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hackndev / zinc

The bare metal stack for rust
zinc.rs
Apache License 2.0
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Raspberry Pi support #161

Closed alexchandel closed 10 years ago

alexchandel commented 10 years ago

RPi is a pretty commonly held ARM board, support would allow lots of others to test zinc.rs. It would mean adding support for the Broadcom SoC that the RPi uses.

bgamari commented 10 years ago

It's unlikely Zinc will ever support the Raspberry Pi as it is a much larger machine than we are targeting (e.g. Cortex-scale devices). Really you are better off running Rust on Linux when working with Beagle Bone/Raspberry Pi-scale devices. However, even if the RPi were in the machine class that we target the poor state of Broadcom's documentation would make it quite unappealing to work on.

bharrisau commented 10 years ago

The RPi is an ARMv6 core, whereas we are targetting ARMv6m and ARMv7m. It doesn't look like it would be too big a stretch to cover RPi too, but I'm not sure Broadcom has shared the required reference manuals?

farcaller commented 10 years ago

I don't think a bare-metal RPi support is reasonable to target now. I'd rather add support for "native-linux" platform to zinc/os stack when there's something other than a bare-bones scheduler so that you can run that one on RPi same way as e.g. contiki.

farcaller commented 10 years ago

To elaborate a bit more: I'm fine with a PR that adds GPIO support for RPi based on linux file interface.

ghost commented 10 years ago

I would really like to be able to code only I'm rust on the pi.

Knowing my code can relatively easy move from stb hardware up to a PI is a big win.

bharrisau commented 10 years ago

If you dont need bare metal RPi, you can already build binaries for linux on the RPi https://github.com/npryce/rusty-pi/blob/master/doc/compile-the-compiler.asciidoc

ghost commented 10 years ago

That's a really nice aspect !

Would the actual code be portable between rust on Linux & zinc ?

I assume the instrumentation attributes would ? Maybe many other bits. It would be good for these differences to be well know for newbies like me.

farcaller commented 10 years ago

No, it wouldn't really be portable. rust building natively for linux uses libc that talks to linux kernel. zinc is something like linux kernel + libc, so there's a different set of APIs.

E.g. if zinc implements any filesystem support it might be quite different from what you use in rust to open files (for the sake of keeping code simple and low profile).

jedahan commented 10 years ago

It would be really nice if we could write rust code not for the beaglebone per say, but for the PRUs on the beaglebone...

farcaller commented 10 years ago

AFAIK there's no llvm support for beaglebone's PRUs, so it's not a valid target for rustc so far.

alexchandel commented 10 years ago

@bgamari @bharrisau There's documentation for the RPi's SoC (the Broadcom BCM2835) here. It should be possible to support the RPi's timers, interrupts, the system clock, GPIO, UART, SPI, I2C, and even USB.

To elaborate a bit more: I'm fine with a PR that adds GPIO support for RPi based on linux file interface.

@farcaller Wouldn't that be outside in the scope of this project? Zinc wouldn't really be a "bare-metal" "RTOS stack" if it's running in userspace on Linux.

nistvan86 commented 8 years ago

Any chance of moving this forward? Compiling to bare metal Raspberry Pi is definitely possible with Rust (http://blog.thiago.me/raspberry-pi-bare-metal-programming-with-rust/), but without Zinc using plain Cargo it's difficult.

Also check out this blog series: http://www.valvers.com/open-software/raspberry-pi/step01-bare-metal-programming-in-cpt1/ and this repository: https://github.com/dwelch67/raspberrypi I would love to replicate these tutorials in Rust.

farcaller commented 8 years ago

I reconsidered my stance that it's out of zinc scope and I'm ok with incoming PRs.