Embedded Linux from Scratch in 45 minutes, on RISC-V
Channel: Bootlin
Date: 2021-02-27

This is the video of Bootlin engineer Michael Opdenacker's talk at FOSDEM 2021, "Embedded Linux from Scratch in 45 minutes, on RISC-V".


Slides: https://bootlin.com/pub/conferences/2021/fosdem/opdenacker-embedded-linux-45minutes-riscv/opdenacker-embedded-linux-45minutes-riscv.pdf


Checkout out Bootlin training courses at https://bootlin.com/training/ as well as Bootlin embedded Linux engineering services: https://bootlin.com/engineering/.


Abstract:


Discover how to build your own embedded Linux system completely from scratch. In this presentation and tutorial, we show how to build a custom toolchain (Buildroot), bootloader (opensbi / U-Boot) and kernel (Linux), that one can run on a system with the new RISV-V open Instruction Set Architecture emulated by QEMU. We also show how one can build a minimal root filesystem by oneself thanks to the BusyBox project. The presentation ends by showing how to control the system remotely through a tiny webserver. The approach is to provide only the files that are strictly necessary. That’s all the interest of embedded Linux: one can really control and understand everything that runs on the system, and see how simple the system can be. That’s much easier than trying to understand how a GNU/Linux system works from a distribution as complex as Debian!

The presentation also shares details about what’s specific to the RISC-V architecture, in particular about the various stages of the boot process. This presentation shares all the hardware (!), source code build instructions and demo binaries needed to reproduce everything at home, and add specific improvements. Most of the details are also useful to people using other hardware architectures (in particular arm and arm64).

It’s probably the first time a tutorial manages to show so many aspects of embedded Linux in less than an hour. See by yourself! At least, that’s for sure the first one demonstrating how to boot Linux from U-Boot in a RISC-V system emulated by QEMU.


Speaker biography:


https://bootlin.com/company/staff/michael-opdenacker/