Linux Support for the ARM Architecture

Overview

The 3.x upstream Linux kernel include support for ARM Development Boards, including support for the following ARM processors:

• ARM720T^*, ARM920T^*, ARM922T^*, ARM926EJ-S
• ARM1136J(F)-S, ARM1176JZ(F)-S, ARM11 MPCore
• Cortex-A8, Cortex-A9, Cortex-A5, Cortex-A7, Cortex-A15

ARMv8 support for Linux

Linux kernel support for AArch64 has now been pulled into the Linux 3.7 kernel version. Instructions on how to run Linux on ARMv8 model are available from Linaro ARMv8 engineering wiki page.

GCC AArch64 pre-built cross-compiler is available from Linaro from the location above.

ARMv7 support for Linux

Linaro's website contains considerable resources to enable developers to build and run Linux on ARM development platforms. In addition, the following FAQ provides detailed information on how to use Linaro images on ARM Development Boards.

Versatile Express kernel images now use Device Tree structures to describe the underlying hardware platform. For example, the boot process for zImage described in the README file with respective Device Trees are available from the following location. Some information about how to upgrade Versatile Express systems is available from ARM Technical Support Knowledge Articles.

The upstream Linux kernel includes support for the following Primecells:

• UART (PL010, PL011), Interrupt Controller (VIC, GIC), KMI (PL050), RTC (PL030), Timers
• VGA/LCD (PL110), AACI (PL041), VFP, Ethernet (PL092), LAN9118, LAN91C111, MMC
• L2CC (PL220, PL310), USB

Pre-built Filesystem Images

Filesystem images are available from the Linaro Developers and Community Build section. Developers can also ask questions on Linaro discussion forums as well as upstream ARM Linux forum to interact with the broader Linux developer community.

Information about ARM public GIT repositories is available at the following location.

Licensing

The source code used to build these binary packages is available under the terms of the GNU Public License. This software is provided with NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by applicable law. The software is provided "as is" without warranty of any kind, either expressed or implied, including the implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

Overview

Processors without an MMU can run a modified version of Linux called uClinux and can be used with ARM processors such as ARM946E-S, ARM1156T2-S, Cortex-R4(F). Later versions of the Linux kernel can be configured with MMU off to run for such configurations.

Please refer to www.uclinux.org for more information, documentation, mailing lists and additional resources in addition to other Linux kernel mailing lists. Filesystem images can be produced using BuildRoot environment.

Licensing

The source code used to build these binary packages is available under the terms of the GNU Public License. This software is provided with NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by applicable law. The software is provided "as is" without warranty of any kind, either expressed or implied, including the implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

Overview

Android is a software stack for mobile devices using the Linux kernel and applications. The Android SDK provides the tools and APIs to develop applications on Android platforms using the Java programming language. Android applications run in their own process with their own instance of the Dalvik Virtual Machine (VM). Dalvik is a register-based virtual machine (as opposed to JVM which is a stack-based virtual machine) and executes classes compiled by a Java-like language compiler. Performance-critical applications can be written in native code using the Android NDK, which is a companion tool to the SDK. ARM software enablement blog section includes entries on how to setup and run Android on ARM platforms (see the following article).

This page includes information and sample instructions on how to build and run Android on ARM Development Boards using Linux kernel versions available from http://www.arm.com/linux. Both GIT version-control system and the Repo tool built on top of GIT, used to manipulate the source code.

In addition, the ARM Solution Center for Android (SCA) offers resources to developers new to Android or to ARM. 

Pre-built kernel images

The armdroid1 patch.gz is to be applied on 3.3-rc7 vanilla kernel. 

The following image is a pre-built (plain) 3.3.0 Linux kernel for Cortex-A9 core tile on Versatile Express with corresponding device tree blob.

A set of detailed instructions on how to build Android for ARM Development Boards is available on the following Wiki page complementing recent blog posts.

* There is no generic zImage build available on this page at this point.

Licensing

The source code used to build these binary packages is available under the terms of the GNU Public License. This software is provided with NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by applicable law. The software is provided "as is" without warranty of any kind, either expressed or implied, including the implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

Processors and Related Technology

• Cortex-A57, Cortex-A53
• Cortex-A15, Cortex-A5, Cortex-A7, Cortex-A9, Cortex-A8, ARM1176, ARM1136, ARM926,
• Cortex-R7, Cortex-R4, Cortex-M3, ARM1156, ARM946
• TrustZone
• NEON

Graphics

• Mali Graphics  

Software Development

• OpenMAX software libraries
• ARM Versatile Express development boards
• ARM Development Studio 5 (DS-5)
• Mali Developer Center