From First Boot to First Driver - The Raw Approach.
This repository contains the Markdown source for a first-principles embedded Linux book aimed at engineers who already know MCU, bare-metal, or RTOS development and want to understand Linux from the reset vector up.
Read at https://dangvitin.github.io/linuxlearn/
The book covers bare-metal i.MX6ULL bring-up, U-Boot, mainline Linux, root filesystem construction, Linux driver development, a device cookbook, debugging, production flows, secure boot, field updates, CI/CD, upstream patch submission, and an advanced virtualization track.
This book is written for firmware engineers who already understand concepts such as registers, interrupts, linker scripts, startup code, UART, GPIO, and board bring-up, but are new to the Linux boot stack, kernel/user split, Device Tree, root filesystems, and Linux driver APIs.
Primary target:
- Point Atom MINI / ALPHA i.MX6ULL board
- NXP i.MX6ULL Cortex-A7 at 696 MHz
- 512 MiB DDR3L
- UART console, SD/eMMC boot, USB-OTG recovery, optional JTAG
Most Part IV through Part VIII material transfers to other Linux-capable ARM SoCs. Parts II and III are intentionally i.MX6ULL-specific because they teach Boot ROM, DCD, DDR, IOMUX, clock, and U-Boot porting details. Part IX is an applied virtualization path: QEMU first, Xen on i.MX6ULL where useful, Jailhouse in QEMU ARM64, and STM32MP1 Linux+RTOS for the more production-realistic A7/M4 split.