Re: [microblaze-uclinux] Finally USB support on Spartan3E-500 REV D Starter Kit

[John Williams <jwilliams@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Mostafa,

Mostafa Ali wrote:

> I used spartan3E-500 rev D starter kit. I wanted to have an USB 
> interface to USB storage devices and I succeeded in that thanks to the 
> FTDI and FLE technologies.
> The Vinculum provides both VDRIVE 
> <http://www.vinculum.com/prd_vdrive1.html> which is a module easily adds 
> USB Flash drive interface to MCU/FPGA I/F via UART or SPI interface and 
> VDIP <http://www.vinculum.com/prd_vdip1.html> which is DIP format VNC1L 
> <http://www.vinculum.com/prd_vnc1l.html> USB host controller development 
> module.
> For more details see http://www.vinculum.com/products.html
> To connect the module to my kit I used the "FLE Microblaze UartLite" and 
> "FLE FT245BM Core"  found on http://www.fl-eng.com/xipfree.html.
> I used the GPIO 6-pin Accessory headers to connect the VDrive1 module to 
> the kit then through the FLE-UART core to the OPB bus.
> The question now is: How will petalinux treat the case? Would it see the 
> USB storage device directly and communicate/mount it as if it is an 
> ordinary drive or it will still talk to it as a GPIO I don't know! Also 
> Do I have to write or develop a certain driver for such new 
> configuration or the petalinux "support USB" options in the 
> configuration wizard is sufficient?

Linux will see a new serial port (the uart), and that's about it.

From the little reading I've done, Vinculum includes a host USB stack 
that takes to flash drives, and exports a simple command interface over 
serial that allows you access.

Really this is intended for little microcontrollers running firmware, 
not Linux.

If you want to be able to mount the flash driver from Linux, you'll have 
a reasonable amount of work to do.  Best way might be to use fuse 
(userspace filesystem support) and write a userspace wrapper that 
converts between the FUSE kernel API and the VDRIVE serial protocol.

It would probably work, but might get messy and performance is likely to 
be pretty poor.

Regards,

John

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