Linux on Undocumented Hardware

As MMUs and large amounts of RAM become increasingly common even among embedded devices and portable low-power systems, running Linux on them becomes an attractive option; unfortunately, many of the hardware vendors don't provide full documentation, and board designs are almost never available.

To port Linux to an undocumented device, some way of running privileged code on the device must be found (this is trivial in some cases, but can be a significant part of the porting effort as well) and drivers for undocumented peripherals must be written.

This talk will present several approaches to solving those problems, most prominently disassembling and modifying binary code intended for the target device. A Compaq Aero 8000 laptop shipped with Windows CE and the author's port of Linux to it will be used as an example throughout the talk.

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next deadline:
Abstracts,
Monday,
February 15th,
2001

Thank you to everyone who submitted proposals