Re: AVR XMEGA?

["Ulf Samuelsson" <ulf.samuelsson@atmel.com>]

> On Tue, 2009-01-27 at 10:03 +0100, Marco Cavallini wrote:
>> Sledz, Steffen ha scritto:
>> > Just a short question: Is somebody working on support for Atmel AVR 
>> > XMEGA (8-bit AVR) architecture in OE?
>> >
>>
>> http://wiki.openembedded.net/index.php/Main_Page
>> Openembedded, your best-in class cross-compile environment. Openembedded
>> allows developers to create a complete Linux Distribution for embedded
>> systems
>>
>> Linux doesn't run on 8 bit CPUs
>
> There's nothing about OpenEmbedded itself that is inherently specific to
> Linux; it just so happens that all the currently supported targets are
> Linux-based.  There's certainly no reason that one couldn't build an OE
> target system around, say, the Hurd or the BSD kernel.
>

> Likewise, it would be perfectly feasible to use OE to generate binaries
> for a 8-bit device, although the nature of those small deeply-embedded
> systems tends to be that they use single monolithic application binaries
> rather than a filesystem or "distribution" in the sense that larger,
> general-purpose machines do.  That being the case I suspect some of the
> advantages of OE would probably be negated in such an environment.
>
> As far as I know nobody is working on XMEGA support, anyway.

The AVR could in theory run linux since it supports
an 8 MB linear address space.

In practice there are no standard chips which bond out the program bus
so you are limited to 256 kB of flash, that's it.

The AVR also has a Harvard Architecture which is not hidden,
so you would have a problem compiling most applications.

The AVR32 is much better suited to the job.

Best Regards
Ulf Samuelsson                ulf@atmel.com
Atmel Nordic AB
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