Re: [microblaze-uclinux] Peripherals

[John Williams <jwilliams@itee.uq.edu.au>]

Hi Peter,

Peter Ryser wrote:
> John,
> 
> many of the Xilinx peripherals are already integrated into the Linux source
> tree for PowerPC. This source tree is available from
> http://www.penguinppc.org/dev/kernel.shtml (see linuxppc_2_4_devel).

That's great news.

> At the moment the peripherals have a pre-selected configuration. However, we
> are working on adding features to EDK to be able to generate a BSP that plugs
> into the Linux kernel tree, i.e. replaces the Xilinx specific device drivers
> with the up-to-date ones from EDK.

I'll be interested to talk to you about how you've integrated the EDK 
driver/libgen side of things with the PPC Linux kernel configuration 
process.  My simplest idea is just taking the xparameters.h file from 
the EDK project directory, and putting it somehwere the Linux source can 
see it, to get base addresses of peripherals etc.  I've given some 
thought to driver configuration etc, but haven't gone very far (ie 
anywhere!) down that road yet.

> 
> Without being to familiar with uClinux I'd say that your work will benefit
> immediately from this approach, i.e. that you at least should be able to
> apply the uClinux patch to the above kernel tree.

It would be a multi stage process - you first apply a uClinux patch to a 
stock linux kernel source distro, then I've got a custom 
uclinux/microblaze patch that is needed to get around a few remaining 
wrinkles in the mb-gcc toolchain.

For now the easist approach is to work directly with a uclinux CVS 
distribution, which is available via anonymous CVS from cvs.uclinux.org. 
   The Microblaze /arch/microblaze and /include/asm-microblaze are now 
part of the "official" uClinux distribution.

I'm working on a set of instructions to get a basic uClinux kernel built 
for microblaze, and will post all that to the list when it's ready, 
hopefully later today or early tomorrow.  There's a bit of hacking 
required with the mb-gcc tools, and I'll be documenting that as well.

John