Porting Android on FPGA using ARM softcore

[Muhammad Ali]

Hi, Everyone,

I want to port android on ARM softcore,

What could be the minimum requirements of a machine for android kernel,
(e.g processor along RAM and ROM)

If someone has done this before then is it possible to get a whole
machine softcore (which might be enough to drive android (linux)
kernel)) ?

Is this possible without changing Android source code or NOT ?

Thanks,

Muhammad Ali,
NUST, Pakistan.

[Elvis Dowson]

Hi,
I thought of doing this, but apparently none of the existing ARM
softcore IPs have a full fledged MMU (I haven't confirmed this
independently with ARM).

http://forums.xilinx.com/t5/Spartan-Family-FPGAs/ARM-processor-core-instantiation-with-Spartan-601-development/m-p/107425#M8214

What was suggested was to port Android to the MicroBlaze processor, or
wait for the next Xilinx -7 series platforms with a hard ARM processor
core, or use the older Virtex-5 FXT processor which has a PowerPC 440
hard processor.

Elvis Dowson

[Chris Stratton]

As embedded systems go, android is extremely resource (memory and CPU
speed) hungry, and also harder than other embedded linuxes to extend
to take advantage of unique hardware capabilities, so all in all, I'd
say this probably not a good project idea.

I think you'd be better off running android on a small tablet and
packaging it in a stack with an fpga based peripheral that does
something interesting.

On Nov 28, 1:27 pm, Elvis Dowson <elvis.dow...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>      I thought of doing this, but apparently none of the existing ARM
> softcore IPs have a full fledged MMU (I haven't confirmed this
> independently with ARM).
>

> http://forums.xilinx.com/t5/Spartan-Family-FPGAs/ARM-processor-core-i...