ELCE 2012 slides: porting Linux to new ARM SoC

We are just returning from Barcelona, Spain, after participating to the 2012 edition of the Embedded Linux Conference Europe. My colleague Thomas Petazzoni has delivered the below presentation:

Your New ARM SoC Linux Support Check-List

Since Linus Torvalds raised warnings about the state of the ARM architecture support in the Linux kernel, a huge amount of effort and reorganization has happened in the way Linux supports ARM SoCs. From the addition of the device tree to the pinctrl subsystem, from the new clock framework to the new rules in code organization and design, the changes have been significant over the last one and half year in theARM Linux kernel world.

Based on the speaker’s experience on getting the new Marvell Armada 370 and Armada XP SoC supported in the mainline Linux kernel, we will give an overview of those changes and summarize the new rules for ARM Linux support. We aim at helping developers willing to add suppot for new ARM SoCs in the Linux kernel by providing a check-list of things to do.

Thomas Petazzoni is an embedded Linux engineer and trainer at Bootlin since 2008. He has been involved with multiple projects around the Linux kernel, especially the mainlining of Marvell Armada 370/XP SoCs support. He is also a major contributor to the Buildroot embedded Linux build system with more than 1100 patches merged.

The presentation slides and their sources are now available here. We have also shot a video of Thomas’ talk and it should be available in the next weeks. Stay tuned!

Do not hesitate to contact us if you are looking for engineers to port Linux to new hardware.

Author: Michael Opdenacker

Michael Opdenacker is the founder of Bootlin, and was its CEO until 2021. He is best known for all the free embedded Linux and kernel training materials that he created together with Thomas Petazzoni. He is always looking for ways to increase performance, reduce size and boot time, and to maximize Linux' world domination. More details...

2 thoughts on “ELCE 2012 slides: porting Linux to new ARM SoC”

  1. Nice set of slides. Though I do believe that lots of hardware integration work is done the dirty way by hacking already existent board files the way it works. At least that’s my experience. Problem is that once it works nobody wants to invest time into code cleanups. Then you start marking it as a todo, but never get the time to fix this.

    But nevertheless much appreciation for this article/slide set.

  2. its very useful site. very good material, but what is so much good about site is its free material.

    i just start my carrier as a embedded engineer just now.
    and i feel this site is very useful.

    thank u::))

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