Bringing Up Linux on a New Platform: A Minimal RISC-V Emulator
How to bring up the Linux Kernel on a new platform
WerWolv details the process of getting Linux to boot on a custom platform, using a minimal RISC-V emulator written in C++ as an example. The post covers the essential hardware requirements (CPU with MMU, RAM, timer), compiling a cross-toolchain with crosstool-ng, configuring and building the Linux kernel for RV32IMA, creating a static init program and initramfs, and writing a device tree to describe the emulated hardware. The result is a bootable Linux system in about 2000 lines of code.
Even though Linux is a very complex piece of software, it doesn’t actually have that many requirements to run.