On Wed, Jan 06, 2010 at 04:08:09AM -0500, Robert P. J. Day wrote: > > or you can buy the zippy expansion board for that: Apart from the great hardware recommendations, I'd like to offer my 2 cents for other relatively hassle free newbie alternatives - simply use an emulator such as qemu. <http://www.nongnu.org/qemu/> For example, you can build a standard ARM Linux kernel for a popular supported ARM based development board (qemu models several - Realview Integrators/Emulation Baseboards and several others) and use qemu's built in GDB stub to observe everything from reset onwards (well actually that's not entirely true because Qemu takes a shortcut and sets up enough of the world to get Linux zImages to run - although its quite capable of running say, a bootloader like u-boot from the absolute reset vector). Qemu even models ARM SMP Cores such as the ARM11MPCore and the integrated debug stub represents multiple cores as threads and you can set breakpoint per thread etc. You have a veritable plethora of supported processor architectures and platforms built around them - not just ARM (x86, MIPS etc). It's a boon for newbies IMHO and its free. That said, its still an emulator and it won't give you a taste of the subtleties of stuff like true concurrency, cache related problems, the black arts involved in debugging using JTAG and related technologies, use of performance monitors etc. You'll need silicon for that. Cheers, Robin -- To unsubscribe from this list: send an email with "unsubscribe kernelnewbies" to ecartis@xxxxxxxxxxxx Please read the FAQ at http://kernelnewbies.org/FAQ
