Choosing the right hardware for an embedded Linux device is so much more important than your software choices. Making the wrong decision can lead to significant costs and disruptions if you have to change hardware mid-development. Read this blog first before you solidify your choice. Custom or commercial? Choosing between a custom or commercially available […]

Creating applications for cross-platform compatibility is a modern best practice. It increases deployment flexibility and allows applications to reach a wider audience. However, doing it properly can involve some trial and error. At KDAB, we’ve built many multiplatform desktop applications. Here, we’ve compiled a few insights from that process to help you build better software. […]

Building system images for embedded devices from the ground up is a very complex process, that involves many different kinds of requirements for the build tooling around it. Traditionally, the most popular build systems used in this context are the Yocto project and buildroot. These build systems make it easy to set up toolchains for […]

Hotspot is a standalone GUI designed to provide a user-friendly interface for analyzing performance data. It takes a perf.data file, parses and evaluates its contents, and presents the results in a visually appealing and easily understandable manner. Our goal with Hotspot is to offer a modern alternative to perf report, making performance analysis on Linux […]

Developing embedded software is notoriously difficult – how can we simplify the process? Fortunately, there are lots of techniques you can use daily to help streamline your development. Embracing Automation The specialized nature of embedded systems extends the ramp-up time for developers and necessitates a higher level of expertise. Automating hardware-specific tasks, such as deploying […]

In today’s pervasively digital landscape, building software for a single platform is a 1990s approach. Modern applications, even those designed for specific embedded targets, must be adaptable enough to run seamlessly across various platforms without sacrificing efficiency or reliability. This is often easier said than done. Here are some key points to consider when developing […]

The robustness of Linux is widely acknowledged, but it can't quite match the microsecond management of a real-time operating system (RTOS) for time critical situations such as CNC machine instructions, vehicular control, or health sensor collection. If your software must record, manage, or control events within a narrow and precise time window and you’re invested […]

Choosing the right system-on-chip (SoC) is probably your first consideration when designing an embedded product, followed closely by deciding whether to use an off-the-shelf board or design your own. The case for commercial boards in initial designs For the first product in a new line, consider using a commercially available board that features your chosen […]

When designing an embedded product, there’s a lot riding on those crucial first decisions of choosing a hardware vendor and board. Clearly, the hardware you select must be powerful enough to support your product, a challenging determination given that software is usually still in the planning stages at this point in the process. Plus, planning […]

I'm happy to announce the immediate availability of Heaptrack v1.5.0. Heaptrack is a heap memory profiler targeting mainly Linux, as well as FreeBSD. To learn more, please visit the project website. Version 1.5.0 incorporates about 70 changes since the v1.4.0 release from June last year. The highlights include: - Elfutils is now used for symbolizing […]

Given a strictly positive integer i, this code will calculate i+1 "equally spaced" values between 1 and 0: If you're looking for a trap, this does actually work for any i > 0. One can verify it experimentally; run the code with i from 1 to INT_MAX. For simplicity, just consider the case j = […]

For years, we at KDAB have been using Buildbot as our build and continuous integration system. Gerrit hosts all our projects and is our code review platform. Our deployment of Buildbot and build machines has naturally grown over the years. It builds hundreds of configurations and up to a thousand builds daily, but issues with […]

Writing mobile apps can be a lot of fun, especially with Qt and QML. But if your background is all about C++ and Qt, writing the entire required stack for a mobile app can be challenging. Adding push notifications, storing information, and having to write that with another language and framework might make you give […]

Version 1.3.0 of the KDE Heaptrack project was just released by KDAB's Milian Wolff. Heaptrack is a heap memory profiler on Linux-based operating systems. It can help you find hotspots that need to be optimized for reducing memory usage, memory leaks, allocation hotspots, and temporary allocations. Included in this release is a special new feature […]

Wayland is a display protocol, a protocol (and accompanying C library) spoken by a graphical application with a display server in order to communicate about both input to the application (keyboard, mouse, ...) and about output from the application -- that is, the rendered window. Wayland was developed to replace the X11 server on the […]

It is our pleasure to introduce a shiny new Maps & Navigation solution for QML developers! This QML plugin is a joint effort between KDAB & General Magic to bring the excellent General Magic Maps and Navigation SDK to the QML world. What makes the General Magic QML plugin special? It's easy to use. With […]

If you’ve read the first article in this series, you’ll know what full stack tracing is and why you definitely want it. This time, we’ll show you how to setup full stack tracing on your Linux system. There are two steps – first get everything configured to capture a trace, and then view and interpret […]

A few days ago, a customer using our KD Soap library reported an interesting problem with it. The library worked perfectly to access the SOAP server, but there was some noticeable latency when doing a series of requests in short succession from the client. This latency should not have been there, as both the server […]

What is Akademy? Akademy is the yearly conference for the KDE community, which is a community devoted to creating free software for desktop and mobile. Typically, Akademy takes place in a different city each year. However, due to the pandemic, the conference was online this time around. September 4-11 marked the dates of Akademy 2020. […]

We have just released version 1.2.0 of Heaptrack, the fast heap memory profiler for C++/Linux applications. A bit of Background The Heaptrack fast heap memory profiler allows you to track all heap memory allocations at run-time. Afterwards, you can use the accompanying GUI tool to find optimization opportunities in your code by analyzing the recorded […]