The developers of Magic Lantern have been the last Linux kernel on a Canon EOS dslr camera to boot. It is just a proof of concept, since the ML developers say further, have no experience with kernel development.
Because the ‘announcement’ on 1 april took place, did the development team first as if it was a joke, but the developers assure now on the Magic Lantern forum that it really is. The search did not just fall from the sky. Recently found developer g3gg0 an opportunity to with Canon dslr’s the boot loader via the lcd screen, where the handy was seen to gebrickte cameras to investigate, but also to yourself what low-level-engineering to do.
Because it is known to which ARM processor in the camera is, how much ram they have and how the text on the display, went to the developers to get started. Also, they knew how the timers and the interrupts had to operate and how low-level sd card access could get on different models and in addition they had a rough idea how to search for certain key combinations.
After what gepiel’, he managed to Linux kernel 3.19 booting on cameras that Magic Lantern running. The same binary runs on the 60D, 600D, 7D, 5D2 and 5D3. All the ram is allocated, debug messages are displayed on the lcd screen and timer interrupts are set up. In addition, a 8MB ext2fs-ramdisk is mounted and /bin/init is started from the initrd, and is selfcontained. The next step is to have a gui to build.