Hi guys,
The effort required to port android to an FPGA is huge!! My
honest opinion is to try to scale your thesis into something more
realistic and achievable in a 1 year time frame, such as hooking up an
existing general purpose CPU to an FPGA and accelerating a specific
computational algorithm on the FPGA, and bringing the results back to
the CPU. This way, you use these devices for what it does best, the
CPU to run the linux kernel and the FPGA to hardware accelerate an
algorithm.
I have seen in some of the presentation slides that Android uses the
OpenMax interface developed by the Khronos Group, so that you can
provide for hardware accelerated codecs. So modifying your thesis
along those lines would be the best approach.
I think porting of linux to the FPGA has been done before. Some of the
FPGAs such as the Xilinx Virtex-5 already has a PowerPC 4 series core,
and if you search for a git repository that contains the required
support for the ML507 board, you should be able to get linux up and
running on the board. One thing to keep in mind is that all the
peripheral devices on the ML507 that uses the Virtex-5 (VGA, Ethernet,
USB, etc) are all soft IP cores, so imagine the sheer effort that you
will have to put in, to get this ported to work with android.
I think you need to carefully balance the objectives of this type of
work, i.e is there a benefit to porting android OS onto an FPGA
(factor also time and effort required to do the port, plus end
result). In my opinion, the real benefit of an FPGA is the blazing
speed that it offers in terms of h/w acceleration, so accelerating
specific algorithms or codecs, or even porting an existing software
codec in android and getting it to run on the FPGA and send the
results back to the CPU is a better thing, and it probably something
that you should be able to achieve with 2 people working full time for
about 4 to 7 months in an academic environment.
Best regards,
Elvis
--~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~
unsubscribe: [email protected]
website: http://groups.google.com/group/android-porting
-~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
