This week I traveled to Madrid where the 7th White Rabbit workshop was held. It was a two day event where the White Rabbit community presented all the latest development efforts, installations, the White Rabbit standardization process and much more. It was amazing to find a broad range of experiments using or considering to use this technology, the applications, the new PCB designs to come, etc.
Apart from Research institutions like CERN, GSI, DESY, NIKHEF among others, there were a lot of HW companies that design, manufacture and support all the required boards needed by the experiments. They were showing their products like the White Rabbit switch and Sevensols's White Rabbit starter kit.
I went there to present, together with Javier Muñoz, the latest work Igalia's OS team did. We spoke about testing and how virtual HW helps on this task. We showed our experience on the FMC TDC driver development, the FMC TDC's virtual model and its integration in a testing suite with continuous integration.
Also, some software companies were there, like Gnudd represented by Alessandro Rubini, Integrasys and others. They were describing their work on the software part: FMC bus drivers, sdbfs filesystem, White Rabbit switch software, etc.
I found this event very interesting to share ideas, talk about technologies and plan new designs to improve all the White Rabbit stack.
I wouldn't like to finish this post without saying anything about the organization. It was a perfect event: CDTI made a great work hosting the event at their offices and BE/CO/HT section at CERN organizing the rest.