Join and discover how to build your own embedded Linux system completely from scratch. You will build your own toolchain, bootloader and kernel, that you will run on system with the new Risc-V open Instruction Set Architecture emulated by QEMU. You will also build a minimal root filesystem by yourself thanks to the BusyBox project. You will finish by controlling the system through a tiny webserver. The approach will be to provide only the files that are strictly necessary. That's all the interest of embedded Linux: you can really control and understand everything that runs on your system, and see how simple the system can be. That's much easier than trying to understand how a GNU/Linux system works from a distribution as complex as Debian!
You will also get details about what's specific to the Risc-V architecture, in particular about the various stages of the boot process. At the end of the presentation, you will leave with all the hardware (!), source code build instructions and demo binaries to reproduce everything by yourself at home, and add your own improvements. Most of the details should also be useful to people using other hardware architectures (in particular arm and arm64).
Michael Opdenacker here proposes a new version of an older presentation he made 15 years ago to discover embedded Linux, and which was for a long time one of his most downloaded presentations.
This presentation should be particularly useful for people who are new to embedded Linux and/or to Risc-V, don't have Risc-V hardware yet, and wish to test each new release of the Linux kernel and U-Boot on this new architecture, to report possible regressions and propose missing features.
