Kernel Recipes 2015 - Porting Linux to a new processor architecture - by Joël Porquet
Channel: Kernel Recipes
Date: 2015-11-04

Getting the Linux kernel running on a new processor architecture is a difficult process. Worse still, there is not much documentation available describing the porting process.

After spending countless hours becoming almost fluent in many of the supported architectures, I discovered that a well-defined skeleton shared by the majority of ports exists. Such a skeleton can logically be split into two parts that intersect a great deal.

The first part is the boot code, meaning the architecture-specific code that is executed from the moment the kernel takes over from the bootloader until init is finally executed. The second part concerns the architecture-specific code that is regularly executed once the booting phase has been completed and the kernel is running normally. This second part includes starting new threads, dealing with hardware interrupts or software exceptions, copying data from/to user applications, serving system calls, and so on.

In this talk I will provide an overview of the procedure, or at least one possible procedure, that can be followed when porting the Linux kernel to a new processor architecture.

Joël Porquet