Sunday, August 17, 2008

Building linux for psp - Introduction


Hi recently i was looking at getting linux on to my psp and found this site.
http://jacksonm88.googlepages.com/linuxonpsp.htm

The information provided here is not enough for a noob like me to get it up from start ; I had to do a lot of twiking around, google alot ask about my problem at http://ps2.dev.org to get it up and in the process i learned alot about linux :) .

Basically getting linux on psp or embedded system for that matter, Involves the following steps

1) Get a cross compiler / toolchain
2) Get a bootloader
3) Compile a kernel with drivers
4) Get a rootfs

Before going further i would like to mentions some details about the psp hardware and its limitations for running linux. PSP has a mips microcontroller / arch mips32, mmu-less. The mmu is a important unit for any OS. Fortunately there is a branch of linux which can be run on a mmu-less processors called uClinux. But it is very limited.
The limitations of a mmu-less system as far as i understood are
- No glibc
- It does not support shared libraries.
- The executable file format should be flat, ELF is not supported.

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