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For those who are interested in running your software on AArch64 hardware directly, without any additional firmware or operating system in between, I've develop

by Lichtso 10y ago

For those who are interested in running your software on AArch64 hardware directly, without any additional firmware or operating system in between, I've developed a boot loader and tool chain to test and execute unikernels on a Pine64: https://github.com/Lichtso/UnikernelExperiments https://github.com/Lichtso/UnikernelExperiments

lgeek 10y ago
Hmm, what are the advantages of using this bootloader over U-Boot? Or is it simply that U-Boot doesn't support Ethernet or some other peripherals on the A64 SoC?
- Lichtso 10y ago
  On one hand it is very light weight: less than 4k LOC and 16 kB executable (which fits completely in the first stage of SRAM), so it is easier to grasp compared to U-Boot: https://github.com/trini/u-boot/search?q=sunxi&type=Code https://github.com/trini/u-boot/search?q=sunxi&type=Code On the other hand, it has different goals and is just meant to load a blob of instructions over ethernet (faster evaluation cycle) not an entire Linux kernel with all the POSIX / UNIX stuff from SD. So you have far more control but are also on a lower level, somewhat like developing for a more powerful Arduino.