Guidance for porting Genode to a new SoC Jun 01, 2021

Our new "Genode Platforms" documentation complements the existing Genode Foundations book with a wealth of hardware-related topics.

The porting of Genode to a new ARM SoC is a challenging under- taking that comes with a great deal of uncertainties, namely the inner functioning of overly complex hardware, picking appropriate tools and methodologies, taking informed decisions about porting versus developing drivers, and relating all this to Genode.

Combined, these uncertainties pose a huge barrier. At Genode Labs, we have conquered this barrier a few times in the past, like recently for supporting the NXP i.MX8 SoC. However, the porting of Genode to new hardware should not be left as an activity exclusive to Genode Labs. In order to assist developers outside of Genode's inner circle with joining the effort and help the proliferation of Genode across diverse SoCs, we decided to publicly share our know-how.

Over the past six months we have continuously published an article series called "Pine fun" on https://genodians.org that explains the process step by step. We have now curated the content of the accumulated articles into one coherent document called Genode Platforms (PDF).

Similar to the established "Genode Foundations" book that receives annual updates, it will be a living document, to be enhanced according reader feedback and further practical steps. The initial version already covers a wealth of architectural and methodical insights that were not publicly available before, ranging from bare-bone hardware enablement, over low-level debugging, kernel-code organization and porting, user-level device drivers, cascaded access control to device resources, up to custom assistive tooling.