Raspberry Pi Prospects and/or Alternative

[Norman Feske]

Hi Ben,

> By the way, Norman, what would be a good project for me to get started
> on while I'm waiting for the people who understand the AHCI and part_blk
> drivers?

[off-topic] Please let me raise your awareness about mailing-list
etiquette. Short top postings are generally not considered as polite.
Keep in mind that each email you send to the list arrives at the inboxes
of all subscribers. Hence, please be considerate not to abuse the
mailing list as an instant messaging tool.

Regarding your question, I have following recommendations:

* If you are interested in using Genode on the Raspberry Pi, go this
  way. It is fun. Use it as a chance to learn about device drivers.
  Even if Jeroen has developed a GPIO driver already, I would still
  recommend you to start poking around with GPIO pins - just for the
  sake of learning.

  Download and study the reference manuals for the SoC and board of the
  Raspberry Pi.

  Try to understand how GPIO programming works. There are excellent
  resources available to get started. For example:

  https://github.com/dwelch67/raspberrypi

  The examples start with simple things like a blinking LED. Apply the
  gained knowledge to write a Genode program that accesses the GPIO
  registers using an IO_MEM session. Look at the existing drivers to
  see how it is done.

* For the work that you initially wanted to pursue, the lack of a
  proper file system and block driver is not a show stopper. You
  mentioned your interest to port libraries and applications.
  You can do that just fine without a persistent file system. Just
  look at the large body of software that we already ported (e.g.,
  Qt5 with the Arora web browser, the entire tool chain, the GNU
  tools, etc.). For porting, we normally place files in a TAR
  archive mounted into the VFS of the ported application.
  Additionally, there is a RAM file system available if the
  application needs to write files.

If you are genuinely interested in contributing to Genode, the best way
would be to document and publish your steps, e.g., in the form of a blog
or a Wiki. This would possibly enable future newcomers to get started
more easily.

Regards
Norman

-- 
Dr.-Ing. Norman Feske
Genode Labs

http://www.genode-labs.com · http://genode.org

Genode Labs GmbH · Amtsgericht Dresden · HRB 28424 · Sitz Dresden
Geschäftsführer: Dr.-Ing. Norman Feske, Christian Helmuth