ARM programming, where do I start?

ask.metafilter.com

10 points·helwr··6 comments

OK. These are the two books you need when you start out programming for ARM chips:

ARM System-on-Chip Architecture (2nd Edition) By Steve Furber (the guy who designed the bloody chip!) http://www.amazon.com/ARM-System-Chip-Architecture-2nd/dp/02...

ARM Architecture Reference Manual (2nd Edition) By David Seal http://www.amazon.com/ARM-Architecture-Reference-Manual-2nd/...

Depends on what you want to do. Getting a beagleboard would be a no brainer to start out.

http://www.amazon.com/ARM-System-Developers-Guide-Architectu... is a good book, you might want to buy a copy.

Some handy things to know about ARM.. logical operations can be added on to ALU instructions for free -- lots of speed gains there...

If you have never done any embedded programming; expect things to take longer to write, and frustration levels can be pretty ugly.

If you get an ARM chip that doesn't have floating point, and you need to do something mathematically intensive, look into fixed point math. Make everything you can into a table (most ARM chips have enough memory so that you can trade space for speed)

Don't give up -- embedded requires tenacity.

Oh, and Codesourcery provides good pre-compiled toolchains, but you have to dig around on their website a bit to find them.

"If you get an ARM chip that doesn't have floating point..."

Or that there is no dedicated instruction to divide. :)

Also, you can get started on an emulator such as qemu:

http://www.nongnu.org/qemu/

Or even start playing with eg Android SDK/NDK which runs their emulator on qemu. Pretty much all mobile phones run on ARM though so pick which ever you are most comfortable with.

Slightly off the wall idea... but you could buy an old Archimedes or RiscPC off eBAY. There's an ARM assembler built-in (OS, BASIC V, assembler, and some apps are in ROM).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com