i.MX515 Project
AROS Research Operating System for ARMin category Operating Systems
proposed by michalsc on 2nd February 2009 (accepted on 1st June 2009)
Developers: Michal Schulz, Pavel Fedin
Project Summary
The aim of this project is to port the core components of AROS Research Operating System to i.MX board. The port shall include the complete core including network stack and graphics driver. Preferably the core shall be able to boot directly from NAND/NOR Flash memory (unless this option is not available).AROS Research Operating System is a lightweight operating system which aims source compatibility with AmigaOS 3.x, improving it in many areas. More details regarding AROS can be found at the project homepage.
Project Blog Entries
I have set up a nightly build machine for AROS linux hosted on ARM. Please visit http://aros.sourceforge.net/download.php#nightly-builds and get the linux-arm-system package. Run it on your efikamx machine and enjoy.
Hello again. I though I own you few words of explanation, why is AROS on ARM so interesting...
AROS is a lightweight OS. It's core system started up occupies around 5MB of RAM only. It schedules fast (since AROS tasks and processes are either as heavy or even lighter than linux threads) and starts quickly. Memory footprint is very low. Functions in AROS libraries are not resolved by name, but rather by their position in function pointer table. Core AROS applications start within a fraction of second, including their load time and loading of all libraries. Even on linux hosted AROS applications behave and response faster, than native linux software. If you were using AmigaOS, AROS or MorphOS before, you will find the same speed here, on ARM. If you haven't used any Amiga-like operating system before, you have to test it and feel it yourself.
It was a very long time since I've posted here last time. Work, private life and more important activities related to EfikaMX had priority over AROS. Now AROS got some attention and love, too :)
The first and very important milestone towards native AROS on EfikaMX is the linux-hosted port. What you have there is regular AROS core running on top of host operating system (linux). It does not access hardware directly, but uses the facilities provided by the host. AROS drivers for graphics, network and sound are, in this case, wrappers calling the host libraries. Everything else, including memory management, messaging and scheduling is done on AROS side. For host system AROS looks like one single-threaded task.
In great cooperation with Pavel Fedin I have just completed this milestone. AROS hosted for ARM linux is born. For a moment, only core package can be provided, without all the additional apps which you might know from i386 version. They will come later, once I fix some bugs visible in ARM version only. Please watch the www.aros.org for ARM image to download. It should show up within few days.