I decided to be a bit more proactive with publishing the source to my projects, so I installed Gitweb. You can accesses my projects at: http://coreytabaka.com/git
Due to the level of interest I’m getting in the source to the Cube Demo, I’m making an effort to clean it up and publish it. Look for it soon.
I recently found the old test VM I used for developing the Monarc PowerPC Emulator. VMware is a great platform to develop on, with support for GDB remote serial protocol and decent performance compared to straight emulators like Bochs or qemu. However, even with VMware’s superior performance, it was not fast enough to run a PowerPC guest OS interactively. But lately it seems that VMware, and of course computer performance in general, has made some significant improvements since I last tried running a PowerPC guest.
My most recent experience was surprising. My development machine is a 15” MacBook Pro, with 8 GB RAM, an Intel Core 2 Duo clocked at 2.93 GHz, and running Snow Leopard; nothing too shabby. I started up the VM in VMware Fusion 3.1 and was interacting with Mac OS X Panther in about 20 seconds. Amazing.
Now that I have a speedy platform to test and debug the emulator on, I’m going to have to dust off the source and start hacking on it again. For this round I think I will port it to my more recent kernel, which much more capable than the small embedded kernel I wrote originally.
Of course I’ll add some goodies to the project page as things progress.
I just picked up a set of Lego Mindstorms NXT 2.0. It’s a robotics kit based on the AT91SAM7S256, which is a rather nice ARM7TDMI based SoC.
Coincidentally, the little kernel (lk), written by Travis Geiselbrecht and being used as a bootloader for Android and webOS, supports AT91* platforms. Of course, this means I have to get lk running on the NXT.
I recently discovered a really cool tool called IDA Pro. It’s an interactive disassembler with some powerful features that make examining low-level code and debugging very easy.
I’m currently working on getting IDA Pro to talk to my Lauterbach JTAG Debugger via GDB Remote Serial Protocol, but it seems that there is a bug in the Lauterbach software. The two products should make a very powerful combination.
Check out IDA Pro at http://www.hex-rays.com/idapro/
I recently ported lk to the x86 PC platform. Lk (little kernel) is an embedded kernel written by Travis Geiselbrecht, with contributions from various others. More info here.
I recently accepted a position at Palm out in Sunnyvale, California. I’ll be flying out to start in a few weeks and things are getting rather hectic as the date draws closer; we have a lot to get done even though my family won’t join me until a little later.
I’m excited to be working on the soon to be released Palm Pre and future products. I will be joining a great team of talented people and I can’t wait to see what challenges are in store.
I decided to make a clean start on the site today. WordPress is pretty decent for my needs and hopefully I’ll be more motivated to filter content in with the nicer facilities.