Slashdot Mirror

An anonymous reader writes: Back in March 2015, the United States Federal Communications Commission (FCC) issued a security document that included a series of provisions related to the use of wireless devices. In order to comply with these security guidelines, some manufacturers of home routers and other networking equipment decided to lock down the software powering these devices. This caused an outcry from the open source community who demanded that the FCC and manufacturers would not restrict the free use of the operating system and associated software running on their devices. Now Imagination Technologies is presenting a proof of concept demonstration that addresses the next-generation security requirements mandated by the FCC and other similar agencies. The demo makes use of a feature of MIPS Warrior CPUs called multi-domain, secure hardware virtualization. This technology allows developers to create system-wide, hardware-enforced trusted environments that are much secure compared to current solutions. The platform used for the demonstration runs three virtual machines (VMs) on a MIPS P-class CPU integrated in a router-type evaluation kit; this approach securely separates the OpenWrt operating system from the Wi-Fi driver, allowing them to co-exist in isolation and thus comply with the FCC guidelines.Ars Technica has more details.

WheatGrass writes to note that the company T-Platforms has introduced the first mass production unit based upon the Russian Baikal-T1 processor, mentioned here last in 2014. The new Baikal-based workstation is called the "Meadowsweet terminal," according to T-Platform's official website; the feature list says it's running a Debian-based Linux distro. "Congratulations, Russia," Says WheatGrass. (According to Google's translation of this Russian-language story at RG.RU Digital, "[Y]ou can install many conventional applications, such as the LibreOffice office suite, Firefox web browser, and so on, the developers say," but the main use seems to be as a thin client.)

alexvoica writes: After interviewing the NASA New Horizons team (if you've missed the original story on Slashdot, you can find it here), it's time to get the views of another famous space agency (JAXA) on spacecraft hardware and software. This interview focuses mainly on Hayabusa-2, the world's first round-trip mission to a C-type asteroid. The main goal of the Hayabusa-2 mission is to visit the near-Earth asteroid 1999 JU3, conduct on site science experiments, collect soil samples from the asteroid, and return them back to Earth. 1999 JU3 is a near-Earth C-type asteroid, and is believed to contain organic and hydrated minerals. The contact at JAXA replying to these questions is Associate Professor Yuichi Tsuda, Ph.D the project manager for Hayabusa-2. Dr. Tsuda works for the Department of Space Flight Systems at the Institute of Space and Astronautical Science (ISAS) and at JAXA.

alexvoica writes: Last week we learnt that Pluto has blue skies and ice water thanks to a series of high-resolution images provided by the New Horizons probe. But how is the probe taking these photographs and sending them back to NASA? What hardware and software systems are inside and who built them? Luckily, the New Horizons engineering team kindly answered these questions (and many others) in a detailed interview.

Here are some fun facts from my discussion with the engineers. The chipset: It might sound strange to some but NASA used to be a chip maker. Before using standard MIPS or Intel CPUs for probes like New Horizons, NASA had to design custom-built processors since the commercial solutions available at the time were not designed to handle the intense workloads of space travel. Inside New Horizons we find a radiation-hardened, MIPS-based Mongoose-V processor worth $40,000 apiece and built using a grant from the Goddard Space Flight Center. The camera: New Horizons has a multispectral 1 megapixel camera; sending a single 1200 x 900 image back to earth takes approximately 3-4 hours. The comms: Forget 4G LTE, New Horizons uses the very best! The probe relies on NASA's Deep Space Network (DSN) to make its long-distance calls. DSN is the largest and most sensitive scientific telecom system in the world and was also used to guide the astronauts aboard the Apollo 13 mission back to earth. Tom Hanks and Kevin Bacon remain forever grateful. The memory: New Horizons includes 16GB of flash memory which provides plenty of storage space for photos and other scientific data. The operating system: New Horizons runs on Nucleus, a popular operating system designed by Mentor Graphics. Coincidentally, Nucleus is also at the heart of the ARTIK 1 platform for IoT launched by Samsung only a few months ago.

New submitter alexvoica writes: Today Fedora contributor Michal Toman has announced that the first Fedora 22 image for 32-bit MIPS CPUs is available for testing; this version of the operating system was developed using our Creator CI20 microcomputer, which includes a 1.2 GHz dual-core MIPS processor. In addition, Michal announced he is working on a 64-bit version designed to run on MIPS-based Cavium OCTEON III processors.

DeviceGuru writes: Imagination Technologies has developed a Linux-ready academic version of its 32-bit MIPS architecture MicroAptiv processor design, and is giving it away free to universities for use in computer research and education. As the MIPSfpga name suggests, the production-quality RTL (register transfer level) design abstraction is intended to run on industry standard FPGAs. Although MIPSfpga is available as a fully visible RTL design, MIPSfpga is not fully open source, according to the announcement from Robert Owen, Manager of Imagination's University Programme. Academic users can use and modify MIPSfpga as they wish, but cannot build it into silicon. "If you modify it, you must talk to us first if you wish to patent the changes," writes Owen.

DeviceGuru (1136715) writes "In a bid to harness the energy and enthusiasm swirling around today's open, hackable single board computers, Imagination Technologies, licensor of the MIPS ISA, has unveiled the Creator C120 development board, the ISA's counter to ARM's popular Raspberry Pi and BeagleBone Black SBCs. The MIPS dev board is based on a 1.2GHz dual-core MIPS32 system-on-chip and has 1GB RAM and 8GB flash, and there's also an SD card slot for expansion. Ports include video, audio, Ethernet, both WiFi and Bluetooth 4.0, and a bunch more. OS images are already available for Debian 7, Gentoo, Yocto, and Arch Linux, and Android v4.4 is expected to be available soon. Perhaps the most interesting feature of the board is that there's no pricing listed yet, because the company is starting out by giving the boards away free to developers who submit the most interesting projects."

New submitter HalWasRight writes "After years of struggle, MIPS Technologies — the original RISC processor company — is being sold to Imagination Technologies, best known for its popular mobile GPUs. Part of the deal included MIPS divesting much of its non-processor related patents to a group that includes ARM. This deal could change the landscape in the battle for mobile sockets." MIPS press release, Imagination press release.