Tim Guite
Memory Safety Dance
Status: Coming up in April 2025!Accidents with memory are a well-known problem in the world of embedded systems. Now, they have entered the mainstream, with documents produced by the White House, NSA, and international cybersecurity organizations highlighting the threats posed by memory safety bugs. In the next few years, regulations will put increasing focus on these issues. So, what can we do?
In this talk, I will focus on the leading options for addressing memory safety:
- Tools for static analysis and fuzzing
- Memory-safe languages
- New hardware architectures (such as CHERI)
A Simple Embedded System in X Flavours
Status: Available NowMost of us are here because we enjoy writing code that makes things happen in the real world. Throughout this conference and tech talks during the year, we are presented with lots of options for our embedded systems.
These options are often presented to us as floating gently down a calm river.
Yet, when we come to use these technologies in our serious systems, where we want reliability, unit testing and CI/CD, we feel like we are rapidly tumbling down towards a big waterfall.
How do I get a simple embedded system to work for me?
In this talk, I will discuss my experience getting a simple embedded system (reading a sensor and displaying it to a user) working in X technologies such as:
- Simulation: Custom, Renode, Wokwi
- Bare Metal / Languages: C, C++, Rust (Ferrocene), Ada, Circuit Python, Arduino, LibHal
- RTOS: ThreadX, FreeRTOS, Zephyr, Integrity OS, Riot OS, PX5, uC OS III, eCos, SafeRTOS, Nucleus
Tour of Embedded Systems: What in the World is Going On?
Status: Available NowIt is hard to define an embedded system and even harder to decide where the world of embedded systems ends and becomes electronics on one side, software on the other side and system design on the other other side. In this talk, I will present the current state of two complimentary pillars of embedded systems - chips and software – with possible tangents into areas such as PCB design, testing and simulation.
The traditional hierarchy of chips (IC → FPGA → MCU → SoC) nicely mirrors the traditional hierarchy of embedded software (Bare Metal → RTOS → OS). However, this is not the world we live in: AMD owns Xilinx, Amazon and Microsoft are handing out RTOS’s, ST is presenting AI solutions. MCUs and FPGAs in the same chip, containers for embedded, RISC-V picking up steam. Consolidation and disruption has produced new combinations of technologies which challenge us on how best to use them and connect everything together.
After watching this talk, you should walk away with a better understanding of:
- The major industry players in embedded systems
- How new chips fit into the traditional hierarchy
- What tools are available at different layers of the software stack
- Some acronyms and strange words :)
Hope to see you there!