[microblaze-uclinux] EDK 9.2

[John Williams <jwilliams@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi folks,

As some of you may have seen, EDK 9.2 came out last week.  The big news 
from a MicroBlaze perspective is the addition of an optional MMU to 
MicroBlaze v7.00.a, as well as the move to a native PLB bus interface 
for MicroBlaze.

Maybe not such good news if you have heavy investment in OPB based cores 
- if you used IPIF maybe the pain won't be too great.  OPB is supported 
in legacy mode for some time I believe, but will go away eventually.

Also included are some changes to the FSL instructions (that I and 
no-doubt others have lobbied for), basically interruptible versions of 
the otherwise blocking FSL ops, and a few other tweaks.

I assume that a certain embedded Linux vendor is being funded by Xilinx 
to do the MMU support for MicroBlaze, no idea on status or timeframes 
there.  Once the basic patches are released we'll get them into shape 
and into PetaLinux.

The move to PLB doesn't have a great deal of impact from a linux 
perspective, except that the old opb_ and plb_ethernet cores are pretty 
much history - there's now just the ll_temac and the xps_ethernetlite 
(xps_ == plb_).

The existing ethernetlite drivers seem to work ok with the new 
xps_ethernetlite core, however the same is not true for the original 
ethernet driver.  There was some progress on the PPC lists a few months 
back for an LL_TEMAC driver, I'm chasing that up to see what is involved 
in getting them going for the MicroBlaze.

In the meantime, I've boot tested an MB v7.00a, PLB design on an ML506 
at 125 MHz, all seems to work nicely (and fast!).  Next step is to test 
on an S3E1600 board.

I'm in two minds about whether to put some EDK9.2 reference designs into 
the next PetaLinux cut - without decent ethernet support I'm not sure it 
makes too much sense.   Waiting until they are ready will delay the 
release unecessarily.  I'm open to suggestions on this matter.

Cheers,

John

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