[ Thanks to An
Anonymous Reader for this link. ]
“In this article, I will describe how to bring up
Debian Linux on an Embedded System.“The hardware chosen for the embedded system is a PowerPC
440EPxX. I have chosen Debian for the operating system of choice to
load on the embedded hardware because of my prior experience with
it and because it is a free distribution that continues to be
actively maintained and supported. Linux is a powerful operating
system and is valuable on an embedded hardware platform for
real-time applications. An example is real-time digital signal
processing. Alternatives to Debian include Montavista and Wind
River, which are both commercial Linux distributions.“1. Description of the hardware
“The hardware is a custom digital signal processing printed
circuit board which includes a PPC440EPx embedded processor and
five Xilinx Virtex 5 Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs). The
PPC440EPx was designed with an RS-232 interface, a JTAG debug and
flash programming interface, 2 Gigabit Ethernet interfaces, and one
status LED. Initially, the system is completely bare of software
and contains no operating system. The goal is to bring up Debian
Linux on this embedded hardware platform, and the same process
applies to most embedded platforms.” 2. Compiling the custom bootloader (uboot) and Linux
kernel“The bootloader is a small program that is used to load the
operating system. Popular bootloaders include the IBM PowerPC
Initialization and Boot Software (PIBS) and the U-Boot Universal
Bootloader from DENX. In this example, U-boot was used. The board
was designed with a JTAG interface to the PPC440EPx. An Abatron BDI
debugger can be used to load U-boot and associated environmental
variables onto the Flash using the JTAG interface. In this system,
the Flash is a Mirrorbit. The U-boot source is available from
DENX.”