How to Port Linux on ARM processor
 

Hi all,

I am very new in linux. Give some basic study materials of linux.
How can I port CentOS linux kernel to ARM LPC2478 ?

Thank you
Pinkesh shah

Porting is not for the faint hearted, or the inexperienced.
The kernel will compile for arm, but of course there will be significant differences from a x86 or x86_64 kernel. Instructions for porting generally are
1. get a compile environment for arm (hardest part)
2. Give it your best guess and compile
3. Keep fixing and repeating step 2 until it works

If you're new, better start with Debian, who do an arm port

You might want to take a look at Gentoo.

http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/handbook/handbook-arm.xml

CentOS, as far as I know (I could be wrong), doesn't support arm, so you would have to compile everything from scratch anyway. It's not just the kernel that you will need, that is, unless all you want is to use some feature that's only present in the CentOS kernel. In such case, you should rather be fetching the relevant patches and applying them on your chosen distro kernel. If you don't want that, I suggest looking for a distro that supports arm as suggested above.

Debian has an ' arm ' version too.

http://www.debian.org/CD/index.en.html

http://cdimage.debian.org/debian-cd/5.0.3/arm/iso-cd/

is there any reason that you believe that this is possible, in this case. I note that
http://www.embeddedartists.com/produ...it.php?tab=mcu
where they do produce a kit with Linux included, there is an external 32 MB ram which supplements the internal 96kB. How much RAM do you have? (Another vaguely memory-related issue is the prescence or otherwise of an MMU; server and desktop Linux packages assume the prescence of an MMU, the cheaper microcontrollers
don't have them and you need to select one of the very few Linux packages that do not assume an MMU; this is the first thing that you need to take care of before you buy anything. From what I know of the range, you seem to have chosen a microcontroller that has an EMC (ie, can produce the correct waveforms for DRAM) but not a memory management unit. Without an MMU, you could have to hack a Centos kernel so much, that it is arguable that you shouldn't call it a Centos Kernel anymore.)

In any case, the easiest approach is to buy a board which is available with a Linux BSP (Board Support Package), which some suppliers do make available. At a very minimum, you know that if you can buy it, it can be done. And you can pick through how the supplier has built their packages.

In any case I'd agree with the others that centos probably isn't the optimum starting place; in addition to emdebian, gentoo and whatever BSPs you can find, with the aid of a search engine, http://www.uclinux.org/ would be another place to look.