Bare metal, Assembly language • Raspberry Pi 3 replacement for bare metal teaching?

Hello everybody,

I teach a low-level/real-time systems class using Raspberry Pi 3.
For the practical side, I show how a simple real-time executive can be
built directly on top of the Raspberry Pi hardware. I provide the students
with source code and they have to later extend it.

Up to the Raspberry Pi 3, the architecture of the Pi cards is quite simple,
allowing me to focus on the Cortex-A multi-core (interrupt configuration,
memory coherency...). The low-level library and code is specific to the Pi3,
which allows easy customization and avoids the pitfalls of code that
is too general and has #ifdef directives everywhere.

However, the Raspberry Pi 3 is no longer manufactured, and I'm not so
sure how to proceed. Should I continue towards the Pi 5 (which is far more
expensive and more complicated) or should I consider other, simpler SBC
cards, where I can continue to focus on the multi-core and on simple
I/Os.

I guess my deeper question is: are future multi-core Raspberry Pi SBCs
going to be as tinker-friendly as the Pi3?

Regards,
Dumitru

Statistics: Posted by dpotop — Thu May 02, 2024 9:59 am — Replies 5 — Views 71

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