Modern City Life

Porting the Linux kernel to a new ARM board

The Linux kernel supports a lot of different CPU architectures. Each of them is maintained by a different group of contributors. In our case, Russell King leads a group of developers who actively port Linux to ARM-based devices. The ARM developers base their work on the upstream Linux kernel as published by Linus Torvalds and develop ARM-specific patches for it. These source code patches enable new hardware support, fix existing bugs affecting the ARM architecture in the upstream kernel, and do many other things besides. The organization of the source code and the methods to port the Linux kernel to a new board are very architecture dependent. ARM relies on source code only. This post is focused on the ARM architecture only. › Continue reading

Tags: architecture, arm, board, kernel, linux, machine, porting

Linux on an AT91SAM9 Microcontroller

My goal with this post is to centralize some useful information about how to cross-compile an entire Linux system to an Atmel AT91SAM microcontroller. There is no perfect-match, maintained Linux distribution for an ARM9 embedded microcontroller (with MMU) out there, so one has to build one. Hereafter I’m going to describe the process step by step, but I will also provide the shell scripts to make life easier.

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Tags: ARM9, AT91, linux, patch

Installing GNU ARM toolchain on Linux

I have recently designed and built a custom board using the AT91SAM9XE microcontoller and was searching for an appropriate operating system with proper support for my embedded system. I choosed the embedded version of Linux, because of the linux4sam distribution optimized especially to ATMEL ARM devices,  no royalties or licensing fees, a stable kernel and a large support base. To be able to cross-compile the kernel, I needed an ARM toolchain.

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Tags: arm, binutils, gcc, gdb, linux, newlib, toolchain