cirrus ep93xx support (was: Re: Debian ARM success story: Debian desktop on a TS-7300)
On Fri, Jul 14, 2006 at 10:46:42AM +0300, Riku Voipio wrote:
> > It was strightforward to image a pre-installed Debian Sarge (as
> > set up and distributed by Technologic Systems) onto a 2 GB SD
> > card I bought, following these instructions:
> > [4]http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ts-7000/message/3211
>
> Do you know what kind of TS-7300 specific changes (if any) are there
> on the image? While obviously can't support every and each arm board
> out there, this board appears interesting. cheap and relatively well
> suited periphals for debian. Plus having something of the Cirrus ARM
> variant would be good for completeness.
I've slowly been rewriting the Cirrus ep93xx kernel port and feeding
it into 2.6. Merged upstream right now we have support for the base
CPU, GPIOs, on-chip watchdog, UARTs, RTC, USB, and Crunch. See:
http://ep93xx.giantshoulderinc.com:8001/wiki/wiki/KernelStatus
The TS-72xx boards are supported in 2.6 (I have a TS-7250 myself), but
the TS-7300 isn't, which is mostly just because noone ever bothered.
It shouldn't be too much work to have it supported. One caveat (IIRC)
is that the TS-7300 needs a bit of binary only code linked to the kernel
image to support the SD card slot, and this probably will only work with
the 2.4.x kernel that the vendor supports. (Or someone would have to
reverse engineer how the communication with the SD card works.)
I'd love to have a number of ep93xx boards supported officially in the
Debian installer.
> > One minus: even though the TS-7300 has a "Maverickcrunch" FPU,
> > in practice it doesn't get used by Debian because maverick support
> > is not compiled into the stock arm Debian packages yet. This
> > means the odds of getting any multimedia goodness (like sound),
> > which requires FPU, are bad.
>
> In current arm port it is hard to use Maverick, statically
> compiled mplayer compiled with a special maverick toolchain
> should be possible.
The current advantage of Maverick over something like iWMMXt, considering
that Debian is still hardfpa, is that Maverick is on coprocessors 4,5,6
so it doesn't conflict with FPA, whereas if you want to use iWMMXt at all,
you have to use either softfloat or EABI for everything because it conflicts
with FPA.
As I said above, 2.6.18 will support Crunch (for task switching, ptrace
and signal frame save/restore), so if you want to play with it, get a
board and go wild. (Or I can give shell access to a TS-7250 to folks
interested, possibly even make it a DD box, how do I do that?)
cheers,
Lennert
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