What sort of development systems are people here using to
embed Linux in some hardware? I'll volunteer to collate
replies and various opinions I receive.
What I'm intending to do as a little side project myself
is embed Linux into some custom hardware. It'll have
a CPU of course, and RAM. My idea is to plop my code and
filesystem images down into some sort of EEPROM.
There will be no BIOS, so I'll need to do chip and motherboard
initialization - should be fairly straight forward, as the
software is only intended to run on "known" configurations.
It doesn't need to probe to detect what is out there.
I'm imagining that there will be some bios-like code in a
PROM; something that will allow one to reload the EEPROM via
tftp or a serial port. The stuff in EEPROM will be loaded by
this code into RAM (it'll be the linux kernel and maybe root fs).
Is anyone working on doing this? Has anyone done it already?
(Probably).
Care to share your methods and code?
I'm particularly interested in knowing how people debug this sort
of code - assuming the PROM code is "working"; can it have some
remote debugger hooks in it to allow gdb debugging via a serial
port in order to debug the kernel itself? Once the kernel is
working there would be no problem debugging applications by
traditional methods (gdb on linux itself).
So - I'm trying to determine how to begin development; are
there packages available for purchase? How about download?
I'm prepared to purchase the hardware that I need, and probably
software as well if need be.
I'm trying to get some conversation going along these lines,
as I haven't really seen much on the list in the past month
or two that I've been lurking. As I said, I'll collate replies
and opinions and hopefully be able to provide something for the
Embedded Linux FAQ.
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