A tour of the ARM architecture and its Linux support
Presented by
Thomas Petazzoni
Wednesday
3:40 p.m.–4:25 p.m.
Target audience:
Developer
Abstract
From mobile devices to industrial equipment, and with the rise of IoT, computing systems based on the ARM architecture are already ubiquitous and will become even more so in the future, which means more and more developers will be exposed to ARM systems.
The ARM architecture however has a number of differences compared to x86/x86_64, both in how the hardware is designed, and how it is supported from a low-level software point of view: at the bootloader level and the Linux kernel level.
This talk proposes an introduction to the ARM architecture, to help Linux users and developers understand the huge variety of ARM processors and platforms that are available, and how such a variety of hardware is supported in bootloaders and the kernel.
If you want to migrate your system to an ARM platform, and understand the difference between the Raspberry Pi variants, between ARMv6, ARMv7 and ARMv8, what is the Device Tree, what is this U-Boot thing, and generally get a better understanding of the ARM platform, this talk is for you!
Presented by
Thomas Petazzoni
Thomas Petazzoni is CTO and embedded Linux engineer at Free Electrons, a world-wide recognized embedded Linux consulting company, making significant contributions to the Linux kernel. At Free Electrons, Thomas leads a team of 8+ engineers all contributing to the Linux kernel, adding hardware support for a large number of platforms.
Thomas has been an active contributor to the Linux kernel for the last 4 years, mainly adding support for the Marvell ARM processors. In addition, Thomas is a core developer of Buildroot, a tool to build embedded Linux systems. Thomas is also a regular speaker at the Embedded Linux Conference and Embedded Linux Conference Europe.