No not all cpus are affected, not by a very long shot. Only ones that have speculative execution (through a vulnerable cache design). And from what they are saying/implying it has to be more than just a little branch prediction/prefetch, meaning it needs more fetching than that. I cant see this core falling into that category. But will see I guess.
If you dont have an mmu/cache then you are certainly not vulnerable to this category of problem.
No not all cpus are affected, not by a very long shot. Only ones that have speculative execution (through a vulnerable cache design). And from what they are saying/implying it has to be more than just a little branch prediction/prefetch, meaning it needs more fetching than that. I cant see this core falling into that category. But will see I guess.
If you dont have an mmu/cache then you are certainly not vulnerable to this category of problem.
going to ditto that, to avoid the rush and running out of pi-zeros the sellers all agreed to one per purchase, and of course nobody has cheap shipping so that adds another half to double the cost. this far down the road dont know why they have not stopped that. The pi community is very hard to compete with not seen anything like that outside avrfreaks (or the arduino community that followed).
they are both linux capable platforms, the pi folks have made good attempts to give userland access to the peripherals in a library fashion so you can use i2c, spi, gpio, etc.
There is also the next thing co C.H.I.P in this price range, but I think you will find that you can also buy in quantity unlike the pi-zero but, dont have the community support.
There is a strong baremetal community on the pi side that would be nice to see on the omega2 if that is of any interest, most folks just want to write an application on top of an os and make api calls though, so someone has had to provide that.
Very late to the game here, but this is a perfectly fine platform for baremetal or make your own OS programming. IMO there is no reason to replace u-boot, just use it as a launching pad for your programs just like one would to launch Linux or freebsd or other. You certainly dont want to get into the ddr init and other things, for this or any platform.
Been beating my head on this platform for a number of days now mostly turns out because I am an ARM person and not so much MIPS, so ran into some elementary MIPS things I needed to learn (address space). Dont know why ARM beat MIPS to world domination, but true there are very few MIPS choices out there which is why I was happy to see this one come along.
Easier to place your program on the flash than other u-boot based platforms, not quite as simple as the raspberry pi, at the same time the pi3 is quad core, so depending on where you attack it you have to "sort the cores" and deal with other stuff...On par with the pi-zero as far as ease of use (for baremetal programming).
I have some examples to get you started if still interested...
In short I recommend building for 0xA0000000 then take your binary and create an omega2.bin from it using mkimage
mkimage -A mips -O linux -T standalone -C none -a 0xA0000000 -e 0xA0000000 -n "myprogram" -d myprog.bin omega2.bin
You need the expansion board with the usb interface. Put omega2.bin on a (FAT32) thumb drive, plug that in the board, hold the reset button down, flip the switch off and on, on the serial/uart terminal press 2 to flash firmware from USB storage. It then automates the process of burning omega2.bin into the flash and resetting into it. Now when you power on without reset pressed it runs your firmware.
My preference is to have a Motorola S-record based bootloader (since they removed these nice features from u-boot, press a key to stop loads to srecord load) in nand flash, and my programs under test are downloaded into that and launched from there. You can pretty much make whatever bootloader you want of course, or do the usb dance for every experiment if that is your preference.
Like the pi and allwinner chips and others the documentation here isnt the best, but not the worst either. The docs.onion.io is very good actually but mostly geared toward users not (baremetal/roll-your-own) developers. They claim it is a 24KEc, but the productid of the core shows 24KE (0x96 not 0x93) but cant yet find a MIPS document to prove that, and building for 24KEc with gcc makes software that crashes (eventually once your project tickles the right instructions being generated). But this is all part of the fun of baremetal programming.
My two cents at the moment is go with the omega2 and the pi-zero for your project. Have yet to find a baremetal community that remotely comes close to that of the raspberry pi, would like to see one for this platform.
Sorry so long and sorry so late to the game didnt know about this platform unitl sparkfun picked it up...
it is nothing more than a generic linux computer so anywhere you can learn to program in whatever popular language, C, C++, Python, etc.