Embedded Systems Programming

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Embedded Systems Programming

• Introduction to the course

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Course delivery

• There are two lecturers
• Craig Duffy first term
• Tony Pipe second term
• The practicals are supported by
• John Counsel and Steve Hughes

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Embedded System - aims

• This course aims to introduce you to embedded
  systems programming
• What are embedded systems?
• Small systems
• Low power
• Portable
• Part of large system
• Real-time features

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Embedded System - features

• Embedded software has different characteristics
  than more mainstream software
• Speed, size, interface,
• Embedded software development is very different
  from normal software development
• Use of tools, system initialisation, interaction
  with systems, debugging

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ESP 1st term

• In the first set of lectures and practical
  sessions I will be covering cross developing code
  and operating systems onto a single board
  computer.
• The practical sessions will involve small groups
  of students installing Linux onto the target
  hardware. The Puppeteer will be a central part
  of the system developed as part of the assignment.

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Lecture list

• Cross development techniques
• Using a cross development environment
• Extra tools for software development
• Using C and assembler language
• Linking issues
• ARM and the SA1110
• RISC
• The Puppeteer board
• Serial port programming
• Porting the Linux kernel
• Embedded OS, real-time executive and monitors

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The Puppeteer board 1

• The Puppeteer boards are based on the StrongArm
  SA1110 processor
• Intel version of ARM core
• 200MHz CPU
• MMU support
• 2 Serial interfaces
• PCMCIA interface
• Ethernet

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The Puppeteer board 2

• The board was originally developed for cable set
  top boxes, but has a large number of potential
  usages
• Has 2 serial interfaces irda
• Audio codec Toshiba TS35143
• Ethernet support SMCS LAN91C96
• 8 Mb of boot block flash
• 32 Mb of DRAM
• Altera 6k FPGA
• Xilinx CPLD
• Small EEPROM
• I2C support
• JTAG interface

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The Linux kernel

• The kernel we will be porting will be a standard
  2.4.18 with the ARM patches
• We will need to port to the specifics of the
  board
• Initialisation code need porting
• Some of the serial port code will need modifying
• The Ethernet chip needs porting
• MTD (flash) system need configuring

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The Linux system

• Although we will examine various distributions we
  will create our own Linux system using
• uClibc
• Busybox
• Tinylogin
• Netkit
• NFS
• GDB version 6
• MTD support and tools

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Development environment

• We will be using a GNU cross compiler kit
• The version of gcc is 2.95.3
• We will also use binutils
• Plus various conversion and download utilities
• elf2bin to convert elf binaries to MSbin format
• eloadsvr to download images to the Puppeteer
  board

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Lab organisation

• The first few weeks will be small scale
  programming of the boards
• When we start to install Linux the labs will be
  broken into groups
• Each group will have user space on kenny to keep
  their kernel and Linux systems
• You must learn to save space!
• You will be guided into porting the kernel onto a
  board

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Literature and information sources

• Some books
• Building Embedded Linux Systems K Yaghmour
• Embedded Linux C Hollabaugh
• Embedded Linux Primer C Hallinhan
• Arm System Developers Guide Sloss, Symes
  Wright
• ARM Architecture Reference Manual D Seal

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Useful web sites

• My homes pages
• cems.uwe.ac.uk/cduffy, kenny.netlabs.cems.uwe.ac.
  uk/cduffy
• Web sites
• ARM UK, armlinux, GNU, uClibc,
• IBM developerworks
• Linux Journal
• Kernel newbies
• Linux from scratch
• The Linux Documentation Project (LDP)