How to use Genode directly on hardware

This document provides brief instructions about building and booting Genode with the base-hw repository. The base-hw repository provides an implementation of the Genode core that runs directly on hardware, without an intermediate third-party kernel. It supports a limited range of target boards. For further target specific informations, have a look at <GENODE_DIR>/repos/base-hw/doc/<TARGET>.txt where <TARGET> is one of the following:

panda - PandaBoard A2

Prerequisites

To build Genode you need to download and install the tool-chain used by Genode. Have a look at this page:

If you want to use the so called run-scripts in Genode, a mechanism that automates building, integration and testing of components, you have to install the following, additional package:

 apt-get install expect

If you want to examine the examples that are given in this document, you will need Qemu for ARM emulations to run them on your machine:

 apt-get install qemu-kvm-extras

Building Genode to run directly on hardware

The current version of the Genode source code is available at this page:

Now, go to a directory where you want the Genode build directory to remain. Use the helper script in the tool directory of the Genode source tree to create the initial build environment. You need to state the build directory you want to create, and the hardware target to run Genode on.

 <genode-dir>/tool/create_builddir hw_<TARGET> BUILD_DIR=<build-dir>

Where <TARGET> is one of the following, depending on the hardware system you aim at:

arndale - Arndale (Exynos5) board imx53 - i.MX53 based board imx53_tz - i.MX53 based board using TrustZone odroid_xu - Odroid XU (Exynos5) board panda - PandaBoard A2 pbxa9 - Realview PBXA9 rpi - Raspberry PI

Please notice that not all of these targets might be emulateable with Qemu. To be on the safe side use pbxa9. For informations about how to boot base-hw images on real hardware have a look at <GENODE_DIR>/repos/base-hw/doc/<TARGET>.txt.

Now, go to the newly created build directory make a test:

 cd <build-dir>
 make run/nested_init

This will build the Genode components that are needed to run a simple test with 3 nested init programs, and than execute it via Qemu.