The Colibri Tegra T20 module from Toradex was a highly anticipated piece of hardware, the first Cortex-A9 SoM for widely available for the industrial market.

Engineering samples became available in January 2011, but back then little support in terms of OS and bootloader availability was provided. To use the module in our embedded computer, which we wanted to upgrade from Cortex-A8 to Cortex-A9, we needed to port what we wanted ourselves.

By Embedded World 2011 some 7 weeks after we first received our engineering sample, we were able to provide a UBoot port as well as a booting Linux kernel running on our own hardware, the first real-world use of the Colibri Tegra module.

This would not have been possible without the help of our virtual platform, which let us parallelize the development of the software and the hardware to fit in that tight schedule. We have published the port on our blog, announcing it with a post in April, after we were able to get hold of an Iris carrier board and verify that the port runs there as well.