Boards with no OS and acceleration?
#1
I'm not sure if any pine products support this but I'll ask.

I was thinking about writing a toy OS. There two big problem I can see. 1. No hardware acceleration on graphics. I want to be able to render images and move them around and completely draw a new screen @60hz. I prefer 1080 but 60@720 would be fine 2. Boot up without writing much or any code. I hear there's a lot of work to get an ARM to boot properly. I don't really need libc (although I expect that to be available) but I'd like to be able to compile hello world and have the board show it on screen (or serial port) without me writing much code.

I was thinking about using an arduino which I have experience with but I've never done anything using HDMI or graphics with it. Typically arduinos give you a basic library for various shields and lets you use C to write your code.
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#2
You're in for quite an adventure. Probably your best bet is to rely on TF-A and u-boot to set up the system for you (DRAM training, setting the clocks, etc.) and then have them jump to your custom kernel. If you choose to not go down this route, then graphics acceleration is the least of your worries; unlike microcontrollers like you mentioned, modern SoCs have a lot of complexity to them that are documented in thousands of pages of SoC TRM (Technical Reference Manual) and tens of thousands of pages of architecture documentation from ARM.

As for graphics acceleration, if you don't want to write a gpu driver inside your toy OS, you might be interested in the RGA functionality on Rockchip SoCs such as the RK3399 found on the ROCKPro64. RGA is a bitmap blitter, and can do some other stuff as well (scaling, drawing lines, that sort of stuff).

I recommend that if you want to look into this seriously, you get yourself a copy of Part 1 and Part 3 of the RK3399 TRM (can be found in various places online) and read through some sections. If it doesn't immediately scare the bajeesus out of you, you may then proceed to figuring out how to boot into your custom code from a mainline self-compiled u-boot.

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