This paper presents a detailed experimental study on the board bring-up and device driver development process for the BeagleBone Black, with a specific focus on real-time clock (RTC) subsystems. The work is motivated by the increasing demand for precise and persistent timekeeping in embedded systems used in industrial automation, IoT deployments, and real-time applications. Given the critical role of RTCs in maintaining time during power cycles or system restarts, ensuring their reliable integration at the kernel level is essential. The study begins with the hardware initialization sequence, covering the bootloader configuration, device tree customization, and verification of peripheral interfaces. This foundational process ensures a stable Linux environment capable of supporting custom hardware drivers. The second phase of the work concentrates on the development and deployment of an RTC driver within the Linux kernel framework. Both internal and I2C-based external RTCs are explored, with the design addressing device registration, time reading and writing routines, and integration with user-space utilities. The implemented driver demonstrates accurate timekeeping and seamless hardware communication, verified through diagnostic tools and runtime behavior. The results not only validate the effectiveness of the RTC subsystem integration but also highlight the adaptability of BeagleBone Black as a reliable platform for embedded system prototyping and research. This work serves as a practical guide for developers involved in low-level system design and peripheral interfacing on ARM-based platforms.

Keywords: BeagleBone Black, Board Bring-Up, Real-Time Clock (RTC), Embedded Linux, Device Driver Development, Kernel Module