibiOS on the other hand is more its own thing, which isn’t necessary a negative. Maybe it’s most helpful to look at FreeRTOS as a helpful module one can bolt onto CMSIS and other frameworks to add multi-threading support, whereas ChibiOS is more akin to NuttX and Zephyr, as a one-stop solution for all your needs.

The content below is taken from the original ( Azure Remote Rendering is now generally available), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

Build immersive mixed reality experiences with Azure Remote Rendering, now generally available. Use it to enable high fidelity 3D visualization of objects and view models with a billion or more polygons without decimation.

The content below is taken from the original ( World’s First eVTOL Airport Will Land This November), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

We have to admit that flying cars still sound pretty cool. But if we’re ever going to get this idea off the ground, there’s a truckload of harsh realities that must be faced head-on. The most obvious and pressing issue might seem to be the lack of flying cars, but that’s not really a problem. Air taxis are already in the works from companies like Airbus, Rolls-Royce, and Cadillac, who premiered theirs at CES this year.

Where we’re going, we don’t need roads. But we do need infrastructure to support this growing category of air traffic that includes shipping drones that are already in flight. Say no more, because by November 2021, the first airport built especially for flying cars is slated to be operational in England.

British startup Urban Air Port is building their flagship eVTOL hub smack dab in the center of Coventry, UK, a city once known as Britain’s Detroit due to the dozens of automobile makers who have called it home. They’re calling this grounded flying saucer-looking thing Air One, and they are building it in partnership with Hyundai thanks to a £1.2 million ($1.65M) grant from the British government. Hyundai are developing their own eVTOL which they are planning to release in 2028.

Starting in November 2021, this temporary, pop-up eVTOL hub will used to give live demonstrations that show the viability of these electric air vehicles for transporting both passengers and goods on a regular basis, as well as in heightened response to natural disasters. The hubs themselves will be small — 60% smaller than a heliport, which is their closest living cousin. They require no runway, and can be powered completely off-grid if necessary. Urban Air Port expects to be able to stand up one of these facilities in a matter of days, which makes them ideal for getting supplies into disaster-stricken areas of the world.

Even though the overall footprint will be smaller, these hubs will still need parking lots, bus stops, and other support for ground transportation. Fortunately, this is a whole-future endeavor and the hub is designed to be harmonious with other sustainable modes of electric transport. We’re picturing an EV charger in every parking space, all of which are shaded beneath a roof covered with responsive solar panels. Oh, and there’s a really nice bus stop.

If You Build It, They Will Come

On the one hand, it totally makes sense to start building these hubs. Again, you have to start somewhere, and I know I would feel a lot better about getting into an air taxi after a bit of front-row education. Like Urban Air Port founder Ricky Sandhu says in the video below, cars need roads, trains need rails, and planes need airports. And they all need places for parking, embarking, and disembarking. Air taxis and shipping drones need places for people and goods to load in and load out of them. From the looks of it, these hubs are more than just storage and a launch pad; they’re more akin to, well, small urban airports or helipads with amenities like couches and restrooms and maybe a vending with masks and sanitizer.

On the other hand, we still have a global pandemic going on that has changed the way we work, shop, and do just about everything. There’s barely anyone using regular airplanes these days. We have to wonder how much use these near-future air taxis would get, what with way fewer people actually going to a job, and no drive-through coffee options in the sky as of yet.

Urban-Air is planning to build 200 of these hubs across the UK and abroad within the next five years. We’re excited to see where project this goes — how many hubs end up getting built, and where. NASA thinks the Urban Air Mobility market could be worth a lot in the States, but cites the current lack of infrastructure as a major barrier. Don’t tell that to Archer Aviation, a California start-up that plans to launch a fleet of air taxis as early as 2024.

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Marc Sumner, CEO of channel recruitment agency Robertson Sumner, reflects on how Covid has impacted the channel jobs market over the past 12 months.

Throughout 2020 we have all had to adapt and change at speed. Businesses were expected to enable their teams to work from home with very limited notice from the government. Some businesses were well prepared and were able to ‘flick the switch’ allowing their staff to start working from home seamlessly right from the start of the imposed lockdown. But the vast majority of UK plc were not.  After nearly a year of operating through a series of lockdowns, what was the impact on the job market within the IT channel?

Despite an initial dip in hiring between March and May 2020, demand has bounced back strongly to pre-Covid levels. Technology is one of the markets that helped UK plc respond to the challenges of enabling people to work in a more collaborative way despite the restrictions of travelling and running traditional events. The IT channel has needed to double down on both technical and sales staff to present the most suitable solutions to their customers.

Companies became adept at hiring and onboarding remotely. This has freed up many organisations from the restrictions usually associated with hiring people who live within a commutable distance of an office base. In some cases, skills shortages have become a thing of the past with hiring managers realising that a person’s location is no barrier to their suitability for the organisation. Some 76 per cent of clients surveyed at the end of 2020 are now willing to hire somebody remotely for a traditionally ‘office based’ role, expanding the ‘talent-pool’ available to choose from.

Hiring managers and recruiters in the IT channel were forced to review their interview and assessment techniques to adapt to the lockdown restrictions. To minimise the risk of making bad decisions many organisations added skills or psychometric testing to the recruitment process. Some even started developing a ‘score-card’ based approach to their hiring taking away some of the ‘gut-feel’ out of the process. It will be interesting to see if this trend continues as the restrictions are eased.

There was a big rise in the way we consume our jobs-based training, with 90 per cent taking place online during 2020. On-boarding remotely also became the norm. Most channel leaders and many employees that I have spoken to have expressed a desire to return to a mix of online and traditional face to face on-boarding and training when practical.

Despite the lockdown being designed to physically keep people and teams apart, it has demonstrated how important working more collaboratively is to achieve a positive outcome. In the IT channel, businesses who are ‘competitors’ in the traditional sense have in some instances formed unlikely alliances to help deliver solutions to their customers. This level of creativity could go a long way to helping foster long-term growth and help deliver job opportunities that fall out of these joint ventures.

To conclude, it is still very early days to predict the medium/long term impact of Covid on the job market within the IT channel. However, the early signs are that the adoption of technology is still key in helping the country return to some sort of normality and therefore the opportunity for job growth is very realistic in 2021.

Marc Sumner is managing director of channel recruitment outfit Robertson Sumner. This article featured in the recent CRN Staff and Salaries Report 2021.