While hardware platforms have evolved over the years, operating systems had to follow along. At the same time, their portability poses an increasing challenge in terms of complexity: A memory-intense system these days relies on DRAM that needs to be kept stable, commonly performed by dedicated controllers. Those feature thousands of registers for configuration. Beyond that, the diversity of peripherals requires lots of drivers, and the OS still has to come from somewhere. This is solved in a multi-step manner, a process refered to as "booting". However, those steps may overcomplicate the issue, bringing duplication and hard to understand interwoven components into the concept. In this talk, we will look at a range of projects involved, classify them, discuss and compare the various approaches, and come to a modern solution taming a good portion of the problem space.
Presenter: Daniel Maslowski
Daniel likes giving talks and workshops.
In his free time, he works on various software projects, especially operating systems and distributions, bringup and application firmware, with a focus on tooling, integration, and documentation.
He created Fiedka, the firmware editor.