This article detailly explains how an ARM processor starts up

Why program? This I can not answer. Everybody has his reasons. Maybe your boss wants you to make something that little bit faster and more efficient. Maybe you have been given the source to a program that you often use, and it is up to you to update it. Maybe you are just doing this 'cos you think it might be a worthwhile hobby. To me? I program because of the following reasons:

Developing an embedded system is pratically very complicated, especially for new engineers, it always takes long time for them to become familiar with the developing procedures. Luckily, some experienced engineers (Chi-Hung Chou, Tsung-Hsien Yang, Shih-Chiang Tsao and Ying-Dar Lin in Embedded) introduced us a standard operating procedure, which might greatly help us with saving the costs of building an embedded system.

Now a pretty, lovely, shining development kit is just under your eyes, she is nothing but a rose in bud, a diamond in the rough, a virgin in the bed, waiting, for your —— development.

A large size of an embedded system might be a problem that bedevils embedded system developers the most. Developers, as return, are always seeking for ways to downsize their embedded systems, so as to leave more RAM and Flash memory resources for applications and reduce the hardware cost of the device. In this article some methods for downsizing the embedded system are to be introduced.

Embedded systems are now spreading in our world, they are becoming more and more common. However, as the spread goes, some questions are being raised. One, maybe the most important one, of these questions is: How can we ensure that our embedded systems are safe?

Hopefully this program example is to help someone with learning and understanding ARM programing. In order to make it more understandable, in this example I am going to use actual addresses instead of macro definitions.

This article takes an example to illustrate the procedures to write an application and compile it into the uCLinux filesystem.

Forwarded from: embedded.com By Stan Schneider and Lori Fraleigh Debugging your system may be the most important step in the development process. Here are ten hard-won lessons from the embedded trenches.

An integrated development environment (IDE) is a programming environment that has been packaged as an application program, typically consisting of a code editor, a compiler, a debugger, and a graphical user interface (GUI) builder. The IDE may be a standalone application or may be included as part of one or more existing and compatible applications. “When all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail”, getting a proper development environment is the first step of a successful embedded development.This article lists and introduces some popular IDEs for embedded development.

When developing software and hardware for an embedded system, the use of developing tools such as editors, assemblers, compilers, debuggers, simulators, emulators and Flash/OTP programmers is rather essential to an embedded system developer. To beginners it might be not so easy to learn about all these components. How do all of them play together? What differences are there between them? What matters should be considered when selecting a right tool? In this article these questions are to be answered.

Bootloader is a SW component that boots a device and launches the main software. It provides, in addition to booting capabilities, functions such as effective debugging, reading/writing memory, flash reprogramming, configuring, etc. In this article we will take the U-Boot (on SMDK2410 board) for example to introduce the usage of bootloader in embedded systems.

This article lists the functions of some common U-Boot instructions

A toolchain means the collection of programs used for compiling and linking an application. It consists of three separate components: binutils, libraries and compiler. This article introduces these components.

A cross compiler is a compiler capable of creating executable code for a platform other than the one on which the compiler is run. It is a the first tool that one must use for an embedded platform. This article takes GCC for example to introduce several different approaches to build a cross-compiler.

Honoured as ‟the swiss army knife of embedded Linux‟, BusyBox is one of the most useful application for embedded development, it combines tiny versions of most Unix command line utilities, provids replacements for most of the utilities you usually find in GNU fileutils, shellutils, etc. In fact, BusyBox can pack almost 3.5MB of utilities into a single executable around 200KB, and therefore provides greater functionality to bootable floppy disks and embedded devices that use Linux.

This paper takes the three common used embedded operating systems (uC/OS-II, uCLinux and embedded Linux) for analysis, so as to suggest some factors that should be considered for selecting operating system for ARM based development platform.

Some Linux enthusiasts are very much interested in the Linux kernel, however some of them do not know where and how to start learning it. This article is going to introduce some initial methods for learning Linux kernel source code, but not to explain the complex kernel mechanism of Linux.