Noob Question: What kind of OSes can run on Stellaris Launchpad?

[pixelhaze 0]

Hi Everyone,What are the speculated list of OSes / RTOSes which might run on the Stellaris Launchpad ?

Do FreeRTOS, eCos, or Linux (or armlinux) figure in them ?

I am presuming if Linux or armlinux can be ported, it would need external flash which is absent on the board.

Can this be overcome with a booster pack ?

What kind of changes should one anticipate while porting the above ?

And what should anyone watch out for ?Regards,Pixelhaze

[M-Three 0]

Hi Everyone,

 

What are the speculated list of OSes / RTOSes which might run on the Stellaris Launchpad ?

 

Do FreeRTOS, eCos, or Linux (or armlinux) figure in them ?

Yes: http://www.freertos....xx_Eclipse.html

 

I am presuming if Linux or armlinux can be ported, it would need external flash which is absent on the board. Can this be overcome with a booster pack ?

People are still trying to figure that out. The probable answer is no - as there is no external peripheral parallel port for RAM. But there was a video a few days back showing a Stellaris kit run linux.. so it is in the air still.

 

What kind of changes should one anticipate while porting the above ?

No idea.

 

And what should anyone watch out for ?

Memory limit mostly.

 

Regards,

Pixelhaze

[dellwoodbu 1]

Regarding FreeRTOS

 

http://www.ti.com/tool/sw-ek-lm4f120xl Is the software package from TI for the Stellaris LaunchPad. Download one of those packages for the tool chain of your choice. Run the enclosed StellarisWare installer. Find c:\stellarisware\boards\ek-lm4f120xl\freertos_demo. (default directory choice). A simple complete demo for FreeRTOS running on Stellaris LaunchPad.

 

Building from there should be straight forward.

 

dellwood

[txf 0]

As dellwoodbu states, freeRTOS supports some of the stellaris mcus. It would be nice to have a list of the supported RTOSes and features, but I imagine support will pick up once more launchpads get released. AFAIK the stellaris line doesn't have a large mind share yet.

 

I doubt that you could get linux running on the mcu, as it does not have an mmu. A port of uClinux is possibly feasible, but I haven't seen any Arm ports to thumb2 based processors, only older ARM7 controller (which does the full arm and thumb instruction sets ).

[starhawk1426459861 0]

Just discovered this. Looks very nifty -- it's an FPU that should be nearly universal -- this is very useful for linux ops! As for MMU, wouldn't it be possible to program a PIC for that? IIRC, a PIC can do nearly anything short of delivering pizza or washing dishes. Just sayin'.

[txf 0]

The Stellaris uses a cortex-m4f, where the f stands for floating point. It can handle a few floating point operations directly in hardware. I think that the linux kernel does not need an fpu to run (the kernel devs frown heavily on floating point ops in the kernel).

 

I don't think that adding an mmu outside the processor is quite that easy. For one I think you'd need complete access to the arm memory space so that cache misses transparently fetch data from external memory. The arm microcontrollers tend to load program data from flash as opposed to generally more powerful (linux capable) processors which load program and data from ram.

 

There was (is?) a project that was providing patches with the aim getting linux to run in a MMUless cortex-m3. I don't know if the patches were complete or if it fully worked on real hardware.