Exploring an Intel Curie board: Genuino 101

This is a work in progress.

I’m doing Organización del Computador 2 (computer organization) course at the UBA, and I remembered that a few years ago (probably 2016 or 2017), at an Arduino event in Buenos Aires I won a Genuino 101 board. Why is that relevant to the course? The course it’s based on Intel x86 architecture, and so is the Genuino 101.

Arduino boards

Generally, Arduino boards have an ATmega328P, but this weird Intel version has an Intel Quark SE microprocessor, that’s a Pentium x86 ISA compatible processor without x87 floating point unit.

Arduino Vs. Genuino

A few hours into this I discovered that Genuino and Arduino are the same thing branded differently, so I can use Arduino 101 documentation. Finding documentation, datasheets, or Intel resources for Genuino 101 is pretty hard, as every site (genuino.cc, Intel downloads, etc.) is either down or barely useful.

The idea

We are writing a kernel. I have an x86 targeted to makers. I found the 101 original firmware. SOMETHING can be done here, I just don’t know what yet.

I would like to run that kernel outside QEMU, on real hardware. It could be a cool final project for the course. It may work, or it may not, but I want to try. In the worst case I will learn a few things about the Curie chips and why Intel left the maker space, toy with a cool board and maybe run something on it (someone mentioned Doom).

The other idea (the weird one)

I like fuzz testing. Last year I did a small intensive course on compiler fuzzing, and this year I worked both on a compiler and a program fuzzing tool (in this case it was smart contract related). I want to write a fuzzing tool for a processor. This particular processor is not a generic one, but an Intel processor, so it is unlikely to have any bugs, but it’s a great learning experience to try to find bugs and vulnerabilities in it. Since this board has Bluetooth LE (BLE), maybe that connection can be used as an entry-point to test the chip.