Watch Linux kernel 3.19 booting on Canon DSLRs

Apr 3, 2015 00:43 GMT  ·  By

It’s no longer April Fools Day, so what we are about to tell you is no joke, but the real deal. The awesome developers behind the well-known and acclaimed Magic Lantern third-party software add-on that brings a wide range of new features to Canon EOS cameras, have announced that they’ve managed to port the Linux kernel to Canon DSLRs.

In the video below, the Magic Lantern developers are demoing the work done so far on porting the Linux kernel 3.19 to Canon EOS DSLRs cameras, despite the fact that they have zero experience with kernel development. The Linux kernel port was successfully tested on several Canon EOS cameras, including 60D, 600D, 7D, 5D2, and 5D3.

At the moment, the Linux kernel port is capable of allocating all available RAM, sets up timer interrupts for scheduling, prints debug messages on the camera screen, mounts am 8 MiB ext2fs initial ramdisk, and starts /bin/init from initrd. The next step is to build userspace binaries.

“Starting from our recent discovery about display access from bootloader, we thought, hey, we could now have full control of the resources from this embedded computer,” says Magic Lantern developers in a forum post. “So, why not trying to run a different operating system? We took the latest Linux kernel (3.19) and did the first steps to port it.”

Well, what can we say? Congrats to the Magic Lantern developer on porting the Linux kernel to Canon DSLRs. Of course, this opens up countless possibilities, so stay tuned on this space for more information about the Linux kernel port for Canon EOS DSLR cameras. The source code can be found on a Bitbucket repository.