BSDCan 2007 006

Howard is an itinerant protocol/device driver hacker with a couple decades experience with BSD based OSes dating back to BSD Vaxen and SunOS on 68K based VME boards in the early to mid '80s. He is particularly cognizant of the difference between 20 years experience and 1 year of experience 20 times. The use of embedded BSD in "software defined" hardware environments (such as FPGAs) that will exhibit a plethora of distinctly hostile behaviours entails a number of engineering decisions and trade-offs that are decidedly outside the norm of conventional hardware/software systems design. We'd like to share what we have learned about embedding BSD, and how we solve some of the problems that are related to the use of BSD operating systems in some rather unanticipated environments.