Yoctoproject meta-fsl-arm and imx53 quick start board

Yoctoproject is a solid framework for creating Linux distributions for embedded devices, and its layering mechanism makes it easy to add Linux OS to new target devices; With highly customization for a particular device it can include custom start-up scripts, software packages built with a high degree of optimization for a particular architecture and different user graphical interfaces from full Gnome desktop to a simple a serial console.

YP has 2 basic layers, board support packages layer and core layer; In the BSP layer is where we include all the custom software and configuration tweaks for a particular platform; The core layer provides the common software stack to provide from a simple command line interface to Sato desktop interface (Matchbox based and Gnome mobile stack). A third layer could be added to provide additional user interfaces such as LXDE, XFCE, Active plasma and more; YP is quite flexible.

One of the problems with Freescale i.MX based platforms is the lack of openness, getting the BSP provided by FSL requires to download a large tarball which bundles the kernel, boot loader, user space applications and Ltib an ancient build system which generates a file system so 2004, literary the software stack is around those years probably older. And that’s why I started working on YP BSP support for i.MX5 targets, and now the project has it’s on life with active members helping on getting the best support possible.

Freescale iMX53 quick start board is an Arm cortex-a8 low cost development board, with interesting peripheral interfaces like Sata II, hdmi and GPU based on AMD Z160. And YP BSP layer has a decent support for it, at github Freescale site there are instructions on how to get started.

But with newest i.MX6 processor a Wandboard should be more appealing.

Advertisement

Thesis documents

Many people had contact me asking for references about my thesis and decide to post them online so any one could take a look at the work I did last year, hope this helps to every one interested; The general goal was:

Hardware/software co-design approach for re-configurable architectures based on the Xilinx ML507 PowerPC 440 platform.
This thesis aims to find a reliable solution for bringing the Linux operating system on embedded devices, focusing on Xilinx re-configurable architectures as a base platform.

I will continue to maintain Yoctoproject Xilinx meta layer [1] as soon I get some free time, hope in the next week’s I will publish some patch’s, I’m going to set a personal goal, meta-xilinx should get official BSP layer by Yoctoproject release 1.2 target for April 2012.

For now thesis is located here [alligator-os]
and presentation at [alligator-
os_17012011].