[microblaze-uclinux] FPGA apps?

[Matthew Rubenstein <email@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

	I have been tracking the development of various "Linux on FPGA"
projects, especially targetting the Xilinx Virtex II boards. In fact,
I've been tracking FPGA development environments since 1990, programming
a combined 80386/AT&TDSP32C/Xilinx platform with a set of homegrown
C/Verilog tools. It's exciting to see that MicroBlaze is an actual
working platform, supporting ethernet, that "just works" as a
development platform with a familiar toolchain.

	Where are the apps? Linux on FPGA is a means to an end, not an end in
itself: familiar development environment for new FPGA tools. Is there an
archive of apps that run under MicroBlaze? With MicroBlaze omitting
fork() in favor of vfork() (inherited from uCLinux, with no MMU), even
the ancient Unix multitasking patterns are unavailable. But the
inherently parallel FPGA architecture offers a vastly superior
environment for parallelism.

	Where is a "helloWorlds" app that builds multiple identical circuits,
each signalling "Hello World" on a different pin literally
simultaneously? That's a template for development, which will not only
improve the productivity of FPGA developers, but also offer a section of
the vast Linux global development community as developers for this
superior platform. Maybe I'm jumping the gun, with a stable platform
less than a month old, but where are the apps?
-- 


(C) Matthew Rubenstein

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