Operation: Try to Bare-Metal the Pi

Now here's an idea I hadn't thought of for bare-metalling... Emulators. Right? Why run an emulator atop an OS?

There're some great thought-points in the commentary, here... I'm no emulator-designer, and barely even use emulators... so I can't vouch for anything said.

http://hackaday.com/2016/10/12/raspberry-pi-boots-cpm/

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I have, however, run VirtualPC on a 1GHz PowerBook-G4 and... running WindowsXP was *doable*; booting took about 20min, then... I used it for CircuitMaker2000, which... was I think written for Windows95/98... and... it was atrociously slow (but functional enough to slowly design several circuit boards). Were it a Win98 machine with CM2K, I think a 100MHz Pentium woulda been plenty. So, I think a 20:1 slow-down is a reasonable estimate... (1GHz G4 => 50MHz Pentium).

So... how much of that was due to OS overhead...? How much was due to MAC-OS overhead, and then, again, how much more of that was due to WinXP overhead...? If I'da done Win98, would it've been significantly faster? Who knows... Maybe I'll rerun those experiments when I acquire my "new" PBG4 replacement.

Regardless, it'd be hard to dispute that running a bare-metal emulator should certainly be faster than running one atop an OS...

Overly-wordy, too long, and much too blurry "proof" of this mythical electronic creature... If you believe the Sasquatch, UFO, or Unicorn-sighting videos, you'll believe this one!

[dwelch67] has what appears to be a great collection of bare-metal-pi examples... And really seems to know (and share) his/this shizzle.

And (interesting-timing?) recently my email's been getting some messages from his project... directly related to getting started with his project...

UPDATE: I've done the first "blinky" example from his code, and put my findings in the "Instructions" section of this project-page.

There might be some useful info, here, as well: https://github.com/dwelch67/raspberrypi/issues/24

So, this whole bare-metalling thing may be quite a bit easier than I pictured, and maybe even quite a bit more common... But either way, Be Sure To Enter Your Project In The Contest! before November 8, 2016

Hey, if you're interested in bare-metalling the Pi, you should look into this... BEFORE NOVEMBER NINTH:

Have an awesome Raspberry Pi project in mind (or maybe sitting on your bench right now)?
Show it off for the Enlightened Raspberry Pi contest and you can score some excellent loot.

Find out more here:

http://hackaday.com/2016/10/05/win-loot-with-the-enlightened-raspberry-pi-contest/

And be sure to click-through for the details (relinked-here):

https://hackaday.io/contest/15532-enlightened-raspberry-pi-contest

As far as I'm aware, there aren't many bare-metal Pi projects out there, and even fewer on .io... So I'm totally guessing here, but something little more complex than a bare-metal-blinky-pi could be surprisingly competitive.

Get to work!

"This project was last updated 7 months ago"

Sometime therebefore I put in the description that my pursuit of this "project" is mostly-dead, but not due to lack of information! So this "project page" remains as a placeholder for a bunch of great links brought to my attention.

Again, thank you to all who did and/or will!

So it's kinda interesting that over the past day or so my email inbox is filled with new folks following this project! Weird! Cool, but weird!

Hey Newbies, and those who haven't already! Check out the profile pages of the folks who've suggested resources! Their profile-pages are linked in the comments-section, the description, and elsewhere 'round this page. Them's some smart folk!

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My original goals for this project kinda branched off to #sdramThingZero - 133MS/s 32-bit Logic Analyzer, but I have little intention to bare-metal that any time in the near future. But, who knows, these new follows are good reminder of bare-metalling... And, again, thanks to all the commenters for their links, 'round here... Should I go that route--now that I've finally ordered MyVeryFirstPi(TM)--I've got some great links here to start with!

And you, new-followers, do too!

Would be awesome to see if y'all come up with stuff, please leave a project-link in the comments-section!

Here're some thoughts on R-Pi peripherals which could potentially be used to generate a steady high-speed clock-output...

(Note the R-Pi's peripheral data-sheet: https://www.raspberrypi.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/BCM2835-ARM-Peripherals.pdf Not sure which particular Pi Revisions this is applicable to...)