[microblaze-uclinux] Introducing the PetaLogix team

[John Williams <john.williams@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi folks,

It seems a good time to give an update on what's happening with PetaLogix, and how I see that positively impacting on support provided here on the list.

Just over 12 months ago PetaLogix spun out from the University of Queensland, and for that time I've been working basically full time in PetaLogix.  We now have four employees, a couple of whom you've already met.

I'm very happy to report that Michal Simek, MicroBlaze kernel hacker extraordinaire, is working with us full time on a Xilinx-funded project to bring the MicroBlaze kernel up to mainline, including upstream submission to kernel.org.  Michal is also the u-boot maintainer for MicroBlaze, so he's a very useful person to have on the team.

Wendy Liang, a former student of mine from the University, joined us last year as a hardware engineer and also does system level work including board bringup, device drivers, and all aspects of the MicroBlaze Linux platform.

Most recently, Karen Whelan joined us to focus on the business development side.

While we're taking steps to raise our level of engagement here on the list, I would also like to say thanks to the community members who are stepping in and answering questions etc, and thanks to those finding and reporting bugs and submitting patches.

We're working to be more responsive to test errors when reported, and get your patches into the tree and out to other users.  Ultimately we'd like to have a public-facing issue tracking system, however we're not quite ready for that one yet.

Long term, we see MicroBlaze kernel development moving to the kernel.org mainline, rather than internally in a PetaLinux tree.  I think we will see tremendous benefit from being in mainline, and thanks to Xilinx for being persuaded that this was an important goal to pursue.

Anyway that's enough for now.  We're working on a bunch of exciting things that we'll be able to reveal over the next few months, but in the meantime, welcome to the newcomers, thanks to the veterans for sticking around, and I hope that the wonderful combination of Embedded Linux and programmable FPGAs can help all of us weather the global financial storm and emerge ready for world domination!

Cheers,

John
-- 
John Williams, PhD, B.Eng, B.IT
PetaLogix - Linux Solutions for a Reconfigurable World
w: www.petalogix.com  p: +61-7-30090663  f: +61-7-30090663