Olinuxino without OS

[carlos]

Hi!
I have a control system running on a E407 board without Operative System. Can I program Olinuxino board (A20) without an OS?
Thanks

[JohnS]

You can.  People have posted before about this with AW chips so start there.

Expect it to require a LOT of effort and much reading and research - and to be roughly the only person doing it.

John

[Freire]

Look this, may be useful:

https://www.olimex.com/wiki/A13-OLinuXino#Bare_Metal_programming_-_no_OS
https://www.techopedia.com/definition/3745/bare-metal-programming

[LinuxUser]

Theoretically you can use Allwinner without OS, linux-sunxi repo contains some few examples of boot-time tools which are working in early pre-boot phase, lacking any OS and runtime to call. As well as u-boot serves as example of programming "without OS". Though it implies a lot of pain. E.g. to use all features, do you have at least basic idea about MMUs and VM? That's what you get in full blown "application processor". And at the end of day, U-boot looks like a very stripped down version of single-tasked OS, which exposes driver model somewhat similar to Linux kernel. It just single-threaded and its drivers are stripped down.

SoC and its peripherals are rather complicated, and have quite many aspects you may want to take care of. Writing everything like this on your own is VERY impractical thing to do, unless you have plenty of time and some really uncommon task with specific requirements. And yep, you can control relay or blink some LED from Linux, etc.

If you want something which is easy to program as bare metal, take a look on microcontrollers. They are less complicated and far more predictable. But their abilities are more limited and they lack multiple cores at GHz rate. Because you do not need GHz core to control relay and blink leds. But it does not hurts if you want to process reasonable network traffic, read files from real filesystem and so on.