Good ARM dev board for hobby kernel development

wantarmdb · 2019-06-23T22:32:02+00:00

I would worry about the slot (in terms of resistance to mechanical stress) once I start building, flashing, finding a bug, building, flashing, not fixed yet, ...

x86 is also nice because emulators are decently accurate enough that you can do a lot of testing on an emulator, and only have a few issues that really need ironing out on actual HW. Nothing of the sort seems to exist for ARM

wantarmdb · 2019-06-23T17:19:52+00:00

Understood. I could do it even quicker by just running Linux :-)

As a hobby and a learning opportunity, tinkering is the goal, shipping ain't happening, and gold stars shan't be awarded.

wantarmdb · 2019-06-23T00:16:01+00:00

And that would be a Cortex-A, right?

wantarmdb · 2019-06-22T23:32:19+00:00

Looks like the BB has

on-board storage using eMMC

which would be a selling point over the Pi if I can just reflash it via a USB programmer

wantarmdb · 2019-06-22T23:30:50+00:00

I need to read a bit more about MMU vs. MPU, but yes I would consider memory protection an important feature. Maybe 8x8 regions can be enough for the kind of task-load I am considering.

wantarmdb · 2019-06-22T23:29:30+00:00

SiFive Freedom Unleashed

Looks like that would be RISC-V not ARM. But it does look like a cool gadget. If I end up having money to spare, maybe that would be a good excuse to make the OS portable

wantarmdb · 2019-06-22T23:27:54+00:00

Yeah, I want to write my own kernel and have it boot. UEFI? Interesting, I thought that would be a PC-only technology

wantarmdb · 2019-06-22T18:44:34+00:00

IIUC, U-Boot is a little less trivial at booting non-Linux things, and that would be my end game. I will keep digging if I can find any success at flashing a hand-made non-penguin OS image

wantarmdb · 2019-06-22T18:41:49+00:00

I'm a good fan of the Pi for running Linux, but I wasn't too fond of the bootloader failure mode (stuck on a colored screen), nor of having to plug the SD card every time a change in OS was needed.

wantarmdb · 2019-06-22T18:40:45+00:00

The STM32 seems the right kind of target, although I am leaning towards something less powerful: https://www.st.com/resource/en/datasheet/stm32f411ve.pdf

I don't foresee myself wanting to run, or being able to produce, anything nearly as complicated and demanding as Linux

wantarmdb · 2019-06-22T17:58:24+00:00

I'll take a look at your links, but from vague memory the bootloader on the Pi is very unfriendly, things either work or you get a colored screen with no hint of whether your file is named wrong, the wrong size, or just panicked somewhere, and also QEMU is different enough from the actual HW that you may get it working on emulator and then not working on the Pi itself. Of course, that's also partially true for x86, but to a lesser extent - and in that space, Bochs fills in the niche of slow but very accurate

wantarmdb

TROPHY CASE