Chapter 3. Board Support Package
The Board Support Package is one of the critical components needed to develop the OS design to generate the CE runtime image.
A complete technical reference covering the Board Support Package (BSP) topic for Windows Embedded CE could expand into a whole book. In this chapter, I simply provide a high-level overview of BSPs and how to clone and customize existing BSPs.
BSP Overview
The Board Support Package is a common name referring to a software library required to load and run the operating system on a supported hardware device. Developing the BSP is one of the important steps to provide Windows Embedded CE support for the targeted hardware. If one is not already available, creating a BSP to support the target hardware is usually one of the first steps in the early stage of development. BSP development typically includes the following:
Develop the boot loader.
Develop the OEM Adaptation Layer (OAL).
Develop the device drivers.
Develop the OS runtime image configuration files.
In general, the BSP is provided by the hardware manufacturer or the hardware development team. Although the application developer does not need to be concerned about BSP development, knowing how the BSP is developed and the BSP's structure can be helpful in writing code for applications involving hardware control, in helping save precious development time, and in minimizing hardware-related coding problems.
Windows Embedded CE is designed to support multiple CPU architectures, such ...
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