[microblaze-uclinux] Proposal: board porting groups

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

Hi everyone,

I'm happy to report that I'm being overwhelmed by emails from people
asking "can I port uclinux to this FPGA board, or that board, and do you
have any advice?".

Well, I'm happy because there's so much interest, but obviously I'm
unable to assist everyone to the extent that I'd like, simply because
I've got a bunch of other stuff going on here (including designing *our*
new hardware platform! :)

One idea I had was to encourage users into forming informal clusters, to
work together to do the various platform ports that they need.  There's
only a finite (and actually quite small) number of different dev boards
out there, so this would prevent significant duplication of effort.

Note that platform ports are not very complicated, no kernel hacking or
anything like that.  Mostly it's a case of configuring the kernel image
properly to target the board and processor resources, and tweaking the
UCF files and so on.  There are howto's out there on creating new
uclinux platforms (Basically a new subdir in the uclinux-dist/vendors
tree which you copy from an existing one, then tweaking it appropriately).

I'm giving some thought to how I can tweak the microblaze kernel
implementation to more flexibily support a wide range of boards (called
"platforms" in uclinux-speak).  This will provide the framework for the
various platform ports - most likely I'll just duplicate the approach
used by SnapGear for the m68knommu architecture.

Anyway, please have a think about it, and if you are contemplating (or
waiting for) a platform port for your specific board (particularly
off-the-shelf dev/proto-boards), then please register your interest here
on the mailing list, and we'll see what emerges.

Cheers,

John


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