What is BSP ? Top 8 Advantages of BSP Development.

“BSP”(Board Support Package Development) term was first used in the year 1981 when the developers of the VRTX, Hunter & Ready described the hardware-dependent software which is needed to run on a specific hardware platform.

A BSP is an essential code that is given for a computer hardware device that will make that particular device work with the operating system of the computer. The Board Support Package includes a small program popularly called a boot manager or bootloader that places the device drivers and the operating system into memory.

Board Support Package is developed for a specific board or a family of Boards. It is a library that gives control of low-level Hardware drivers to the application layer through APIs. The major APIs provided will be to Configure, Initialize, Enable and Disable the peripheral.

It helps to facilitate any application development on the customer hardware and the Real-Time Operating System. In simple terms, BSP provides a mechanism supporting both custom and standard embedded hardware designs with Real-Time Operating systems. BSP helps provide software templates that include skeleton device driver code and code for lower-level systems functions required by some of the particular hardware devices. To perform BSP development, one needs to have complete knowledge of the Board and Hardware Software Interface’s low-level architecture.

Advantages of Board Support Package Development.

  • Standard peripherals include Clock, SPI,12C, ADC, DAC, BLE, UART. The main difference between BSP and SDK is that BSP specifically targets the APIs for hardware peripherals. On the Contrary, SDK is not tied to the underlying hardware and instead tries to hide it.
  • BSP is mainly developed to support Bare metal applications. It is advantageous because it reduces the time to deployment by allowing the user to focus on Algo development instead of worrying about the nitty-gritty of Hardware/Register/Memory specific Implementation Details. 
  • BSP makes it easy to work with the board by providing an abstraction for code readability and high-level programming.
  • BSP helps in reducing the chances of writing incorrect code as it is standardized and released by vendors. The Board Support Package (BSP) is popularly used not only for a start-up but also to run the embedded target processor.
  • Board Support Packages are customizable, enabling the user regarding which routines and drivers shall be included in the build based on their selection of software and hardware options. For example, any single-board computer can be paired with any of the several graphics cards, in that scenario, the Board Support Package may have a driver for each supported graphics, when building the image of Board Support Package, the user might specify which graphics drive has to be included based on their individual choice of the hardware. If you are looking for the right BSP development companies in Bangalore, then you are at the right place.
  • Some of the suppliers also provide a root file system, a toolchain for building programs to be run on the embedded system, and the utilities to be configured based on the device along with the Board Support Package. 
  • When you need to build a new board or development kit, BSP is used for assembling a custom image of the particular operating system. The board BSP is one of the Software packages developed for use with its evaluation board or a specific chip. BSP might set some of the environmental parameters and initiate peripherals to work along with the Embedded operating system.

There are some specific tasks that Board Support Package performs  by initializing the following.

  • Processor
  • Bus
  • Interrupt Controller
  • Clock
  • Configuring the segments
  • Run the boot loader.
  • RAM (random access memory) settings

Board Support Package can contain hardware parameters, compilation parameters, and directives for configuring the operating system.

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What is Board Support Package?

Definition of BSP

board support package software