Author: Andrew Jeffery

Recently we've been diving into Deku, both working with it to implement an NVMe-MI emulator and various PLDM specifications, and working on it to bend it to our needs.

It's a project that sits in an interesting niche for embedded and systems work - providing declarative tools for bespoke communication and storage formats. As a small demonstration we'll explore using it to parse some ELF headers.

Maintaining a long-lived series of changes against a fast-moving open source project can be a headache. Ideally we wouldn't put ourselves in this situation - instead we'd work with upstream to merge the changes and find better things to do with life. However, that's not always feasible.

Some of the bigger headaches are caused by merge conflicts. Sometimes conflicts are invisible as they are solved by clever merge strategies. Other times there's been significant rework of the code on both sides and you are forced to demonstrate you know what you're doing.