Re: Porting Kernel / Drivers to BeagleBoard

"Jim Burnes" <[email protected]> wrote:
> It should be able to run a cross-compiled kernel and Haiku OS.
> 
> This would be a significant amount of work, but maybe not impossible.
> 
> 1. You would have to port the kernel.  I've done some ARM assembler.
> 2. You would have to create keyboard / video / disk and perhaps USB 
> drivers.
> 
> What other issues would you look at?  Probably some sort of custom 
> boot
> loader?

That what you would start with, I guess. I don't know if this board 
uses U-boot, but chances are good that it does. In that case, you would 
need to port our existing boot loader to U-boot, eventually with custom 
ARM parts, depending on how feature rich U-boot is.
You should get it to the point where it can load the kernel (with stubs 
for ARM). When you got there, you should then implement the kernel 
specifics one after the other.

> In addition to reading the kernel sources, is there a hackers, 
> porting or
> architectural guide to the kernel?

I'm afraid there isn't, however, the kernel has a defined interface for 
the arch part.
Generally, you would try to put platform depending stuff into the boot 
loader (under src/system/boot/platform/), and only architecture 
depending stuff into the kernel (as much as possible, you'll probably 
still need some sort of platform depending debugging capabilities, such 
as serial debug output).

The drivers should be put to the general drivers - if they are really 
all architecture depending, then you could put them into a separate 
directory (like arch/arm/).

Does the board has a PCI bus, or does it use something proprietary? In 
the former case, chances are good that you can reuse many existing 
drivers, for example for USB, and IDE.

Bye,
   Axel.



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