Hi David,Thanks for your reply. The Pico boards are very cute - it's a shame to hang DB9 or RJ45 connectors off them :)
In terms of mb-linux 2.6, thanks for the offer. The path forward isn't entirely clear - there are several aspects to consider
1. Completeness - the current patch set is missing some fundamentals such as cache support, and a few other bits and pieces. These need to be added.
2. Auto-configuration - the methodology used is like MontaVista's approach on the PPC, cascading #ifdef structures and XPAR_ definitions for different boards. At the very least we need to go through and replace all the XPAR_ guff with CONFIG_XILINX auto-config as with the 2.4 port.
3. Kernel version - 2.6.13 is pretty old. I'm excited about what more recent 2.6 kernels offer, regarding the platform driver stuff in particular and what it might mean for auto-config. There's some very interesting things happening in PPC with the unified architecture, device trees and all of that, which I would love to see brought over to microblaze.
4. Driver support - apparently there's another code drop in a month or two, but it's not clear which devices these will support. Obviously for the Xilinx devices we can pick up a lot of what has already been done in 2.6 for the Xilinx PPC stuff.
I lurk on the ppc-embedded list and am rather underwhelmed by what I see - lots of confused Xilinx/PPC users, and a large collection of patches/ drivers floating around with no hope of mainline kernel integration.
Ultimately we want to unify the MicroBlaze and PPC kernel sources, or at least have them build out of the same kernel tree, with shared driver code and so on. Unfortunately it looks like we'll have to go it alone on that, what I've seen so far indicates that it isn't a priority for anyone else.
If Pico are going dual architecture then this would no doubt make a lot of sense for you.
Cheers, John David H. Lynch Jr wrote:
John Williams wrote:LynuxWorks/Xilinx have dropped a preliminary release of patches against 2.6.13 at sourceforge.net/microblaze It's not complete, apparently there's more coming in March/April timeframe. We (PetaLogix) are looking at the patches and evaluating our approach to completing it, revving forward to a recent kernel, and getting it auto-configured etc.
I will be starting with this shortly myself. I work for Pico
Computing http://www.picocomputing.com
They have a V5 board due out in March that will not have a PPC in it
that I am expected to put Linux onto.
I did the Linux port for the previous Pico boards and aside from the
missing PPC the new board will be very similar with very similar firmware.
I just DL'd the files and hope to look at them this weekend.
I would be happy to collaborate to whatever extent you may wish.
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