Due to its low barrier to entry (freely available source code) and ease of customization, Linux has been shipped in many consumer devices. The advantages of embedded Linux over proprietary embedded operating systems include multiple suppliers for software, development and support; no royalties or licensing fees; a stable kernel; the ability to read, modify and redistribute the source code.

At Emdalo Technologies, Linux is used on a daily basis and the team has extensive experience in developing on, administering, programming, securing and maintaining linux-based operating systems, applications and technology stacks. We actively engage with the open source community including upstreaming device drivers to the Linux kernel.

RISC-V is emerging as a secure, flexible and cost-effective solution for a myriad of embedded computing needs. Similar to Linux, the core RISC-V technology is unencumbered by patents or trade-barriers. It can be developed and extended upon as desired. The specification itself supports extensibility, e.g. adding bespoke CPU instructions and/or FPGA-based hardware accelerators. This allows future-proofing of reconfigurable hardware devices, where software updates can extend hardware usefulness while also optimizing for performance/power consumption in a dynamic environment.

Technological revolutions don't happen overnight. It takes a vast ecosystem of software to build modern internet-connected electronic devices. We've been on the bleeding edge of innovation and development within the RISC-V ecosystem for a while now but the fruits of that labour are paying off - the bleeding edge is becoming a new standard. Here's a brief summary of some of the things we've been getting up to:

• Developing linux device drivers
• Board/hardware emulation with QEMU
• Distro management with Buildroot / Yocto
• Automated testing with Jenkins / Hudson
• Security hardening and application sandboxing
• Upstreaming patches to open source projects
• Inter-CPU communication and syncrhonization
• Safe and reversible over-the-air firmware updates
• Bottleneck identification and performance optimization

It takes a diverse set of skills to create modern electronic and consumer devices. And for each technology decision along the development path there are many choices and cost/benefit trade-offs to consider. Having the complete view of a full technology stack allows for smarter, better and faster decicions to be made thus improving the time to market for new products.

Diversity in both understanding and application of technology has been a core principle of the culture at Emdalo Technologies. Technology doesn't stand still, and neither do we. Whether it's tracking the current state of the art in machine learning, trying new programming languages, investigating blockchain applications or even just reducing smart-device power consumption through innovation, clients benefit from the cumulative and diverse experiences of our entire team.

We consider information security a cornerstone of the computing experience. If you don't know where to start with securing your network communications, we can advise on the many options and ease-of-use/security tradeoffs. For more informed customers, we can offer advice to account for recent advances, as different algorithms or designs are compromised.

We have expereience in analyzing different threat scenarios and securing those use cases. We have worked with various technologies, such as:

• IPSec and SSL/TLS software stacks.
• Adding hardware accelerators to both IPSec and TLS.
• Public Key Infrastructure (PKI): certificate generation, distribution, managing root Certificate Authority lists.
• Optimization for resource-limited platforms.
• Elliptic Curve Cryptography: why and how.
• Implementing custom, non-standardised, encryption and DRM schemes using basic cryptographic building blocks (e.g. curve25519).