Hi Everyone,
This is chandru, I want to learn board specific package(BSP) for ARM processors under LINUX platform, please guide me "from where I need to start, what are the things I need to purchase" hoping to hear from you soon, thanks in advance.

Thanks
Chandru

Hello,

You haven't specified over which ARM processor you are working. There are lots of ARM processors available. You can start off with the Friendly ARM9 boards. A lot of BSP pertainig to friendly ARM mini2440 is provided at www.friendlyarm.net .

By definition, BSPs are very board-specific. There is much, much more to a borad that the CPU. For a board with an ARM CPU, that description still leaves a huge field of possibilities. Get a board and all of the documentation for the hardware. Start by figuring out how to install a bootloader. After that, your path should be much clearer.
Without knowing the details of your specific hardware, there is very little that someone can advise you on.
--- rod.

Thank you very much,
I am beginner to this domain and want to learn BSP programming(Device Drivers, Boot Loader etc) from scratch, and even I don't know what are the things that I need to purchase to start my learning process. About my background, am good in C and C++ coding, Micro-Controller and Micro-Processor architecture and assembly language, and I have basic idea of what device drivers, kernel is?(but didn't work on these stuffs) and I don't know much about ARM processors but I have strong knowledge of how a processor works, how device drivers interact, how interrupts are handled please suggest me the ARM processor which I can use at the beginning stage and what are the preparations that I need to do to become good BSP developer, kindly help me. Hope to hear from you soon.

Thanks
Chandru

Most hardware that you buy will already come with a BSP in some form. People using single board computers do not generally want the overhead of doing such work, and are interested only in the application-specific elements. This may involve creating drivers for custom hardware, or customizing the OS at the userspace level.

You can learn a lot of useful things without ever touching real hardware by using emulators such as Qemu. Many or even most people use a cross development environment for doing embedded systems work. The job of creating a cross development toolchain for your target architecture is an exercise worth pursuing early on in the process, and comes with its own set of challenges. My weapon of choice for such a project is the Crosstool-NG package. It allows you to create a cross toolchain on a conventional X86 Linux host. With it, you can start building kernels, drivers, and applications for a target SBC.

If you are looking for a real-world project, I'll throw out a suggestion that I would personally find useful: porting the open-source GPIB drivers for Linux to the Technologics Systems ARM-based family of SBCs. In particular, those GPIB drivers that use the ISA/PC104 interface would be of value to many, I suspect. This would be a smallish subset of the full driver package.

It sounds like you are equipped with a good knowledge base and aptitude for embedded systems work. Do you have access to diagnostics equipment such as a basic DVM, oscilloscope, and the capability to assemble cables and connectors? These kinds of things are invaluable to bringing up an untested system and debugging new driver software.

--- rod.

PS. This thread should probably be moved to 'embedded'.

Thank you very much for your valuable suggestion,
I go through the QEMU and it is really awesome, thank you again.


Thanks
Chandru