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Preface
There are many reasons why ambitious programmers should care about huge rush in embedded market. IMO there is great potential in it. I don’t want to go deep into this but take a look at all tablets, phones, smart TVs and other cool stuff like wireless in you washing machine or refrigerator (ok this two are right now only a gadgets :) ). This is all embedded. Another thing is that wages of experienced embedded developers are really high. This environment is very interesting. A lot to learn, a lot to do, so why not get your hands dirty?
First question: How to start?
To do real embedded development, to learn the most, you simply buy hardware like
all this ${animal}board (animal={panda,beagle,hawk}). This is the best way but
if you’re beginner (like me) you probably don’t want to spend $50 for stuff that
you throw away after month because you don’t like to deal with it or problems
are not on your level, than maybe you should take a look around and wonder if it
is possible to build virtual environment to check what kind of problem you may
encounter learning embedded ? BTW this is cheap and fun, so potential ROI is big
enough to try. IMHO this is where world going: proof of concept embedded
platforms affordable for common man (not only for US/West Europe), testing
environment based on virtualized/emulated solution, to check basic features,
speed up testing, development and deployment. That’s why we see so active
development of software like Qemu/KVM.
Virtual Development Board - table of contents
I realize that it is achievable and I will learn a lot trying to implement this
idea. Finally I was convinced reading this two years old article on
eLinux.org. I decide to divide this article on few parts because IMHO it
was to big to read it at once. Also people interesting in particular topic won’t
have to scrolling >2k words post. List of all articles in this series:
- Qemu as an environment for embedded board emulation
- Toolchain for Virtual Development Board
- Embedded board bootloader
- Linux kernel for embedded system
- Qemu network configuration and tftp for Virtual Development Board
- Root file system for embedded system
Kudos
At the and of this intro I want to give big kudos to all those hackers without whom creating this article would not be possible. Thanks for sharing your knowledge. Every time when I use knowledge that found by googling I’m trying to stick link for further reading.
Enjoy!
