Thread: Porting an Operating System

The work involved in porting of an as to a new HW platform or SoC is com¬plex and time consuming. It requires indepth knowledge of the HW plat¬form and also the architecture of the as being ported.

E.g. Linux and Windows CE greatly differ in their kernel an'd device driver architectures. The as porting process typically involves ,the following steps:

Port the boot loader: use a boot loader from a similar SoC platform and modify it to suit the new Soc.



Port the BSP : clone an existing BSP for a similar CPU architecture and modify as needed

Device Drivers: if the peripheral has been available in previous versions of the SoC, the device drivers can be ported to the new SoC with minor changes. But if a new peripheral is introduced in the SoC, then a device driver may have to be developed from scratch.

The newly ported system will require thorough testing and may be followed by certification from the as vendor before it can be released for production use. The task of as porting is further complicated due to the new releases from as vendors with substantial changes in architecture. Some updates to the as version can be as frequent as every 15 days. In order to reduce the time-to-market for products, many times, the as porting engineers have to work with beta versions of the as. A stable as is critical to the success of any HW platform or Soc.