PORTING THE LINUX KERNEL TO BEAGLE BONE BLACK

ARM development boards are the ideal platform for accelerating the development and reducing the risk of new SoC designs. The combination of ASIC and FPGA technology in ARM boards delivers an optimal solution in terms of speed, accuracy, flexibility and cost. The Embedded modules, based on ARM, can become very complex machines since these are meant to support varied tasks such as memory management, process management and peripheral interfaces.For seamless integration of these functional modules an OS has to be ported on these ARM based CPUs .Traditionally this OS porting is often the specialized work of third party vendors having expertise in this domain. For every new CPU architecture, the OS has to be customized, compiled and burnt into the core .With the coming of age of Linux as an embedded OS all this has changed quite significantly. Being in Open Source domain, Linux kernel can be freely downloaded and compiled for any system architecture and this includes ARM based systems also. This enables the developers to port the OS themselves. This paper describes the details of porting of Linux kernel to Beagle bone black.Building linux kernel; u-boot and x-loader are described in detail. SD card configuration is also described. [1]