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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