Low Level Programming of the Raspberry Pi in C (2013) | Hacker News Reader

Low Level Programming of the Raspberry Pi in C (2013)

pieter-jan.com

171 pointsmountainplus19 comments

If you need a little bit more determinism the beaglebone has a PRU (programmable realtime unit), a separate processor that can pass data back and forth to the main RAM.

http://beagleboard.org/pru

I was able to use one to read in an 8 bit parallel bus at around 8MHz without having to build a separate board with appropriate MCU.

Had a quick scroll through the docs there, thanks for the link! One thing that's not clear to me is the degree to which the PRU has register-controller peripheral modules like an MCU, or are you essentially bit-banging everything (which definitely has its appeal after the hours you can spend wrangling with the stupid timers and DMAs on a CM3).

How is the community? Are there ready to go modules for common tasks like actively rectified H-bridge control, CANbus control, etc? (I know the processor itself can do CAN too, but say I have a hard realtime requirement on my CAN network...)

It is basically a raw MCU without any peripherals. I think the main purpose is so you can implement just about any basic peripheral and novel ideas in code, so it is essentially a bit bang but like most MCUs you can read/set an entire IO bank in one go. Since it is separate and basically deterministic except for some ram latency jitter whatever you implement that works should be as solid as any purpose built peripheral. It takes some assembly though. It is absolutely great for basic IO stuff that an arduino class MCU could do where the bandwidth is too high for dealing with the GPIOs with standard linux scheduler latency.

I played with it a couple years ago and the community appeared small, but it is straight forward enough that the examples and docs are likely all you need. I bet the community is stronger but it isn't going to be on stack exchange.

Yeah, they are excellent for bit-banging protocols, which is really handy if you come across some weird digital interface. I've used it for interfacing with a scanner head, which is a fairly quirky parallel interface.

I took another look and it looks like the PRU can also use the peripherals, so you might be able to have a simple realtime component utilizing the CAN peripheral.

I used it for a proof of concept for a project and ended up taking a different route for the final design due to BOM cost desires. The original plan was to use the beaglecore, which is the core of the thing on a PCB with an LGA bottom. It actually comes in a giant cut tape form factor for mutant pick and place machines. I had never seen anything like that before.

http://beaglecore.com/

Sure it's low level in that you're poking at physical memory registers, but to me, low level in this context (thinking microcontrollers) means replacing the Linux kernel binary with your own application that does its own direct memory poking.

Low level: directly accessing hardware. To immediately equate low level with 'you need to roll your own kernel' is a redefinition of terms that makes no sense to me. After all, even a Linux device driver still makes use of all the facilities the kernel provides and yet it is definitely low level programming.

This has been here last year:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16180975

https://jsandler18.github.io/

Also there are a few other things which come in handy like those two:

https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/projects/raspberrypi/tutorials/os/

https://wiki.osdev.org/Raspberry_Pi_Bare_Bones

The cambridge tutorial is armv6 assembly only though. Which is kinda neat to poke around with, but not that much fun (imo). But doing baremetal for the raspberry is fun, just because it is a different architecture. The only problem I had with it was that the bcm-datasheet felt not very nice. It's kind of hard reading yourself through this. Or maybe it was so hard, because the topic in itself is pretty complex

Not 100% agreeable with you. If you are writing a Linux device driver, accessing the registers, memory, IO ports are still considered as low level programming.

But you are right, to be really low level at C, nothing beats writing to the bare metal. There are plenty of guides floating about for this. Here is an example.

http://www.valvers.com/open-software/raspberry-pi/step01-bar...

No, to really be low level, you have to implement your stuff in FPGA. But that's not truly low level. To truly be low level, you have to forego pre-fab hardware and fully implement your logic in RTL yourself. But to really be low-level, that isn't sufficient. You must shed your digital abstractions and implement the whole thing in analog circuits.

There used to be one in Rust but it seems that this year it reverted back to C.

https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/7pymd9/stanford_cs140...

Check out ultibo.org It is Pascal, not C, but runs down on bare metal.

Is there a Raspberry PI emulator that exists that I could test my code on before attempting to load it onto the device?

I use the pre-built image from Azeria Labs. It's a Linux VM with QEMU set up for Pi/Raspian out of the box.

https://azeria-labs.com/arm-lab-vm/

Those instructions are not using QEMU to emulate the Pi. They tell QEMU to emulate an entirely different piece of hardware (the versatilepb board) and run the raspbian userspace on it. You certainly won't be able to test any code for the Pi that directly accesses the hardware like that. (QEMU does have some limited real rpi emulation support, but those instructions don't use it.)

Qemu has some support, but it's not much. There used to be this thing called PiEmu, but it's not on GitHub anymore as far as I can tell.

IMO, just getting a PI and going to town is the best option currently.

Is this the kind of thing that might be good for a kid (9) to learn as a first step into real CS?

Very cool! Has anyone seen a Rust equivalent of something like this?

I came across this [1] a while ago. I haven't spent any time reading it yet so I can't exactly recommend it, but it seems pretty good.

[1] https://github.com/rust-embedded/rust-raspi3-OS-tutorials

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