GR-LEON4-ITX

GR-LEON4-ITX

[Paul Thomas]

Hello,

I'm interested in the getting a GR-LEON4-ITX development board, and I
wanted to know if the mainline kernel would support it? I saw the
leon3 patches, and when I look at xconfig I see the SPARC_LEON & GRETH
config options so it looks like it's close. Is anyone using the
mainline or sparc tree with the GR-LEON4-ITX development board?

thanks,
Paul

Re: GR-LEON4-ITX

[Kristoffer Glembo]

Hello Paul,

The easiest way to get Linux running on the GR-LEON4-ITX board
is to use the kernel that is delivered with the board. It is 
based on 2.6.21 and contains all our drivers and boot loader 
(this kernel is also available from our webpage).

The mainline kernel does work on LEON3/4 (including SMP) but
we have not yet made available an updated distribution with surrounding
infrastructure (e.g. boot loader, root file systems, OpenFirmware tree generation, etc). 

Hopefully it will not be too long until we release an updated version based 
on the latest kernel. All tough it will take some time to get all drivers
from the 2.6.21 version into the mainline kernel.

Link to the board for anyone interested in getting a new SPARC V8 with lots of on chip
devices:
http://www.gaisler.com/cms/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id39&Itemid#2

Best regards,
Kristoffer Glembo
Aeroflex Gaisler


Paul Thomas wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I'm interested in the getting a GR-LEON4-ITX development board, and I
> wanted to know if the mainline kernel would support it? I saw the
> leon3 patches, and when I look at xconfig I see the SPARC_LEON & GRETH
> config options so it looks like it's close. Is anyone using the
> mainline or sparc tree with the GR-LEON4-ITX development board?
> 
> thanks,
> Paul
> --
> To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe sparclinux" in
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> 
> 

Re: GR-LEON4-ITX

[Paul Thomas]

On Mon, May 24, 2010 at 10:11 PM, Kristoffer Glembo
<kristoffer@gaisler.com> wrote:
> Hello Paul,
>
> The easiest way to get Linux running on the GR-LEON4-ITX board
> is to use the kernel that is delivered with the board. It is
> based on 2.6.21 and contains all our drivers and boot loader
> (this kernel is also available from our webpage).
>
> The mainline kernel does work on LEON3/4 (including SMP) but
> we have not yet made available an updated distribution with surrounding
> infrastructure (e.g. boot loader, root file systems, OpenFirmware tree generation, etc).
>
> Hopefully it will not be too long until we release an updated version based
> on the latest kernel. All tough it will take some time to get all drivers
> from the 2.6.21 version into the mainline kernel.
>
> Link to the board for anyone interested in getting a new SPARC V8 with lots of on chip
> devices:
> http://www.gaisler.com/cms/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id39&Itemid#2
>
> Best regards,
> Kristoffer Glembo
> Aeroflex Gaisler
>
>

Kristoffer,

Thanks for the information. I'm not in a hurry. I'd like to work with
the mainline kernel. I'm used to using u-boot, a custom kernel & a
generic emdebian root fs. Is u-boot the default bootloader on the
board?

thanks,
Paul

Re: GR-LEON4-ITX

[Kristoffer Glembo]

Paul Thomas wrote:
 > Kristoffer,
> 
> Thanks for the information. I'm not in a hurry. I'd like to work with
> the mainline kernel. I'm used to using u-boot, a custom kernel & a
> generic emdebian root fs. Is u-boot the default bootloader on the
> board?


You can use U-boot but it is not the default in our current distribution.

Our u-boot SPARC tree can boot the kernel available on our website:

http://git.denx.de/?p=u-boot/u-boot-sparc.git;a=summary

U-boot is also delivered with the board.

The current mainline kernel is not supported at the moment because it needs to have
the OF tree generated by the boot loader (the tree is generated from on chip plug and
play information). We should try to get this code into the kernel instead ...

Best regards,
Kristoffer Glembo
Aeroflex Gaisler

Re: GR-LEON4-ITX

[David Miller]

From: Kristoffer Glembo <kristoffer@gaisler.com>
Date: Tue, 25 May 2010 09:48:41 +0200

> The current mainline kernel is not supported at the moment because
> it needs to have the OF tree generated by the boot loader (the tree
> is generated from on chip plug and play information). We should try
> to get this code into the kernel instead ...

The bootloader should pass in the device information, just like how
powerpc does it.

I might be OK with having it passed in using a compressed format like
powerpc allows for, mostly because for things like kexec et. al we'll
need to allow the kernel to pass the device tree to a kexec of itself
efficiently, but that's pretty much about it.

But it would still come from the bootloader.