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Embedded Engineers: what workflows will you tolerate?

2 points by drvdevd ↗ HN
So, I've spent the last 30 hours or so of my life trying to get Xen running (and now just anything) on my Cubietruck (Allwinner A20) without much success. When I first bought it to play with ARM virtualization a couple years ago, I didn't know much about it. Right now I'm in a ranting mood and I just want to complain about the "workflow" with this thing -- it feels janky. The thought ocurred to me though that I'm just tinkering and the Cubietruck probably isn't so bad and real embedded developers must be suffering some through some pretty painful stuff.

So Embedded engineers: at what point will you throw your hands up and toss a project due to flawed tech? How far have you gone and would you do it again? Have you ever outright quit a job due to workflow issues?

3 comments

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brudgers
I am not an embedded engineer. I am a hobbyist. I was interested in a Raspberry Pi project. There were Allwinner boards that looked more capable and cheaper. But I looked at the ecosystem and Rpi just has better and more support and so I paid more and got less in terms of hardware. In exchange, the Rpi ecosystem has become better in terms of my project over the last three months.

I don't know about your use case, but at the SOC level for someone who doesn't do embedded all day, I'd look at Rpi. Googling "Xen on rpi" hits this: https://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/questions/45930/is-it-... which both provides context and highlights the fact that there is a StackExchange site for Raspberry Pi (and that was one of my factors).

Good luck.

drvdevd
Hey thanks for the link. I actually did solve my own issue with the Cubietruck and managed to get KVM working, if not Xen yet. I'll get there eventually.

I don't have too much of an issue with the platform except I've seen some complaints elsewhere on HN about it (parts of Allwinner's CPUs?) being proprietary and supposedly there being some GPL issues there.

But I will certainly give the Pi a better look for this case.

brudgers
Glad you got it working. The Rpi contains some binary blobs too and people always find something to complain about. The difference I care about is more at the Ubuntu and Windows and StackExchange and Docker and OpenStack want to be on the platform level.