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Devices: Gemini NC14 + Debian, Filesystem Abstractions for L4Re, Nitrogen8M_Mini

Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Wednesday 13th of February 2019 11:26:32 PM Filed under
Hardware
  • Gemini NC14 + Debian

    My main machine is a Dell E7240. It’s 5 years old and, while a bit slow sometimes, is generally still capable of doing all I need. However it mostly lives in an E-Port Plus II dock and gets treated like a desktop. As a result I don’t tend to move it around the house; the external monitor has a higher resolution than the internal 1080p and I’m often running things on it where it would be inconvenient to have to suspend it. So I decided I’d look for a basic laptop that could act as a simple terminal and web browser. This seems like an ideal job for a Chromebook, but I wanted a decent resolution screen and all of the cheap Chromebooks were 1366x768.

    Looking around I found the Gemini Devices NC14. This is a Celeron N3350 based device with 4GB RAM and a 14” 1080p LCD. For £180 that seemed like a decent spec, much better than anything else I could see for under £200. Included storage is limited to a 32GB eMMC, with a slot for an m.2 SSD if desired, but as I’m not planning to store anything other than the OS/applications on the device that wasn’t a drawback to me. Box seem to be the only supplier, though they also list on Amazon. I chose Amazon, because that avoided paying extra for shipping to Northern Ireland.

    The laptop comes with just a wall-wart style power supply - there’s no paperwork or anything else in the box. The PSU is a 12V/2A model and the cable is only slightly more than 1m long. However there’s also a USB-C power on the left side of the laptop and it will charge from that; didn’t work with any of my USB-C phone chargers, but worked just fine with my Lenovo laptop charger. The USB-C port does USB, as you’d expect, but surprisingly is also setup for DisplayPort - I plugged in a standard USB-C → HDMI adaptor and it worked perfectly. Additional ports include 2 standard USB 3.0 ports, a mini-HDMI port, a 3.5mm audio jack and a micro SD card slot. The whole device is pretty light too, coming in at about 1.37kg. It feels cheap, but not flimsy - not unreasonable given the price point. The keyboard is ok; not a great amount of travel and slightly offset from what I’m used to on the right hand side (there is a column of home/pgup/pgdn/end to the right of the enter key). The worst aspect is that the power button is a regular key in the top right, so easy to hit when looking for delete. The trackpad is serviceable; the middle button is a little tricky to hit sometimes, but there and useful.

  • Filesystem Abstractions for L4Re

    In my previous posts, I discussed the possibility of using “real world” filesystems in L4Re, initially considering the nature of code to access an ext2-based filesystem using the library known as libext2fs, then getting some of that code working within L4Re itself. Having previously investigated the nature of abstractions for providing filesystems and file objects to applications, it was inevitable that I would now want to incorporate libext2fs into those abstractions and to try and access files residing in an ext2 filesystem using those abstractions.
    It should be remembered that L4Re already provides a framework for filesystem access, known as Vfs or “virtual file system”. This appears to be the way the standard file access functions are supported, with the “rom” part of the filesystem hierarchy being supported by a “namespace filesystem” library that understands the way that the deployed payload modules are made available as files. To support other kinds of filesystem, other libraries must apparently be registered and made available to programs.
    Although I am sure that the developers of the existing Vfs framework are highly competent, I found the mechanisms difficult to follow and quite unlike what I expected, which was to see a clear separation between programs accessing files and other programs providing those files. Indeed, this is what one sees when looking at other systems such as Minix 3 and its virtual filesystem. I must also admit that I became tired of having to dig into the code to understand the abstractions in order to supplement the reference documentation for the Vfs framework in L4Re.

  • Nitrogen8M_Mini: A Raspberry Pi Alternative That Consumes Less Power

    There are several good alternatives to Raspberry Pi such as the Allwinner H6 or Rockchip RK3399 SoC but a newly launched board called the Nitrogen8M_Mini is based on a modern platform.

    Nitrogen8M_Mini runs on i.MX 8M Mini platform which is specifically designed to be power efficient. Manufactured using 14nm FinFet technology, this board can scale its clock speed to match power demand by swapping tasks between low and high-powered processors.

»

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