U-Boot is becoming the defacto standard among embedded bootloaders, from Embedded Linux to VxWorks 7 and even small solutions such as FreeRTOS. How can proprietary software work in this GPL environment? How does a device boot from NAND using U-Boot? This blog post focuses on these answers and more.

Acquiring software components for your embedded design can be a time consuming task. The right libraries can be purchased, but if changes are needed, the whole project may have to wait. On the other hand, a source code solution can require more knowledge, or even a dedicated resource. Which is the best solution for your design?

At Datalight, we frequently find ourselves helping customers on what we call 'rescue missions' – when a device is failing in the field and the design team is under pressure to quickly resolve a data corruption or data loss issue. Many times, the failure happens because data didn't get to the media, usually because a cache or other performance optimization has delayed those slow flash writes. In our recent presentation, we examined reliability on Linux with a focus on when the data is on the media.

When you spend as much of your time as we do in the depths of the storage stack, you become aware of nuances that are lost on those less well-versed in file systems and media drivers. Some products call themselves "flash file systems" yet offer absolutely no features that have anything to do with the flash memory. "How can that be" you ask, "are they lying?"

Last weekend, Linux kernel 4.17 was released, disappointing a few pundits who thought it should be kernel 5.0. Here are some of the exciting features in this release, and confirmation of something Datalight has always said.

We had some excellent questions in our April web seminar. These answers delve into removing USB media and corruption on flash media.

Last week, we recorded a web seminar of the talk Datalight gave at Embedded World 2018 on techniques for effective power interruption testing. There were some excellent questions at that session, and this blog post answers a few of them in more detail.

Datalight spoke at the 16th Embedded World Conference. For more news about the show, read our blog recap.

Recently a failed update once again emphasized the importance of testing all aspects of product updates before going live with them. This can be the best strategy to avoid angry users who quickly take to social media to express their frustrations.

Data corruption happens when the media or the file system fail in some way. While this is bad enough, there can be serious security complications afterwards. Our blog post looks at the problem and the solution.