Ian McDonnell

Consulting Software Engineer

Objectives

Summary

Skills

Applications/technologies: Internet client/server and systems; LAN and WAN network protocols, applications, access and connectivity; protocol gateways, routers, switches and interworking devices; network appliance, test equipment; network security. Device drivers: PCI configuration; IDE, SCSI, Fast/Gigabit Ethernet, FPGA, CPLD, Co-processor, Fibre Channel. SoC peripherals, microcontrollers. Embedded systems; UNIX daemon, kernel and driver code, BSD, Linux. Real-time, high-performance and multi-threaded data processing.

Internet applications, protocols and server implementation experience with: SLIP, PPP, SMTP, MIME, FTP, Telnet, RPC, NQS, NFS, SOCKS4, Kerberos, L2TP, PPPoE, CGI, HTML, TCP, UDP and IPv4, IPv6, routing protocols, RIP, OSPF, BGP, QoS, MPLS. Datalink technologies: RS232, V.24/V.28/V.35, Modems, HDLC, LLC/MAC, X.25, Ethernet (10/100,1G), ATM, SONET, DSL, high-speed proprietary interfaces, SPI, i2c, CAN.

Platforms: UNIX (application and kernel), SVR4, BSD, Linux, Solaris, SunOS, UNICOS, HP-UX, AIX, IRIX, VMS, Windows/NT, ChorusOS, pSos, VxWorks, eCos. POSIX and X/Open system interfaces; interprocess communication services: streams, sockets, TLI, NLI, multi-threading, RTLinux, SMP, shared memory, file systems, semaphores etc.

Programming: C, C++, shell, perl, expect, Tcl/tk, lex, yacc, etc., various assembler & microcode, Intel x86, PowerPC, ARM, XScale, PCI, PCMCIA, CardBus, i2c, Flash, EEPROM, MicroWire, 64-bit systems, 32-bit SoC and microcontrollers.

Tools/Environment: UNIX, X-Window System, VNC, KDE, make, GNU tools and cross compilers, Binutils, ld-scripts, GDB (local/remote), DDD, RCS, CVS, Clearcase, Purify, UML, ROSE, Octopus, Gilb/Fagan Inspection, Xray, ICE, Sniffers, HP/Tek Analyzers/Scopes, ARM Metrowerks IDE, EmbeddedICE, BDI2000 JTAG.

Contact Information

Experience

A Priori America, Inc. Winchester, Massachusetts.
Freelance Consulting Software and Systems Engineer, 1994 - date

Bright Star Engineering Inc., Woburn, MA 2/2004 - 3/2007


Bright Star is a manufacturer of small form factor single board computers and platforms.

Responsibilites included platform and driver development for PowerPC and ARM based GNU/Linux SBC designs, all aspects from hardware bring-up, bootstrap to multi-threaded application-specific realtime protocol implementation. Vehicle diagnostic tool development incorporating SBC board design and main i/o board development, incorporating wireless LAN, signal multplexers, PIC microcontroller, LCD, Keypad, realtime vehicle control, diagnostic protocols and electrical interfaces - over 5000 units shipped, see DCC Tools.

• Development from scratch of Flash-based GNU/Linux SBC platforms.
• Processor architectures: ARM7, ARM9, XScale, PPC603e, MIPS.
• System-on-Chip (SoC): embedded Linux using Atmel AT91SAM9260, Philips LH79524, FreeScale MPC5200, AMD Alchemy AU1100 chips.
• Configured and build GNU GCC cross-compiler tool chain for target architectures.
• Developed source code management framework, make system and cross-compiling environment.
• Designed and wrote device drivers for: NAND filesystems, Controller Area Network (CAN) interfaces, serial peripheral interface (SPI) controllers and attached devices, LCD displays (interface with linux framebuffer), CPLD devices, analog-to-digital (ADC) converters, timers, RTC, I2C controllers and devices, SoC GPIO, SD/MMC card storage, watchdog, realtime timestamped serial comms, ethernet MAC and PHY MII, USB host and USB devices.
• Integrated both Conexant (PCI) and Marvell (compact-flash, SDIO) 802.11 Wireless chipsets and the vendor-provided drivers with various SoC bus, interrupt, and GPIO architectures. Wrote the low-level I/O layers providing the data transfer and interrupt handling primitives underpinning the vendor-provided drivers. Integrated with Linux Wireless Extensions and WPA supplicant.
• Linux memory technology devices (MTD) including JFFS2 and YAFFS NAND filesystems (small and large page devices), chip mapping drivers, developed flash labeling, partitioning and management utilities.
• RTLinux (FSMLabs) integration with Linux host, RTL driver and RTL application development. Developed a dual RTLinux and Linux driver/device architecture to support shared access to devices and common hardware interfaces.
• Developed fast Flash-based boot mechanisms: under 3 seconds with kernel, full GNU glibc runtime environment all loaded (SDRAM) with root filesystem and busybox.
• Product recovery: secondary, smaller footprint system, with high levels of functionality for network-based software reinstallation and in-field recovery.
• Product firmware upgrade mechanisms: web push, CLI etc.
• User-space: system start-up procedures and scripts, multithreaded (pthreads) application development, driver/application API, daemons.
• Use of JTAG, Abatron BDI2000 and ARM EmbeddedICE tools for low-level debugging, initial program loading, board bring-up etc.
• Hardware design review, bus and peripheral attachment, interrupt routing and hardware/software trade-off.
• Hardware verification, diagnostics and manufacturing test software design and coding.
• Bare-metal bootstrap development: including CPU, clock, bus, SoC pinning configuration, NAND boot and product recovery mechanism.
• Das U-Boot bootstrap: added support for processor and board specific hardware initialization (SDRAM, bus, clocks etc), additional commands, warm-start variables and watchdog recovery.
• Warm booting of OS and filesystem images from a running system; integrated with web-push to boot upgrade images without requiring any changes to persistent storage/flash; providing rollback on upgrade failure.
• eCos C++ based LPC2194 microcontroller firmware development for a CAN bus multiplexer switch, less than 16kB SRAM footprint.
• Designed and implemented a CAN based firmware update protocol and utility for in-circuit-programming of the LPC2194 microcontroller.

Seranoa Networks Inc., Boxborough, MA 1/2002 - 9/2003


Network Switch Development - Embedded Linux on both PowerPC and StrongARM architectures: Motorola MPC8260 PowerQUICC-II, Intel IXP1200/StrongARM network processor, Flash, Ethernet, PCI, C, C++, ARM assembler, GNU tools, CVS, Bugzilla, KDE.

• Contributed to Switching product hardware and software design reviews.
• Evaluated both MontaVista and BlueCat Linux distributions for embedded Linux on StrongARM.
• Firmware Development:
  • Configured and built GCC and binutils for big-endian StrongARM development.
  • Designed and coded IXP1200/StrongARM network processor initialization, memory configuration, I/O and PCI configuration.
  • Hardware bring-up and trouble shooting of IXP1200 processor, Flash-ROM, SRAM, SDRAM, i82559 and 8260 FEC Ethernet chips.
  • StrongARM TFTP bootloader development. Coded Flash-ROM programming and update utility. Integrated bootloader with Linux OS. Built and modified newlib C library for big-endian ARM, modified i82559 Ethernet firmware driver to operate with IXP1200 PCI.
• Embedded Linux:
  • Merged code from three Linux kernel versions (2.5, 2.4, 2.3) to produce an operational big-endian IXP1200 StrongARM kernel for Intel's IXP12EB and Seranoa's WANport boards.
  • Built, integrated and trimmed system shared libraries for small-footprint embedded use.
  • Configured, built, fixed and modified Busybox (embedded Linux commands) for use on big-endian StrongARM.
  • Developed system boot and initialization scripts for embedded Linux on both PPC and StrongARM processors.
• Linux driver development:
  • Developed drivers for IXP1200 - interfaced microcode-based data-plane with Linux protocol stack. Developed switch and forwarding information base driver. .
  • Coded initialization and link-state management for IXF1002 dual Gigabit Ethernet driver and wrote link-state monitor application.
  • Enhanced Linux MPC8260 FEC Ethernet driver - added support for Broadcom BCM5221 PHY, media mode tracking, auto-negotiate/manual PHY control and fixed cache coherency issues.
  • Enhanced both MPC8260 FEC and i82559 Ethernet drivers to support jumbo Ethernet frames.
  • Wrote co-processor and GBIC control PLD driver.
• Protocol development:
  • Integrated MPLS 0.9 for Linux with 2.4 and 2.3 kernels, fixed bugs. Created a new Linux socket protocol type for user-space MPLS applications. Created MPLS client API.
  • Designed and coded a custom ARP resolver daemon providing next-hop address tracking for Gigabit Ethernet channels and IXP1200 microcode forwarding engines.
  • Designed and implemented custom inter-processor bridging and tunneling kernel modules for Ethernet, Frame Relay and MPLS traffic.
  • Coded kernel module to forward ISIS protocol PDUs between WAN and LAN ports. Extended Linux Ethernet LLC to support jumbo frame encapsulation.
• System Integration:
  • Coded SunRPC based interprocess and co-processor control services including modified SunRPC libraries for tight control of timeouts, retransmission and reply caching.
  • Developed several system control, device, and protocol trace, system test and debug utilities.

Zetari Inc., Waltham, MA 5/2000 - 9/2001


System architecture, design and development of a high-density integrated server, NAS and switch system (NetBSD, SA-110, 21285, EBSA-285, Flash, SCSI, Fibre Channel, Ethernet, PCI configuration, C, C++).

• Member of a core team defining overall system design and architecture, including: processors, connectivity, peripherals etc.
• Contributed to the selection of operating systems, hardware/software trade-offs, peripheral silicon and driver selection for both StrongARM and IA32 x86 processor elements; Ethernet, SCSI and Fibre Channel peripherals.
• Ported NetBSD/arm32 to proprietory StrongARM-based control processor, including: hardware bring-up, SA-110 Footbridge 21285 programming, Flash-based board and PCI device initialization and bootstrap coding.
• Modified and supported NetBSD/arm32 as a platform for system control and network management components: PCI drivers, VM configuration, I/O mapping, bootstrap, added support for 82371 ISA/IDE/USB and PCI-based IPC to attached co-processor.
• Developed abstract, object-oriented, UML models for network attached storage (NAS) subsystem. Produced designs mapping existing NAS technology to an abstract model with simplified use and management cases.
• Supported hardware bring-up of NAS subsystem including: BIOS selection, BIOS vendor relations/specification, NFSv3, PCI-bus/device configuration, Fibre Channel, SCSI, RAID, and Ethernet device firmware Flash and EEPROM programming (MicroWire programming utility development).
• Worked with hardware engineers to bring-up Linux, FreeBSD and Windows 2000 on custom 815e Pentium boards. Built custom OS versions; maintained OS source repositories, bug-fixes and version control. Modified Linux LILO to support unattended reset, reboot, OS and disk partition selection as signaled by a control processor.
• Participated in InfiniBand channel adaptor chip selection and InfiniBand/Ethernet switching platform architecture. Examined InfiniBand specifications and developed product functional, architectural and design specifications.

Nokia, Burlington, MA 2/1998 - 5/2000


Internet-access product development. FreeBSD-based operating system and ChorusOS (realtime micro-kernel Posix/UNIX); FreeBSD and proprietary networking code; custom hardware; (L2TP, PPPoE, IP, RIP, OSPF, PPP, Diffserv, ATM, STM-1, OC-3 V.35, T1, E1, xDSL, PowerPC, BSD, C, C++).

• Principal designer/developer of L2TP Access Concentrator (LAC) subsystem development, including PPPoE (RFC2516) and PPP encapsulation, PPPoE session management, L2TP (IETF-draft) tunneling and zero-copy packet switching. ATM and Fast Ethernet data-links.
• Implemented queuing layer for the Internet differentiated services (RFC2475) expedited forwarding (diffserv-phb-ef draft) quality of service (QoS). Modified ATM, T1/E1 and Fast Ethernet drivers and extended the data-link/driver API to support multiple output queues.
• ATM device driver performance analysis and subsequent optimization - re-design and coding of I/O path for Rockwell/Conexant Bt8233 ATM SAR device. Achieved line-speed packet (cell) rates with small-sized packets. Designed and developed an ATM test and evaluation tool used for ATM hardware verification and to measure and tune ATM driver and system performance and efficiency.
• Coded Internet Protocol fast-path forwarding. Integrated and optimized forwarding interface with underlying ATM datalink and routing base. Enhanced ChorusOS networking modules to support Internet CIDR routing scheme.
• Built and configured Linux-based boot facility for diskless line-card bootstrap and configuration.
• Ported Internet routing daemon and protocols, including RIP, OSPF, BGP, to distributed router. Designed and implemented route distribution components. Integrated routing information base with distributed forwarding engine and information base.
• Reviewed design and implementation of Layer-3 Cross-Connect, PPP datalink, and DHCP subsystems. Provided mentoring and guidance to engineers working with IP, data communications, operating system and network management components.

BBN, Cambridge, MA (now Genuity) 6/97

• Technical lead for a large-scale firewall monitoring system over Internet wide-area communications, Kerberos authentication/encryption and proprietary firewall management components (C, C++, Perl, Kerberos, SOCKS4, TCP/IP, UNIX, Solaris, BSDi).

Mentor Graphics, Billerica, MA 5/97

• Consulted on set-up and management in remote office of network workstations and configuration for Solaris NIS+, DNS and SMTP, LAN/WAN frame-relay, T1, and router. Produced PPP dial-up and network routing management tool.

Unimax Systems Corporation, Minneapolis, MN 4/96 - 4/97

• Designed and developed a secure on-line product licensing system and tools incorporating MD5 digest and MIME running on Linux, and created a Web-based product license service with Perl HTML/CGI programs.
• Analyzed software components for a telephone switch management product to identify areas critical to performance and reliability, reported recommendations and priorities (C, C++, Windows/NT/95).
• Created a modem diagnostic tool with GUI for use on Windows/NT/95 systems to aid field support of dial-up and dialed modems used with polling and management of telephone switches.
• Designed and developed an Internet Telnet gateway providing network access to remote telephone switches over a mix of dial-up and network connections.
• Architect and consultant developing a Windows32 agent to poll remote telephony devices and retrieve and distribute alarm messages to Internet-based management stations.

Giesecke & Devrient Engineering, formerly Ektron/Kodak, Bedford, MA 11/95 - 4/96

• Conducted performance and benchmark measurements and analysis to locate and measure areas critical to data acquisition and image processing performance (C, RPC, NFS, X11, UNIX, Solaris, SunOS).
• Consulted on various aspects of distributed processing including: interprocess communication, realtime RPC synchronization, threading, realtime X11 window client communications and developed control programs for a multi-computer currency print inspection system, running on SunOS, Solaris, pSOS and proprietary systems. (C, RPC, NFS, X11, UNIX, Solaris, SunOS).

Sun MicroSystems/Morgan Stanley, Chelmsford, MA 10/95 - 11/95

• Analyzed disk drive, filesystem and NFS/AFS network performance for a large installation of Solaris and AIX workstations and servers. Contributed data, findings and recommendations to a report. Presented and explained significant results with end-user management and system administrators (NFS, AFS, UNIX, Solaris, AIX).

House of Fraser, Information Systems, Swindon, UK

• Consulted on TCP/IP X.25 migration, Internet and ISO LLC protocols, bridging and encapsulation, network architecture and design.

Retail Logic Ltd., Camberley, UK

• Designer and principal developer of ASPEN an AIX/RS6000 UNIX-based remote EPOS terminal polling system for the automatic retrieval and distribution of EPOS data files. Created for a large UK retailer and used to poll hundreds of sites nightly.

Bull Information Systems, Hemel Hempsted, UK

• Designer and developer of network and device communications subsystems running on UNIX for back-office POS data and information processing system using TCP, LLC1, LLC2 on Solaris.

Retail Logic Ltd., Camberley, UK

• Network software component design and implementation for SOLVE/SE, an electronic funds transfer (EFT) and authorization concentrator and routing system.

AEG/MODCOMP, Wokingham, UK

• Interface design for 4GL database to X400 MTA gateway.

• Designed and developed a new generation of file transfer services (FTA) for Cray supercomputers and networked workstation systems running UNIX. Supporting Internet FTP, ISO FTAM and additional proprietary protocols.
• Originated ideas and designs for network authentication and authorization schemes for secure network file access and transfer.
• Led the development of a distributed (client/server) user interface for the Cray supercomputer NQS batch system. Implemented portable NQS protocol modules for use in Cray's networked queuing environment (NQE).
• Presented technical seminars and product information to customers, user groups and corporate management.
• Liaised with customer analysts to identify and define user requirements.
• Practiced Gilb quality assurance and project management techniques for software development cycles.
• Participated in IEEE POSIX and International Standards Organization meetings.
• Speaker at Cray annual Technical Symposium in recognition of new technology contributions to the company.

• Designed and coded a high-performance TCP/IP network driver supporting communications between Digital VAX and Cray supercomputers.
• Created a network tunneling interface for ULTRIX and a DECnet tunneling application which was used to provide connectivity to remote IP islands over the corporate DECnet WAN.
• Specified and developed the installation and verification tools for TCP/IP and DECnet networked products. Managed the testing and certification projects for an electronic mail gateway product. Coordinated product certification, field-test and product release activities.
• Represented Digital in the X/Open working group for the verification of systems.
• Trained customer service and product support personnel in product usage, theory of operation, and problem diagnosis.
• System-managed development group VAX/ULTRIX VAX/VMS and workstation systems.

• Designed and coded the microcode routines for the low-level control of an array processor.
• Produced and presented customer technical training courses.
• Developed array processor I/O channel driver and system software for state-of-the-art realtime data acquisition and signal processing applications.
• Designed and developed VAX/VMS driver extensions and Fortran API for multi-channel data acquisition system.

• Developed hardware diagnostics for an AMD bit-slice pipelined arithmetic processor with MC68000 CPU and I/O elements in a high-performance array processor system.
• Worked with hardware development and manufacturing teams to trouble-shoot system prototypes and manufacturing problems.
• Produced and presented customer training classes in hardware failure diagnosis and trouble-shooting.
• Ported software development tools, written in C, from VAX/VMS to an embedded MC68000 based system.
• Developed an HP-UX file server to support file access from an attached diskless processor.
• Designed and implemented a high-speed I/O port driver and application program library interface for a pipelined arithmetic processor.

• Repaired data acquisition and industrial control and measurement systems.
• Built module and device test equipment.
• Produced demonstration software for product exhibitions (Fortran, Array Processor, RSX-11, PDP-11).

Education

Undergraduate Computer Science, Faculty of Natural Science, 1980 - 1983.
Special interest in operating systems and communications. 3rd year projects: Intel iAPX432 processor simulator and Rugby time server for Cambridge token-ring network and BSD 4.1 UNIX. Treasurer, engineer and presenter at the University radio station.