[microblaze-uclinux] Have a merry (PetaLinux) christmas

[John Williams <jwilliams@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi everyone,

Well, it's taken too long, but here at last for your Christmas 
enjoyment, is PetaLinux v0.10, release candidate 1.  Get it from 
developer.petalogix.com, along with volumes of documentation, getting 
started guides, pre-built demos, you name it.  Thanks to Benny Chen and 
all the postgrads in the lab for participating in our internal beta, and 
writing most of the doco.

http://developer.petalogix.com

See the "What's New" page to see why we've been using it internally for 
months - basically we've taken the hassle out of developing Embedded 
Linux systems on MicroBlaze.

http://developer.petalogix.com/wiki/WhatsNew

In the first instance please direct feedback questions and suggestions 
to the list.  I'm on holiday for a couple of weeks (in remote north west 
Tasmania - no phone or internet!), but we'll be back into in from 
mid-Jan next year.  The UQ/ITEE staff and students who've participated 
in our internal beta tests will step in to help out, I'm sure.

Those who've seen our experimental stuff doing auto-config on PPC will 
have no trouble guessing what's on the roadmap - lots happening next 
year.  We believe that the choice and transition between targeting 
MicroBlaze or PowerPC should be trivial, and mechanical.  PetaLinux will 
make that happen.

More broadly - what does the future hold?

When the 2.6 MicroBlaze port finally comes out, we will of course fix 
it, auto-config it and integrate it into PetaLinux.  After Xilinx 
decided to pay someone else to do the work it made no sense to duplicate 
that effort (hey - I've already done one kernel port for nothing, I 
wasn't about to do another one!).

In other news - my gravy train as a publically funded kernel hacker is 
over - from next year PetaLogix has to pay the bills.  So, my interest 
in making FPGAs and Embedded Linux as good as it can be just got 
stronger. But, it means my ability to spend time answering FAQs on the 
list will be challenged.  I'm hoping that the long term residents and 
experts here can keep up the great job of supporting the newer members 
of our community.

PetaLogix has recently been looking at various Low Latency and real time 
scheduling patches for Linux, and porting them to the MicroBlaze.  You 
can expect to see the results of this work early next year (after the 
customer who paid for it gets their turn!).

It's been a big year - my wife and I had a baby, I had a public stoush 
with a Xilinx marketing guy (we've since made up BTW), PetaLogix kept 
getting busier and busier, and more and more people realised that FPGAs 
plus Linux make a whole lot of sense.  Several PetaLogix clients went to 
market with MicroBlaze + uClinux solutions (sorry, can't say what they 
are).  A bunch more we don't know about probably did too.

Lots of fun to come folks, stay tuned.

Merry Christmas

John

PS I'll be at LinuxConf.au in Sydney in January, with a bit of a talk in 
the Embedded miniconf.  Please come and say "Hi" if you're around.
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