[kyzyl]

The comparison to breaking out the PCB software is a touch misleading. You'd certainly also find it to be an onerous task to break out the PCB software and design a board for the Sitara SoC that sits on the Beaglebone. Realistically the comparison would be to use an FPGA devboard. Modern FPGAs often have an ARM processor build right into them, and if not you can use a Microblaze/NIOSII softcore processor in conjunction with the programmable logic. Such a setup will happily run linux, do your real-time tasks, and use all the typical peripherals that one of TIs soc's will.

I'm not saying that using an FPGA would be easier necessarily--indeed, likely not just because the tools a so terrible--but there are many options. Last I checked the documentation for the PRUs was pretty bad. Mostly a smattering of wiki pages and a couple powerpoints. And even that is a huge improvement over even just a year or two ago.