3 ms·
How do these sort of ports for niche systems get made?
by xwdv 6y ago
How do these sort of ports for niche systems get made?
- protoman3000 6y agoManuals for the system and it’s processor exist. The Linux kernel is pretty agnostic towards what it’s running on, as long as it supports the C Language. The difficult part is filling in the system specific blanks in the kernels’ source code, which is big work. See here: https://www.linux-mips.org/wiki/Linux/MIPS_Porting_Guide https://www.linux-mips.org/wiki/Linux/MIPS_Porting_Guide
- marcan_42 6y agoSimple ports to small systems are actually very easy. To run Linux all that you strictly need is a timer driver and an interrupt controller driver, assuming the CPU architecture is already supported and there is a compatible MMU. On small systems, those drivers can be very simple. I was bored one evening and ported Linux to run on the Wii's IO/security processor (not the main CPU, that's Wii Linux). It only took a few hours to get the kernel booting to userspace.