ARM machine / board ID
I am curious about the meaning of Board / Machine ID. I have several questions related to it:
- Is the machine ID equal to the board ID or different?
- What is the meaning of this ID when it comes to loading the bootloader and loading the kernel?
- Who decides the board ID?
- Is the identifier specific to the ARM architecture, or does this concept apply to other platforms as well?
- How do I view the board ID of a specific machine?
- Is it related to booting Linux?
Any other information. in addition to these questions are welcome.
Thanks in advance.
source to share
The "Machine ID" in this context is specific to ARM Linux, and the numbers were assigned by the ARM kernel developer. The machines supported on the backbone are listed in arch/arm/tools/mach-types
; the complete registry can be found here .
ARM systems are problematic in that there is no "standard" hardware layout (e.g. IBM PC compatible for x86), no standard firmware (e.g. ACPI BIOS), and most peripherals are directly attached to the CPU rather than a likely bus lagging behind (e.g. , PCI). Consequently, the ARM kernel had to rely on the bootloader to tell it what machine it was running on, thus what hardcoded hardware definition / support was in use (see arch/arm/mach-*/
).
Note that this system is deprecated and the preferred way of describing hardware is Device Tree , which removes much of the need to populate the kernel with machine-specific code (indeed, many of those older systems that are still supported are converted from "boardfiles" in DT).
source to share