Re: [microblaze-uclinux] hardware platform

[John Williams <jwilliams@itee.uq.edu.au>]

Hi Emanuel,

emanuel stiebler wrote:

> Absolutely new to uclinux on microblaze, so please be patient ;-)

Welcome to the list :)

> What is the platform of choice to develop on uclinux ?
> In the README on
> http://www.uclinux.org/pub/uClinux/ports/microblaze/
> there is a remark of a Insight/MEMEC p160 developer board, but
> I saw on their web page that they have two of them. On is Virtex and the 
> other is Spartan based.

I'm using the Virtex2 based board, I think they call it the Virtex2 
System Board.  The code on the user manual says V2MB1000.

> So, which one ?
> ;-)

To be honest, I think you probably want other reasons to choose a 
particular board than just "that's what the port was done on", 
especially when you're talking about a board costing around US$1000.

There's nothing specific about this board that makes it a "must have" 
for uclinux- it's just what I had available.

Translating the hardware target (mbvanilla) to work on a different board 
should be straight forward, as long it has reasonably similar (or 
better) capabilities (RAM, Flash, RS232, ethernet etc).  Ulitmately 
having this going on a diverse range of physical platforms will be a 
good thing to demonstrate.

> And, on the same link (www.uclinux.....) there is a trace of a boot-up 
> of the uclinux kernel, but it uses just 1 MByte ?
> Why ? It runs in the SRAM only ? And why only in half of it ?

Yes - I'm running direct from SRAM for now, haven't got around to using 
the DDR on the Insight board.  The bare kernel requires about 420K, then 
once you add a file system with a couple of utilities, the image grows 
quite quickly.

Soon I will be forced to configure the DDR ram, I'm almost hitting the 
memory ceiling with just a simple init process and a shell.

Running the kernel and application code from flash, and other tricky 
things are all in the pipeline, but for now it's a matter of priorities, 
and my top priority is just to get the thing to a useable state.  It's a 
bit bogged down at the moment as I'm distracted with some microblaze / 
mbvanilla issues, but it's still alive and well.  Some major changes 
will be going into the CVS (cvs.uclinux.org) in the next week or two.

Regards,

John

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