This page documents the current state of the in-progress attempt to port the shared-source RISC OS to the new ARM Cortex-A8 based processors. The code is available in CVS as the ‘OMAP3Dev’ product. At present the port consists of a HAL targetting TI’s OMAP3530 SoC (as used in the BeagleBoard and Pandora, and emulated via QEMU-OMAP3), as well as a modified RISC OS kernel intended to support all Cortex-A8 implementations.
This table lists the current state of all planned tasks.
Task | Description/Status | Assigned to |
---|---|---|
OMAP3 HAL – Basic implementation | Implementation is complete and functional under qemu. However currently fails to boot on real hardware; fixes are in development. | Jeffrey Lee, Uwe Kall |
OMAP3 HAL – Video driver | Not yet functional. | Jeffrey Lee |
OMAP3 HAL – Audio driver | Unassigned | – |
OMAP3 HAL – USB support | Unassigned | – |
OMAP3 HAL – SD/MMC support | Unassigned | – |
OMAP3 HAL – GPMC support | Support for devices connected to the GPMC controller (extra RAM, onboard NAND, etc.) | – |
OMAP3 HAL – CMOS/NVRAM support/emulation | Unassigned | – |
OMAP3 HAL – Keyboard scan at boot | Unassigned | – |
OMAP3 HAL – DMA support | Unassigned | – |
Kernel – Basic support | Kernel is functional under qemu but will fail on real hardware. Needs new cache management routines writing for Cortex. | Jeffrey Lee |
Kernel – ARM feature registers | Extend OS_PlatformFeatures (or similar) to allow reading of ARM feature registers. Provide suitable feature register values for old ARMs that don’t implement the feature registers. | – |
VFPU support | Code to initialise VFPU. APCS amendments and compiler/OS support to allow its use by programs. New FPEmulator to provide VFPU emulation for old ARMs. Possibility of special FPEmulator that emulates old FPU instructions by executing new VFPU instructions instead of using software emulation. | – |
ARM v6/v7 instruction set support | Assembler support in BASIC, objasm and cc, and disassembler support in decaof and Debugger. Contact ROOL if you’re interested in working on objasm, cc or decaof under NDA, these are closed-source. | – |
Pandora support | Support for Pandora-specific hardware – keyboard, touchscreen, RTC, etc. | – |
i.MX515 support | New HAL and associated code to support Freescale’s i.MX515 Cortex-A8 implementation, which has a good chance of being used in the first ARM based netbooks to hit the (UK) market (Pegatron – Prototype, LimePC – already available in China) | – |
Kernel – New video mode support | Support for video modes with new pixel formats (R5G5B5, A4R4G4B4, etc.) | – |