Re: [microblaze-uclinux] Wish List

[John Williams <jwilliams@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Ivan,

Ivan wrote:
> First, in the wish list of the wiki there is an entry about the design
> of a tiny bootloader with tftp capabilities (i think it was written by
> John - Hi John!!). 

That's great - I look forward to trying it out.  Why not make a new Wiki 
page to talk about the bootloader, and to put a pointer to it from the 
Wishlist page? :)

> This bootloader was designed to use it in a board based on a small
> Spartan II device (it has a few BRAM blocks). This board only has 2 MB
> RAM and 4 MB flash. The uClinux image boots from the flash memory and it
> allows to use all the RAM memory for applications. So, it is possible to
> use network capabilities on this platform. Currently the uClinux on this
> platform executes telnetd, thttpd, and another user programs sucessfully
> (with only 2 MB RAM memory). 

Do you know roughly how large the BRAM image for the bootloader is?

Also, I'd be very interested to see the link scripts you used to run the 
kernel directly from flash.  There is one side-effect of this that you 
may already know - if the flash is only single plane, you cannot also 
mount a read/write filesystem on it, because as soon as you put the 
flash into write mode, your kernel instruction fetches (also from flash) 
will basically go no-where.   It might also make self-hosted kernel 
image updates a bit tricky!! :)

> Second, we have designed a expansion board with 2 RS232, 1 USB and 1
> Ethernet. There are two images of the previous platform with this
> expansion board:

Looks great.

> The information of this board
> will be available on the web in a few days too. This platform will be
> "Open Hardware".
> 
> Well, I hope this information could be usefull for the
> uClinux-MicroBlaze community :D

I'm certain that everybody appreciates the work you are doing.  I wish I 
had more time to experiment with all that cool things that people are 
starting to do!

Thanks again,

John

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