Porting of an Operating System kernel

When it comes to the domain of embedded technologies, the ARM processor architecture is very popular. According to Wikipedia[8] around 90 % of all 32 bit embedded CPU’s are based on the ARM processor architecture as of 2009. Its usage is growing in cell phones, PDA’s, GPS devices, and netbooks. The fact that the ARM architecture has entered the netbook marked has made it a very interesting architecture for operating system development. Systems based on the ARM processor architecture, can become very complex machines since these are meant to support varied tasks such as memory management and process management. This means that an operating system has to be ported to these ARM processor architectures. An operating system redesigned to extract the maximum performance out of the hardware and still be stable and secure. Often such operating system porting is the work of specialized third party vendors having expertise on this domain. This Thesis describes the details of porting the FenixOS the research operating system to the ARM Cortex A8 processor architecture. It describes; the Kernel boot sequences utilizing an embedded bootloader, the utilization of a software ARM emulator, early kernel initialization where virtual memory is setup, IRQ/FIQ setup and finally contexts switches are also described. ii