Green Metrics Tool helps developers measuring & optimizing software power consumption

GMT CPU Utilization Memory Power Usage

The Green Metrics Tool (GMT) is an open-source framework that allows the measurement, comparison, and optimization of the energy consumption of software with the goal of empowering both software engineers and users to make educated decisions about libraries, code snippets, and software in order to save energy along with carbon emissions. While the firmware of battery-powered embedded devices and the OS running on your smartphone are typically optimized for low power consumption in order to extend the battery life, the same can not be said of most software running on SBCs, desktop computers, and servers. But there are still benefits of having power-optimized programs on this type of hardware including lower electricity bills, a lower carbon footprint, and potentially quieter devices since the cooling fan may not have to be turned on as often. The Green Metrics Tool aims to help in that regard. The developers explain how that works: […]

FOSDEM 2023 schedule – Open-source Embedded, Mobile, IoT, Arm, RISC-V, etc… projects

FOSDEM 2023

After two years of taking place exclusively online, FOSDEM 2023 is back in Brussels, Belgium with thousands expected to attend the 2023 version of the “Free and Open Source Developers’ European Meeting” both onsite and online. FOSDEM 2023 will take place on February 4-5 with 776 speakers, 762 events, and 63 tracks. As usual, I’ve made my own little virtual schedule below mostly with sessions from the Embedded, Mobile and Automotive devroom, but also other devrooms including “Open Media”, “FOSS Educational Programming Languages devroom”, “RISC-V”, and others. FOSDEM Day 1 – Saturday February 4, 2023 10:30 – 10:55 – GStreamer State of the Union 2023 by Olivier Crête GStreamer is a popular multimedia framework making it possible to create a large variety of applications dealing with audio and video. Since the last FOSDEM, it has received a lot of new features: its RTP & WebRTC stack has greatly improved, Rust […]

GL.iNet Beryl AX OpenWrt router review – WiFi 6 performance, repeater, NAS, and 4G hotspot modes

Power bank GL.iNet GL-MT3000 Beryl AX router

In the first part of the review of GL.iNet GL-MT3000 “Beryl AX” pocket-size WiFi 6 OpenWrt router we had a look at the specifications, the package content, and the hardware design with a teardown of the little router. I’ve now had more time to play with the router focusing the review on WiFi 6 performance, and some of its functions such as repeater, NAS, and 4G hotspot. The router also supports VPN client and server modes, the Tor network, and Adguard Home, but I’ll invite readers to check out the GL.iNet Brume 2 security gateway review since I went through all these, and the hardware is very similar minus wireless connectivity. Initial setup of the Beryl AX router If you connect an Ethernet cable to the router you can switch to step two. If you only rely on WiFi for the setup that works too as the Beryl AX router […]

conga-HPC/cRLS Raptor Lake COM-HPC Client module supports up to 128GB DDR5 RAM

Congatec conga HPC/cRLS COM HPC Client Size C Raptor Lake CPU

Congatec conga-HPC/cRLS is a COM-HPC Client Size C computer-on-module based on a 13th gen Intel Raptor Lake processor with support for up to 128GB DDR5 memory through four SO-DIMM sockets. The COM-HPC module also provides up to three DDI display interfaces, two 2.5GbE networking interfaces with TSN support, two SATA storage interfaces, and a range of PCIe Gen 3, 4, and 5 interfaces through the two 400-pin connectors defined in the COM-HPC standard. conga-HPC/cRLS specifications: Raptor Lake-S SoC (one or the other) Intel Core i3-13100E with 4x P-cores @ 3.3GHz / 4.4GHz, 12 MB cache, Intel UHD Graphics 730; PBP: 65W Intel Core i5-13400E with 6x P-cores @ 2.4GHz / 4.6GHz, 4x E-cores @ 1.5GHz / 3.3GHz, 20MB cache, Intel UHD Graphics 730; PBP: 65W Intel Core i7-13700E with 8x P-cores @ 1.9GHz / 5.1GHz, 8x E-cores @ 1.3GHz / 3.9GHz, 30MB cache, Intel UHD Graphics 770; PBP: 65W Intel […]

U-boot now supports booting Linux from an HTTP server

U-Boot HTTP

Up until now, U-boot would only support the User datagram protocol (UDP) allowing for TFTP and NFS boot, but Linaro has now added support for TCP and HTTP in U-boot in order to boot Linux from common web servers. TFTP boot from U-boot has been supported for years, as around the year 2006 I remember implementing TFTP Linux boot for a Karaoke system in order to lower the BoM cost by selecting a smaller flash device, and I also explained how to boot Linux on a TV box with TFTP back in 2014. This requires installing a TFTP server on your server, which is quite a trivial task, but HTTP servers are omnipresent, so it’s a welcome addition to U-boot. If you want to use HTTP to boot Linux, it needs to be enabled in the U-boot config:

The top and bottom options are pretty obvious, and the second […]

$199+ Morefine M9 mini PC is powered by an Intel Processor N100 Alder Lake-N processor

Morefine M9

Morefine M9 is one of the first mini PCs I’ve seen sold with the 6W Intel Processor N100 Alder Lake-N quad-core processor and the price is not too bad with $199 asked for a barebone model on Aliexpress. The mini PC supports up to 32GB DDR4 RAM, is sold up with up to 1TB NVMe SSD, and features two 4K-capable HDMI 2.0 ports, 2.5 Gbps Gigabit Ethernet, a WiFi 6 & Bluetooth 5.2 module, as well as four USB 3.2 ports. Morefine M9 specifications: SoC – Intel Processor N100 quad-core Alder Lake-N processor @ up to 3.4 GHz (Turbo) with 6MB cache, 24EU Intel HD graphics; TDP: 6W System Memory – Up to 32GB DDR4-3200MHz Storage M.2 2280 PCIe/NVMe socket fitted 128GB, 256GB, 512GB, or 1TB SSD M.2 2242 SATA socket Video Output – 2x HDMI 2.0b ports up to 4Kp60; dual independent display support Audio – 1x audio jack […]

TerraMaster F4-423 review – A low-power 4-bay NAS tested with Unraid

Terramaster F4-423 NAS review

Hey Karl here. The timing couldn’t have been more opportune when I was asked to review the TerraMaster F4-423 4-bay NAS. Let me explain why. I run Unraid as my OS of choice for my home lab. I have found it easy to maintain and hard to break. My old rig had a 3900X with 3 cores, 6 threads dedicated to docker containers, and the remaining cores running VM’s. It has been a fun and learning experience. I have run it with several different VM configurations over the past few years. The majority of the time I ran 2 VM’s. One personal and one work and I would RDP over to the work VM. If I wanted to game I had a third gaming VM and allocated all resources to it. It’s not super convenient and as convoluted as it sounds. But recently I moved back to my company-provided laptop […]

HiFive Pro P550 “Horse Creek” RISC-V motherboard with 16GB RAM to launch this summer

HiFive Pro P550 Horse Creek SBC

SiFive HiFive Pro P550 RISC-V motherboard based on Intel “Horse Creek” quad-core SiFive Performance P550 processor will launch this summer with 16GB DDR5 memory, two PCIe expansion slots, Gigabit Ethernet networking, USB 3.x ports, and on-board graphics. Intel Horse Creek platform was first revealed when SiFive unveiled the SiFive Performance P550 64-bit RISC-core with Cortex-A75 class performance in June 2021. The companies then demonstrated an internal Intel Horse Creek board with 8GB DDR5 and PCIe Gen5 at the Intel Innovation 2022 Developer Conference last October, and it looks like the 7nm RISC-V processor, manufactured with an Intel 4 process, will finally be available to developers this summer with the launch of the HiFive Pro P550 motherboard/development system.   HiFive Pro P550 preliminary specifications: SoC – Intel-SiFive Horse Creek SoC equipped with 4x SiFive Performance P550 RV64GBC RISC-V cores with a 13-stage, 3-issue, out-of-order (OoO) pipeline GPU – “On-board graphics” [Update: […]

EmbeddedTS embedded systems design