Book Image

Raspberry Pi Computer Architecture Essentials

By : Andrew K. Dennis, Teemu O Pohjanlehto
Book Image

Raspberry Pi Computer Architecture Essentials

By: Andrew K. Dennis, Teemu O Pohjanlehto

Overview of this book

With the release of the Raspberry Pi 2, a new series of the popular compact computer is available for you to build cheap, exciting projects and learn about programming. In this book, we explore Raspberry Pi 2’s hardware through a number of projects in a variety of programming languages. We will start by exploring the various hardware components in detail, which will provide a base for the programming projects and guide you through setting up the tools for Assembler, C/C++, and Python. We will then learn how to write multi-threaded applications and Raspberry Pi 2’s multi-core processor. Moving on, you’ll get hands on by expanding the storage options of the Raspberry Pi beyond the SD card and interacting with the graphics hardware. Furthermore, you will be introduced to the basics of sound programming while expanding upon your knowledge of Python to build a web server. Finally, you will learn to interact with the third-party microcontrollers. From writing your first Assembly Language application to programming graphics, this title guides you through the essentials.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Raspberry Pi Computer Architecture Essentials
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Booting up


What follows is a brief explanation of the process that eventually results in Raspbian being loaded. This will provide some context when we come to modify the cmdline.txt file in order to boot the operating system from the HDD rather than the microSD card.

Start by running the following ls command:

ls /boot/

This is the boot directory as its name suggests. In here you will see a variety of files that are used in a specific order to boot the Raspberry Pi 2 up into the operating system.

The following screenshot illustrates what this directory typically looks like:

We will now summarize how these files are used in the overall process.

The first step happens when we power up the Raspberry Pi. The CPU and other components start up and the VideoCore GPU kicks off the boot process based upon its firmware located in Read Only Memory (ROM).

This firmware can optionally be updated with the latest version by following the steps in the document available at https://github.com/Hexxeh/rpi-update...