Main Content
What you get
A production-grade Linux (uClinux) BSP for the NXP i.MX RT crossover MCUs — professionally supported, kept current, and free to use.
The BSP ships as a single Docker container carrying both a prebuilt target image and the full SDK. Download it, follow the documentation, and you are at a Linux root shell on your EVK about five minutes later. The same container then rebuilds the entire system from source and builds your own applications against it. Container, documentation, and the sources on GitHub are the whole product — there is nothing further to buy. It is Linux without an MMU: no per-process memory isolation, and your RAM ceiling is whatever SDRAM your board carries. Inside that envelope it behaves like the Linux you already know.
Supported hardware
The BSP is maintained for four i.MX RT SoC families, each on the reference boards listed below. These are the boards the prebuilt target image boots on and the documentation walks you through.
- i.MX RT1020 — reference board: NXP MIMXRT1024-EVK
- i.MX RT1050 — reference board: NXP MIMXRT1050-EVKB
- i.MX RT1060 — reference board: NXP MIMXRT1060-EVKB
- i.MX RT1170 — reference boards: NXP MIMXRT1170-EVK, Avnet MaaXBoard-RT
What is included
- U-Boot firmware
- Linux kernel 6.12, with drivers for the key i.MX RT I/O interfaces — Ethernet, USB host and device, UART, SPI, I2C, CAN, ADC, GPIO, display, and RPMsg to the companion Cortex-M4 on the RT1170
- A GCC toolchain producing FDPIC ELF: real shared libraries on an MMU-less core, not flat binaries
- GDB cross debugger, and the Eclipse IDE for debugging user-space code
- A Buildroot root filesystem, with a broad set of Linux tools and libraries ported and built for i.MX RT
- A prebuilt, ready-to-run target image
- User documentation covering installation, build, and deployment
- All of the above packaged as a Docker container
Licensing and source code
Emcraft imposes no licensing terms of its own on the software in the BSP. Every component is available in full source from our public repositories at github.com/EmcraftSystems. No fees — one-off, recurring, or licensing — are attached to downloading or using the BSP.
We welcome contributions to our repositories from any developer.
How we are paid
By consulting, not by the BSP. We support the BSP for free for basic installation and use. Porting to your custom hardware, new software development, and advanced support are paid engagements — fixed-price where the requirements are well defined and the scope is clear, or time-and-materials where they are not.
Who we are
Emcraft is a hardware and software engineering team that has worked together since 1997. We design and build System-on-Modules and starter kits around SoCs from NXP, STMicroelectronics, Microchip, and Nordic, and we are a partner with each of them — with NXP above all, whose i.MX RT parts this BSP is built for. On the software side we are experts in embedded Linux, Yocto, and secure boot, as well as RTOSes including FreeRTOS and Zephyr. We are headquartered in Carlsbad, California, with our main engineering office in Belgrade, Serbia. More about Emcraft.
Talk to us
Tell us your i.MX RT part and the features you need, and we will tell you whether Linux fits and what it would take.