UPDATE: More info on this little project is here.

So, this thing is getting a little out of hand. “This thing”, in case you haven’t been here before, is my experiment with using a standard Linux C library on a bare metal ARM board. The way that I’m making it work is by writing simple Linux system call handlers to do what the normal Linux system call would do but in a much simplified way. In my last post I described a little about how my test kernel is built and run and how to connect to it with GDB for debugging.

This time I have added some interrupt handlers and implemented a few more system calls. My first attempt at interrupt handling is for the SP804 dual timer to handle the POSIX monotonic and realtime system clocks. After one of my last posts, someone asked what ARM I was targeting. It turned out to be a great question for which I had no clue how to answer. There are so many ways to say ARM: arm7, armv7, cortex, … Diving in to this project at first I had no idea about the nuances. It turns out that that what I’m trying to target at first is the Cortex-a9, specifically as emulated by QEMU on the vexpress-a9 board.

Ah! you say. Then why the heck are you using the SP804 timer for that? You should be using the 64 bit timers in the private memory region! Indeed I should, and that will be an exercise for another day. The a15 is even cooler, with its virtual timer, but I digress.

In this update, I’ve also added some simple command line processing:

[~/ellcc/baremetal/arm] dev% make run
../../bin/qemu-system-arm -M vexpress-a9 -m 128M -nographic -kernel kernel.bin
audio: Could not init `oss' audio driver
kernel started. Type "help" for a list of commands.
kernel % help
                date: show/set the realtime timer.
                time: time the specified command with arguments.
               sleep: sleep for a time period.
Test Commands:
             syscall: test the syscall interface with an unhandled system call.
               yield: yield the current time slice.
             thread1: start the thread1 test case.
               send1: send a message to the thread1 test thread.
             cancel1: cancel the thread1 test thread.
             thread2: start the thread2 test case.
kernel % time date
Thu Jan  1 00:23:50 1970
elapsed time: 0.007252000 sec
kernel %

Kind of cool, right? Well, just to show that some rudimentary threading is going on:

kernel % thread1
unhandled system call (175) args: 1, 1194164, 0, 8, 8, 0
thread started foo
thread self = 0x00029EB0
kernel % send1
thread running 3
kernel % 

Even better, here’s a test case where the thread periodically sleeps:

kernel % thread2
thread2 started
kernel % thread2 still running
thread2 still running
thread2 still running
thread2 still running

The code for thread2 looks like this:

static void *thread2(void *arg)
{
    printf ("thread2 started\n");
    for ( ;; ) {
        // Go to sleep.
        sleep(10);
        printf ("thread2 still running\n");
    }

    return NULL;
}

Unfortunately it will be running forever. I haven’t implemented pthread_cancel() or pthread_kill() support yet. But the command prompt is still active:

thread2 still running
thread2 still running
thread2 still running
timethread2 still running
 sleep 1
elapsed time: 1.000731000 sec
kernel % 

(I had typed in “time sleep 1”)

As usual, the code is available here. Please don’t look at irq.c. The interrupt controller code is a total hack for now.

UPDATE: If you want to try this out at home, everything you need except QEMU is packaged as a binary download from ftp://ellcc.org/pub/ choose the tarball appropriate for your host system, untar it, go into the ellcc/baremetal/arm directory and type “make run”.

Make sure you have QEMU installed on your system, as I am not currently able to cross make it for all the hosts.