About Kristof Provost...
Embedded software engineer
Cisco Systems bvba, Kortrijk
November 2007 - January 2011
Development work on D9900 (Digital Content Manager). DCM is a "head-end in a box" device. It is a high density MPEG multiplexer with advanced features such as scrambling, transrating, splicing and transcoding. It consists of multiple PowerPC (and ARM) processors which coordinate multiple FPGAs responsible for the routing and processing of MPEG/DVB/ATSC data. All processors run Linux and communicate over an internal IP network.
- Specification of new features based on customer requests.
- Design of new features and enhancements, producing UML class and sequence diagrams.
- Development of multi-threaded C++ code for a Montavista Linux PowerPC platform
- Regression tests for new features and bug fixes (Python)
- Improvements and enhancements to the regression test framework
- Design, implementation and testing of new SNMP MIBs. Maintenance and improvement of the SNMP agent
- Improvements of the GNU Make and Autotools based build system resulting in a halving of the build times.
Build manager
Thomson Telecom Edegem
September 2004 - October 2007
Support of the xDSL home gateway development team. The Technicolor gateways (formerly SpeedTouch) are ADSL(2+)/VDSL/SDSL/... gateway devices for consumers and small businesses. Many of the devices supported advanced features like IPSec, or VOIP (H232/SIP/MGCP). Low-end devices are based on the RTEMS operating system while some of the high end devices were based on Linux (custom build based around busybox and uClibc).
- Responsible for the reproducible and timely delivery of firmware builds for up to 20 different hardware platforms, with up to three software versions for some platforms.
- Re-implemented and significantly extended internal website (Java servlets/JSP, with a MySQL back-end database) to track software changes and released builds. It was eventually extended to track the results of automated regression tests and the evolution of memory and flash usage.
- Assist developers with the ClearCase version control system, assist the off-site administration team.
- Migrated bug tracking system from ClearDDTS to ClearQuest.
- Support and enhancement of the build environment (based on ClearMake and the GNU toolchain)
- Upgraded gcc toolchain for RTEMS systems, resulting in a significant reduction of the binary size (allowing more features in low-cost platforms).