A tour of the ARM architecture and its Linux support

Thomas Petazzoni From mobile devices to industrial equipment, and with the rise of IoT, computing systems based on the ARM architecture are already ubiquitous and will become even more so in the future, which means more and more developers will be exposed to ARM systems. The ARM architecture however has a number of differences compared to x86/x86_64, both in how the hardware is designed, and how it is supported from a low-level software point of view: at the bootloader level and the Linux kernel level. This talk proposes an introduction to the ARM architecture, to help Linux users and developers understand the huge variety of ARM processors and platforms that are available, and how such a variety of hardware is supported in bootloaders and the kernel. If you want to migrate your system to an ARM platform, and understand the difference between the Raspberry Pi variants, between ARMv6, ARMv7 and ARMv8, what is the Device Tree, what is this U-Boot thing, and generally get a better understanding of the ARM platform, this talk is for you!