Date: Mon, 19 Jan 2009 16:18:06 +0100 From: Daan Vreeken <Daan@vehosting.nl> To: freebsd-ppc@freebsd.org Cc: FreeBSD-Embedded@freebsd.org Subject: Re: PowerPC embedded board? Message-ID: <200901191618.06297.Daan@vehosting.nl> In-Reply-To: <49747ABA.9090606@semihalf.com> References: <200901191259.50518.Daan@vehosting.nl> <49747ABA.9090606@semihalf.com>
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Hi Rafal, On Monday 19 January 2009 14:06:02 Rafal Jaworowski wrote: > Daan Vreeken wrote: > > For a new product I am looking for an embedded powerpc board. For the > > project we need the following : > > o A board that can (in the near future) boot FreeBSD. > > o Support for hardware floating point arithmetic. > > o The board should have some form of bus / IO to connect custom-made > > peripheral(s) to. > > Other than what you alrady pointed out, what is the overall profile of this > deployment i.e. what level of horse power do you need, networking > throughput etc.? The processor will be used for coordinate transformations in a real-time position control system. We only need a small amount of memory. A network interface would be very nice to have, but it's only used for live debugging and to update software/firmware, so I could live without if needed. What I really need, is a processor that can do a fair amount sine / cosine's per second. I've done some tests with Linux on an MPC5200 board running at 400MHz. ( http://www.freescale.com/webapp/sps/site/prod_summary.jsp?code=MPC5200 ) The processor has more than enough processing power to run our code, but I'm looking for a (preferably cheap) alternative that can run FreeBSD (with some help). > > Searching the internet I've already stumbled upon the Efika [1] and > > SAM440 [2] boards, which both look promising, but as far as my > > Google-skills go, it looks like both boards need more work to get FreeBSD > > fully functional on them. > > I'm thinking of buying a couple of boards and helping an interested > > developer by either setting up a compile & test environment that is > > accessible over ssh, or donating an entire board (or both :) > > Both MPC5200 (Efika) and PPC440 (SAM440 and others) require quite a bit of > work to turn into a reliable system to be used in a commercial product. > They are both at a very similar stage: the kernel initially boots, > interrupt controller driver ready, console (UART), work is in progress > towards getting user-space pieces together, getting single user shell etc. > In both cases virtually all remaining on-chip peripherals need respective > drivers newly developed. Given enough hardware documentation, I have no problem with writing a couple of drivers. The thing I'm not familiar with, is the lower level development of getting a new platform to run FreeBSD. (I have never touched FreeBSD's VM subsystem for example.) What would be needed to get either of these boards to a single user shell? > > So I've got some questions : > > o Are there more interresting boards I could/should consider? (Or even > > boards that can already run FreeBSD?) > > o What board is most likely to grow FreeBSD support in the near future? > > o What parts are currently missing to get these boards up and running? > > Ready to use and stable is the port for higher-end PowerPC systems: > PowerQUICC MPC85xx series based on the E500 (BookE) core. You'll find all > integrated peripherals supported, although the default environment with > regards to the floating point support is running with emulation and not > native hard-floats (due to various implemetations of the FPU, or the lack > of). What would be needed to get hardware floating point to be supported? Is it something that could be imported from NetBSD? Thanks, -- Daan Vreeken VEHosting http://VEHosting.nl tel: +31-(0)40-7113050 / +31-(0)6-46210825 KvK nr: 17174380
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