Availability of SH hardware?

Availability of SH hardware?

[Rich Felker]

One of my goals in taking on maintainership of arch/sh is to gradually
replace all of the hard-coded legacy board/subtype support with device
tree based board descriptions, and clean up the related board support
infrastructure in arch/sh to be more in line with how things are done
on other archs these days. However the ability to make and test these
changes depends on having some actual hardware to work with.

I'm working on the J-Core (currently J2) open hardware revival of the
SH architecture and don't have any original SH hardware (except
perhaps embedded in old appliances). Does anyone have pointers (direct
add-to-cart'able links) to where SH dev boards are still available, or
even better, any old hardware lying around that's not being used that
you'd be willing to donate?

I'm especially interested in getting an SH-X3 board since it seems to
be the only model with existing SMP support, and moving it over to
device tree would eliminate the need for keeping around the
non-device-tree SMP register_smp_ops and cross-core cache invalidation
infrastructure, which are low-hanging fruit for refactoring/cleanup.
But really anything would be great to have.

Rich

Re: Availability of SH hardware?

[John Paul Adrian Glaubitz]

Hi Rich!

On 03/17/2016 04:24 AM, Rich Felker wrote:
> I'm working on the J-Core (currently J2) open hardware revival of the
> SH architecture and don't have any original SH hardware (except
> perhaps embedded in old appliances). Does anyone have pointers (direct
> add-to-cart'able links) to where SH dev boards are still available, or
> even better, any old hardware lying around that's not being used that
> you'd be willing to donate?

I have acquired SuperH hardware in the past and I have good contacts
to people in Japan. I will help you getting a board, but it may take
a while.

Since Renesas dropped support for SuperH completely, they don't have
any evaluation boards left. In fact, I own the last board that they
had in stock.

So, with Renesas out of the picture, sources for SuperH hardware would
be either open source people in Japan who used to work for Renesas -
I know, for fact, that Renesas hired lots of people in Japan to work
on SuperH support in Linux - or third-party companies like emtrion [1]
or Alpha Project in Japan [2]. Another option would be getting an
old LANDisk device which can also be used to run Debian's sh4 port [3].

I have already forwarded your mail to a friend in the Japanese Debian
community and asked him to post a mail in Japanese on their mailing
lists asking for people who are willing to donate hardware.

We will find something for you :).

Adrian

> [1] https://www.emtrion.de/en/legacy_products.html
> [2] http://www.apnet.co.jp/product/superh/
> [3] http://www.iodata.jp/product/nas/personal/hdl-u/

-- 
 .''`.  John Paul Adrian Glaubitz
: :' :  Debian Developer - glaubitz@debian.org
`. `'   Freie Universitaet Berlin - glaubitz@physik.fu-berlin.de
  `-    GPG: 62FF 8A75 84E0 2956 9546  0006 7426 3B37 F5B5 F913

Re: Availability of SH hardware?

[Rich Felker]

On Thu, Mar 17, 2016 at 10:10:26AM +0100, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:
> Hi Rich!
> 
> On 03/17/2016 04:24 AM, Rich Felker wrote:
> > I'm working on the J-Core (currently J2) open hardware revival of the
> > SH architecture and don't have any original SH hardware (except
> > perhaps embedded in old appliances). Does anyone have pointers (direct
> > add-to-cart'able links) to where SH dev boards are still available, or
> > even better, any old hardware lying around that's not being used that
> > you'd be willing to donate?
> 
> I have acquired SuperH hardware in the past and I have good contacts
> to people in Japan. I will help you getting a board, but it may take
> a while.
> 
> Since Renesas dropped support for SuperH completely, they don't have
> any evaluation boards left. In fact, I own the last board that they
> had in stock.

Am I correct that the chips are still available, just not as part of
eval/dev boards, so that in theory, if someone wanted to, they could
make their own board? Or are they completely out of distribution? I
ask mainly from a standpoint of gauging the theoretical possibility of
new users for the original SH models.

> So, with Renesas out of the picture, sources for SuperH hardware would
> be either open source people in Japan who used to work for Renesas -
> I know, for fact, that Renesas hired lots of people in Japan to work
> on SuperH support in Linux - or third-party companies like emtrion [1]
> or Alpha Project in Japan [2]. Another option would be getting an
> old LANDisk device which can also be used to run Debian's sh4 port [3].
> 
> I have already forwarded your mail to a friend in the Japanese Debian
> community and asked him to post a mail in Japanese on their mailing
> lists asking for people who are willing to donate hardware.
> 
> We will find something for you :).

Great, thank you very much!

Rich

Re: Availability of SH hardware?

[Geert Uytterhoeven]

Hi Rich.

On Thu, Mar 17, 2016 at 6:21 PM, Rich Felker <dalias@libc.org> wrote:
> Am I correct that the chips are still available, just not as part of
> eval/dev boards, so that in theory, if someone wanted to, they could
> make their own board? Or are they completely out of distribution? I
> ask mainly from a standpoint of gauging the theoretical possibility of
> new users for the original SH models.

Unlike SH dev boards, Digi-Key seems to have several SH SoCs in stock:
http://www.digikey.be/product-search/en/integrated-circuits-ics/embedded-microcontrollers/2556109?k=&pv506Q&pv506R&pv506S&pv506y&pv506”&pv506T&pv506U&pv506V&pv506p&pv506W&pv506\x137&pv506’&FVÿf40027%2Cfff800cd&mnonly=0&newproducts=0&ColumnSort=0&page=1&stock=1&quantity=0&ptm=0&fid=0&pageSizeP0

Gr{oetje,eeting}s,

                        Geert

--
Geert Uytterhoeven -- There's lots of Linux beyond ia32 -- geert@linux-m68k.org

In personal conversations with technical people, I call myself a hacker. But
when I'm talking to journalists I just say "programmer" or something like that.
                                -- Linus Torvalds

Re: Availability of SH hardware?

[John Paul Adrian Glaubitz]

On 03/23/2016 08:50 AM, Geert Uytterhoeven wrote:
> Unlike SH dev boards, Digi-Key seems to have several SH SoCs in stock:

I don't think one would get very far with these, would one?

FWIW, the best options I have found so far are either buying boards from
alpha project in Japan which are still sold new:

> http://www.apnet.co.jp/product/superh/index.html

Since I travel to Japan frequently and have very good contacts there,
I'd be happy to help acquiring any of the hardware listed there.

Other options are just buying LANDISK hardware off Yahoo Auction
Japan which all have a SH7751 CPU with 266 MHz and 64 MiB RAM.

Adrian

-- 
 .''`.  John Paul Adrian Glaubitz
: :' :  Debian Developer - glaubitz@debian.org
`. `'   Freie Universitaet Berlin - glaubitz@physik.fu-berlin.de
  `-    GPG: 62FF 8A75 84E0 2956 9546  0006 7426 3B37 F5B5 F913

Re: Availability of SH hardware?

[John Paul Adrian Glaubitz]

On 03/23/2016 10:52 AM, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:
> Other options are just buying LANDISK hardware off Yahoo Auction
> Japan which all have a SH7751 CPU with 266 MHz and 64 MiB RAM.

Or how about a professional movie camera:

> http://deadhacker.com/2009/07/26/targeting-the-panasonic-hvx200-hd-camera/

:)

-- 
 .''`.  John Paul Adrian Glaubitz
: :' :  Debian Developer - glaubitz@debian.org
`. `'   Freie Universitaet Berlin - glaubitz@physik.fu-berlin.de
  `-    GPG: 62FF 8A75 84E0 2956 9546  0006 7426 3B37 F5B5 F913

Re: Availability of SH hardware?

[Magnus Damm]

Hi Rich,

On Thu, Mar 17, 2016 at 12:24 PM, Rich Felker <dalias@libc.org> wrote:
> One of my goals in taking on maintainership of arch/sh is to gradually
> replace all of the hard-coded legacy board/subtype support with device
> tree based board descriptions, and clean up the related board support
> infrastructure in arch/sh to be more in line with how things are done
> on other archs these days. However the ability to make and test these
> changes depends on having some actual hardware to work with.
>
> I'm working on the J-Core (currently J2) open hardware revival of the
> SH architecture and don't have any original SH hardware (except
> perhaps embedded in old appliances). Does anyone have pointers (direct
> add-to-cart'able links) to where SH dev boards are still available, or
> even better, any old hardware lying around that's not being used that
> you'd be willing to donate?
>
> I'm especially interested in getting an SH-X3 board since it seems to
> be the only model with existing SMP support, and moving it over to
> device tree would eliminate the need for keeping around the
> non-device-tree SMP register_smp_ops and cross-core cache invalidation
> infrastructure, which are low-hanging fruit for refactoring/cleanup.
> But really anything would be great to have.

I have a couple of old SH boards that I can hook up to remote access
for you if that would help. Probably sh775x-based ones and maybe also
something with sh2a. Need to go through my old boxes in the attic to
find more detail. =)

As for SH-X3, I recall seeing that board IRL at some point on the desk
next to me, but it was pretty rare even at that time so I highly doubt
you will have any luck finding it or any SMP capable SH SoC.

In the mean time, does the sh4 target in QEMU work in system emulator
mode? I recall user space emulation could run busybox at least.

Cheers,

/ magnus

Re: Availability of SH hardware?

[John Paul Adrian Glaubitz]

On 03/23/2016 11:05 AM, Magnus Damm wrote:
> I have a couple of old SH boards that I can hook up to remote access
> for you if that would help. Probably sh775x-based ones and maybe also
> something with sh2a. Need to go through my old boxes in the attic to
> find more detail. =)

I think it would be much better for actual kernel development to have
physical access to the hardware. And if your SH boards are gaining
dust in your attic anyway, why not send them out to support the
new SH kernel maintainers?

> As for SH-X3, I recall seeing that board IRL at some point on the desk
> next to me, but it was pretty rare even at that time so I highly doubt
> you will have any luck finding it or any SMP capable SH SoC.

You can buy dual-core SH4 systems in Japan:

> http://www.apnet.co.jp/product/superh/ap-sh4ad-0a.html

With 460 USD a bit expensive though.

> In the mean time, does the sh4 target in QEMU work in system emulator
> mode? I recall user space emulation could run busybox at least.

Well, in that case qemu-system would actually the better choice as
it allows to boot the kernel. And, yeah, that should work, too.

But, again, Rich should have real SH hardware for kernel development
which is why I am donating him a LANDISK system which I am buying in
Japan. I have great interest to get kernel support for SH back
in shape and I am therefore happy to support anyone who wants to
work on that.

Adrian

-- 
 .''`.  John Paul Adrian Glaubitz
: :' :  Debian Developer - glaubitz@debian.org
`. `'   Freie Universitaet Berlin - glaubitz@physik.fu-berlin.de
  `-    GPG: 62FF 8A75 84E0 2956 9546  0006 7426 3B37 F5B5 F913

Re: Availability of SH hardware?

[Rich Felker]

On Wed, Mar 23, 2016 at 11:11:04AM +0100, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:
> On 03/23/2016 11:05 AM, Magnus Damm wrote:
> > I have a couple of old SH boards that I can hook up to remote access
> > for you if that would help. Probably sh775x-based ones and maybe also
> > something with sh2a. Need to go through my old boxes in the attic to
> > find more detail. =)
> 
> I think it would be much better for actual kernel development to have
> physical access to the hardware. And if your SH boards are gaining
> dust in your attic anyway, why not send them out to support the
> new SH kernel maintainers?

Indeed. I appreciate the offer, but I don't think there's much that
can be done in the way of kernel development with only remote access,
at least not without a fancy setup to facilitate remote reboot and
reset to a known-working state. Magnus, do you mind if I contact you
again some point later if I find there's something where remote
testing would be helpful?

> > As for SH-X3, I recall seeing that board IRL at some point on the desk
> > next to me, but it was pretty rare even at that time so I highly doubt
> > you will have any luck finding it or any SMP capable SH SoC.
> 
> You can buy dual-core SH4 systems in Japan:
> 
> > http://www.apnet.co.jp/product/superh/ap-sh4ad-0a.html
> 
> With 460 USD a bit expensive though.

Yes, I'll keep it in mind for the future, though. Thanks for finding
this.

> > In the mean time, does the sh4 target in QEMU work in system emulator
> > mode? I recall user space emulation could run busybox at least.
> 
> Well, in that case qemu-system would actually the better choice as
> it allows to boot the kernel. And, yeah, that should work, too.

I've used qemu userspace emulation a good deal already for testing the
initial sh3/4 port of musl libc and later extending it to sh2/j2.
Unfortunately it doesn't work for multi-threaded testing, however,
because the pre-sh4a atomics rely on kernel scheduler help, and the
emulation of the sh4a ones is wrong in qemu (not actually atomic).

I've also used qemu system-level for some minimal kernel smoke
testing, but I'd be hesitant to rely on it, and there doesn't even
seem to be good documentation of what boards/hardware are emulated. At
some point I'm hoping qemu will be extended (I might work on this, but
I don't have time right now) to emulate a user-provided device tree
rather than just a few hard-coded boards.

> But, again, Rich should have real SH hardware for kernel development
> which is why I am donating him a LANDISK system which I am buying in
> Japan. I have great interest to get kernel support for SH back
> in shape and I am therefore happy to support anyone who wants to
> work on that.

Thank you very much, both for the donation and for taking the time to
work out the logistics of getting one and getting it to me.

Rich

Re: Availability of SH hardware?

[Geert Uytterhoeven]

Hi Rich,

On Wed, Mar 23, 2016 at 5:09 PM, Rich Felker <dalias@libc.org> wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 23, 2016 at 11:11:04AM +0100, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:
>> On 03/23/2016 11:05 AM, Magnus Damm wrote:
>> > I have a couple of old SH boards that I can hook up to remote access
>> > for you if that would help. Probably sh775x-based ones and maybe also
>> > something with sh2a. Need to go through my old boxes in the attic to
>> > find more detail. =)
>>
>> I think it would be much better for actual kernel development to have
>> physical access to the hardware. And if your SH boards are gaining
>> dust in your attic anyway, why not send them out to support the
>> new SH kernel maintainers?
>
> Indeed. I appreciate the offer, but I don't think there's much that
> can be done in the way of kernel development with only remote access,
> at least not without a fancy setup to facilitate remote reboot and
> reset to a known-working state. Magnus, do you mind if I contact you
> again some point later if I find there's something where remote
> testing would be helpful?

Magnus' Development Board Farm does have remote power control facilities.

Gr{oetje,eeting}s,

                        Geert

--
Geert Uytterhoeven -- There's lots of Linux beyond ia32 -- geert@linux-m68k.org

In personal conversations with technical people, I call myself a hacker. But
when I'm talking to journalists I just say "programmer" or something like that.
                                -- Linus Torvalds

Re: Availability of SH hardware?

[Magnus Damm]

Hi Geert, Rich,

On Thu, Mar 24, 2016 at 1:17 AM, Geert Uytterhoeven
<geert@linux-m68k.org> wrote:
> Hi Rich,
>
> On Wed, Mar 23, 2016 at 5:09 PM, Rich Felker <dalias@libc.org> wrote:
>> On Wed, Mar 23, 2016 at 11:11:04AM +0100, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:
>>> On 03/23/2016 11:05 AM, Magnus Damm wrote:
>>> > I have a couple of old SH boards that I can hook up to remote access
>>> > for you if that would help. Probably sh775x-based ones and maybe also
>>> > something with sh2a. Need to go through my old boxes in the attic to
>>> > find more detail. =)
>>>
>>> I think it would be much better for actual kernel development to have
>>> physical access to the hardware. And if your SH boards are gaining
>>> dust in your attic anyway, why not send them out to support the
>>> new SH kernel maintainers?
>>
>> Indeed. I appreciate the offer, but I don't think there's much that
>> can be done in the way of kernel development with only remote access,
>> at least not without a fancy setup to facilitate remote reboot and
>> reset to a known-working state. Magnus, do you mind if I contact you
>> again some point later if I find there's something where remote
>> testing would be helpful?
>
> Magnus' Development Board Farm does have remote power control facilities.

Indeed - thanks for clarifying Geert!

Of course for I/O related development physical access is most
convenient. My remote access setup allows power control, network boot
and in special cases video over VNC. It is not the best system in the
universe but probably beats nothing.

For the SH architecture it seems to me that things like DT for
interrupt controllers and CCF are the most serious blockers for modern
kernel support. Those two or at least the latter should be possible to
develop over remote access. And then you of course also have SMP. =)

I recall hearing that Dreamcast hardware was historically used for
some SH development. Can't be that difficult to find such hardware,
however I highly doubt that the boot process is very convenient.
Hardware wise Dreamcast probably contains something like sh775x so it
should be similar to whatever is in QEMU.

Thanks,

/ magnus

Re: Availability of SH hardware?

[John Paul Adrian Glaubitz]

On 03/24/2016 09:50 AM, Magnus Damm wrote:
> I recall hearing that Dreamcast hardware was historically used for
> some SH development. Can't be that difficult to find such hardware,
> however I highly doubt that the boot process is very convenient.
> Hardware wise Dreamcast probably contains something like sh775x so it
> should be similar to whatever is in QEMU.

The Dreamcast has just 16 MiB of RAM. On the other hand, the LANDISK
NAS device I have acquired for Rich in Japan comes with 64 MiB RAM
and a SH7751 CPU running at 266 MHz. And people have used these devices
in the past to run Debian.

Adrian

-- 
 .''`.  John Paul Adrian Glaubitz
: :' :  Debian Developer - glaubitz@debian.org
`. `'   Freie Universitaet Berlin - glaubitz@physik.fu-berlin.de
  `-    GPG: 62FF 8A75 84E0 2956 9546  0006 7426 3B37 F5B5 F913

Re: Availability of SH hardware?

[Yoshinori Sato]

On Thu, 17 Mar 2016 12:24:41 +0900,
Rich Felker wrote:
> 
> One of my goals in taking on maintainership of arch/sh is to gradually
> replace all of the hard-coded legacy board/subtype support with device
> tree based board descriptions, and clean up the related board support
> infrastructure in arch/sh to be more in line with how things are done
> on other archs these days. However the ability to make and test these
> changes depends on having some actual hardware to work with.
> 
> I'm working on the J-Core (currently J2) open hardware revival of the
> SH architecture and don't have any original SH hardware (except
> perhaps embedded in old appliances). Does anyone have pointers (direct
> add-to-cart'able links) to where SH dev boards are still available, or
> even better, any old hardware lying around that's not being used that
> you'd be willing to donate?
> 
> I'm especially interested in getting an SH-X3 board since it seems to
> be the only model with existing SMP support, and moving it over to
> device tree would eliminate the need for keeping around the
> non-device-tree SMP register_smp_ops and cross-core cache invalidation
> infrastructure, which are low-hanging fruit for refactoring/cleanup.
> But really anything would be great to have.
> 
> Rich
> --
> To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-sh" in
> the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org
> More majordomo info at  http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html

I got HDL-U (aka LANDISK). And setup latest u-boot / kernel.
So we can testing real SH4 hardware.

-- 
Yoshinori Sato
<ysato@users.sourceforge.jp>

Re: Availability of SH hardware?

[Magnus Damm]

On Thu, Mar 24, 2016 at 6:01 PM, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz
<glaubitz@physik.fu-berlin.de> wrote:
> On 03/24/2016 09:50 AM, Magnus Damm wrote:
>> I recall hearing that Dreamcast hardware was historically used for
>> some SH development. Can't be that difficult to find such hardware,
>> however I highly doubt that the boot process is very convenient.
>> Hardware wise Dreamcast probably contains something like sh775x so it
>> should be similar to whatever is in QEMU.
>
> The Dreamcast has just 16 MiB of RAM. On the other hand, the LANDISK
> NAS device I have acquired for Rich in Japan comes with 64 MiB RAM
> and a SH7751 CPU running at 266 MHz. And people have used these devices
> in the past to run Debian.

Indeed 64 MiB is better than 16MiB. It is also still simple to handle
from a software perspective with the fixed virtual-to-physical memory
windows used by the SH architecture. For more than 256 MiB of RAM some
32-bit extensions were added, perhaps combined with the PMB hardware
unit unless I remember incorrectly. Those 32-bit extensions are not
available on older SoCs like sh7751 but on later generations like
sh7785 and probably sh7786 as well.

/ magnus

Re: Availability of SH hardware?

[Rich Felker]

On Fri, Mar 25, 2016 at 06:18:56AM +0900, Magnus Damm wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 24, 2016 at 6:01 PM, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz
> <glaubitz@physik.fu-berlin.de> wrote:
> > On 03/24/2016 09:50 AM, Magnus Damm wrote:
> >> I recall hearing that Dreamcast hardware was historically used for
> >> some SH development. Can't be that difficult to find such hardware,
> >> however I highly doubt that the boot process is very convenient.
> >> Hardware wise Dreamcast probably contains something like sh775x so it
> >> should be similar to whatever is in QEMU.
> >
> > The Dreamcast has just 16 MiB of RAM. On the other hand, the LANDISK
> > NAS device I have acquired for Rich in Japan comes with 64 MiB RAM
> > and a SH7751 CPU running at 266 MHz. And people have used these devices
> > in the past to run Debian.
> 
> Indeed 64 MiB is better than 16MiB. It is also still simple to handle
> from a software perspective with the fixed virtual-to-physical memory
> windows used by the SH architecture. For more than 256 MiB of RAM some
> 32-bit extensions were added, perhaps combined with the PMB hardware
> unit unless I remember incorrectly. Those 32-bit extensions are not
> available on older SoCs like sh7751 but on later generations like
> sh7785 and probably sh7786 as well.

I've been reading the documentation and trying to figure out the MMU
and PMB stuff for SH4, and it seems the PMB is only relevant to
extending the amount of virtual address space that can be remapped to
different physical addresses, and only for kernelspace (userspace has
no access to the P1 and P2 ranges it maps). The 32-bit physical memory
extension is separate from what I can tell, and just uses the upper 3
bits of the TLB registers which were previously reserved. Does this
sound correct?

Rich

Re: Availability of SH hardware?

[Magnus Damm]

On Fri, Mar 25, 2016 at 7:00 AM, Rich Felker <dalias@libc.org> wrote:
> On Fri, Mar 25, 2016 at 06:18:56AM +0900, Magnus Damm wrote:
>> On Thu, Mar 24, 2016 at 6:01 PM, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz
>> <glaubitz@physik.fu-berlin.de> wrote:
>> > On 03/24/2016 09:50 AM, Magnus Damm wrote:
>> >> I recall hearing that Dreamcast hardware was historically used for
>> >> some SH development. Can't be that difficult to find such hardware,
>> >> however I highly doubt that the boot process is very convenient.
>> >> Hardware wise Dreamcast probably contains something like sh775x so it
>> >> should be similar to whatever is in QEMU.
>> >
>> > The Dreamcast has just 16 MiB of RAM. On the other hand, the LANDISK
>> > NAS device I have acquired for Rich in Japan comes with 64 MiB RAM
>> > and a SH7751 CPU running at 266 MHz. And people have used these devices
>> > in the past to run Debian.
>>
>> Indeed 64 MiB is better than 16MiB. It is also still simple to handle
>> from a software perspective with the fixed virtual-to-physical memory
>> windows used by the SH architecture. For more than 256 MiB of RAM some
>> 32-bit extensions were added, perhaps combined with the PMB hardware
>> unit unless I remember incorrectly. Those 32-bit extensions are not
>> available on older SoCs like sh7751 but on later generations like
>> sh7785 and probably sh7786 as well.
>
> I've been reading the documentation and trying to figure out the MMU
> and PMB stuff for SH4, and it seems the PMB is only relevant to
> extending the amount of virtual address space that can be remapped to
> different physical addresses, and only for kernelspace (userspace has
> no access to the P1 and P2 ranges it maps). The 32-bit physical memory
> extension is separate from what I can tell, and just uses the upper 3
> bits of the TLB registers which were previously reserved. Does this
> sound correct?

Sounds about right. It may be that the PMB is only used during early
boot to allow access of more than 29 bits of physical memory for
instance before the MMU is turned on. But depending on memory model
and protection requirements it may make sense to map in as much as
possible of lowmem into the virtual space using the PMB to take the
load of the MMU.

As you've figured out, the PMB hardware allows virtual -> physical
remapping of larger contiguous areas. It exist both for the SH CPU
core and also as part of various IOMMU variants. I believe the former
cannot generate any traps or interrupts while the latter is able to.
So no on-demand paging or other fancy stuff like protection that user
space would like to have.

/ magnus

Re: Availability of SH hardware?

[Rob Landley]

On 03/23/2016 05:05 AM, Magnus Damm wrote:
> Hi Rich,
> 
> On Thu, Mar 17, 2016 at 12:24 PM, Rich Felker <dalias@libc.org> wrote:
>> One of my goals in taking on maintainership of arch/sh is to gradually
>> replace all of the hard-coded legacy board/subtype support with device
>> tree based board descriptions, and clean up the related board support
>> infrastructure in arch/sh to be more in line with how things are done
>> on other archs these days. However the ability to make and test these
>> changes depends on having some actual hardware to work with.
>>
>> I'm working on the J-Core (currently J2) open hardware revival of the
>> SH architecture and don't have any original SH hardware (except
>> perhaps embedded in old appliances). Does anyone have pointers (direct
>> add-to-cart'able links) to where SH dev boards are still available, or
>> even better, any old hardware lying around that's not being used that
>> you'd be willing to donate?
>>
>> I'm especially interested in getting an SH-X3 board since it seems to
>> be the only model with existing SMP support, and moving it over to
>> device tree would eliminate the need for keeping around the
>> non-device-tree SMP register_smp_ops and cross-core cache invalidation
>> infrastructure, which are low-hanging fruit for refactoring/cleanup.
>> But really anything would be great to have.
> 
> I have a couple of old SH boards that I can hook up to remote access
> for you if that would help. Probably sh775x-based ones and maybe also
> something with sh2a. Need to go through my old boxes in the attic to
> find more detail. =)
> 
> As for SH-X3, I recall seeing that board IRL at some point on the desk
> next to me, but it was pretty rare even at that time so I highly doubt
> you will have any luck finding it or any SMP capable SH SoC.
> 
> In the mean time, does the sh4 target in QEMU work in system emulator
> mode? I recall user space emulation could run busybox at least.

Sure, I have prebuilt system images for that even.

  http://landley.net/aboriginal/bin/system-image-sh4.tar.gz

Most recently tested with the 4.3 kernel, I think?

Rob

Rob

Re: Availability of SH hardware?

[Rob Landley]

On 03/24/2016 03:50 AM, Magnus Damm wrote:
> Hi Geert, Rich,
> 
> On Thu, Mar 24, 2016 at 1:17 AM, Geert Uytterhoeven
> <geert@linux-m68k.org> wrote:
>> Hi Rich,
> I recall hearing that Dreamcast hardware was historically used for
> some SH development. Can't be that difficult to find such hardware,
> however I highly doubt that the boot process is very convenient.
> Hardware wise Dreamcast probably contains something like sh775x so it
> should be similar to whatever is in QEMU.

You can find dreamcasts, but the problem is the specific dreamcast
peripherals (there was a "dreamcast keyboard") stopped being
manufactured 20 years ago, and were no longer even available on ebay
when I checked.

Rob

Re: Availability of SH hardware?

[John Paul Adrian Glaubitz]

On 03/25/2016 03:04 AM, Rob Landley wrote:
> You can find dreamcasts, but the problem is the specific dreamcast
> peripherals (there was a "dreamcast keyboard") stopped being
> manufactured 20 years ago, and were no longer even available on ebay
> when I checked.

Well, don't look on eBay, look on Amazon. There are plenty of offers
with new-old-stock Dreamcast keyboards and mice. I bought both for
a very low price off Amazon a few months ago. I just checked Amazon
Germany and there are still offers.

What's more of a concern is getting the necessary broadband adapter
for the Dreamcast. Those are very hard to get outside Japan but
in Japan it's less of a problem which is generally true for any
SuperH hardware.

The cheapest and easiest obtainable hardware are the LANDISK devices
sold by IODATA in Japan. Those sell for around 20-50 Euros on Yahoo
Auction Japan and have been reported to work fine with Debian.

Adrian

-- 
 .''`.  John Paul Adrian Glaubitz
: :' :  Debian Developer - glaubitz@debian.org
`. `'   Freie Universitaet Berlin - glaubitz@physik.fu-berlin.de
  `-    GPG: 62FF 8A75 84E0 2956 9546  0006 7426 3B37 F5B5 F913

Re: Availability of SH hardware?

[John Paul Adrian Glaubitz]

Hi Yoshinori!

On 03/24/2016 12:40 PM, Yoshinori Sato wrote:
> I got HDL-U (aka LANDISK). And setup latest u-boot / kernel.
> So we can testing real SH4 hardware.

That's great to hear. Then you can help Rich setting up his LANDISK
device once he receives his from Japan. It will be mailed in the
following days, I already bought it off Yahoo Auction Japan:

> http://page15.auctions.yahoo.co.jp/jp/auction/t464640538

Would probably also be a good idea to write everything related
to the LANDISK into the Debian Wiki which already has a section
for SH4 [1].

Adrian

> [1] https://wiki.debian.org/SH4/

-- 
 .''`.  John Paul Adrian Glaubitz
: :' :  Debian Developer - glaubitz@debian.org
`. `'   Freie Universitaet Berlin - glaubitz@physik.fu-berlin.de
  `-    GPG: 62FF 8A75 84E0 2956 9546  0006 7426 3B37 F5B5 F913

Re: Availability of SH hardware?

[John Paul Adrian Glaubitz]

On 03/17/2016 10:10 AM, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:
> So, with Renesas out of the picture, sources for SuperH hardware would
> be either open source people in Japan who used to work for Renesas -
> I know, for fact, that Renesas hired lots of people in Japan to work
> on SuperH support in Linux - or third-party companies like emtrion [1]
> or Alpha Project in Japan [2]. Another option would be getting an
> old LANDisk device which can also be used to run Debian's sh4 port [3].

So, while reading the SH4 page in the Debian wiki [1], I stumbled
accross another very interesting SH4 machine, the NextVOD from
Taiwan [2] (Chinese name: 網樂通).

The specs [3] look very promising:

 * SH7105 CPU running at 600 MHz (other sources claim 450 MHz)
 * 256 MiB RAM
 * 8 GiB Flash storage (through an internal USB stick)
 * Ethernet
 * USB 2.0
 * HDMI
 * AV out

Apparently Paul Liu (another Debian guy from Taiwan I know personally)
has or had such a device as well. At least he's got a filesystem image
in his Debian webspace [4].

I will get in touch with him. Maybe he can help us acquire multiple
boxes from Taiwan for little money.

Adrian

> [1] https://wiki.debian.org/SH4
> [2] http://www.techbang.com/posts/4504-one-television-report-lok-tong-demo
> [3] http://digiland.tw/viewtopic.php?id\x1771
> [4] http://people.debian.org.tw/~paulliu/nextvod/

-- 
 .''`.  John Paul Adrian Glaubitz
: :' :  Debian Developer - glaubitz@debian.org
`. `'   Freie Universitaet Berlin - glaubitz@physik.fu-berlin.de
  `-    GPG: 62FF 8A75 84E0 2956 9546  0006 7426 3B37 F5B5 F913

Re: Availability of SH hardware?

[Rich Felker]

On Fri, Mar 25, 2016 at 09:31:05PM +0100, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:
> On 03/17/2016 10:10 AM, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:
> > So, with Renesas out of the picture, sources for SuperH hardware would
> > be either open source people in Japan who used to work for Renesas -
> > I know, for fact, that Renesas hired lots of people in Japan to work
> > on SuperH support in Linux - or third-party companies like emtrion [1]
> > or Alpha Project in Japan [2]. Another option would be getting an
> > old LANDisk device which can also be used to run Debian's sh4 port [3].
> 
> So, while reading the SH4 page in the Debian wiki [1], I stumbled
> accross another very interesting SH4 machine, the NextVOD from
> Taiwan [2] (Chinese name: 網樂通).
> 
> The specs [3] look very promising:
> 
>  * SH7105 CPU running at 600 MHz (other sources claim 450 MHz)
>  * 256 MiB RAM
>  * 8 GiB Flash storage (through an internal USB stick)
>  * Ethernet
>  * USB 2.0
>  * HDMI
>  * AV out
> 
> Apparently Paul Liu (another Debian guy from Taiwan I know personally)
> has or had such a device as well. At least he's got a filesystem image
> in his Debian webspace [4].
> 
> I will get in touch with him. Maybe he can help us acquire multiple
> boxes from Taiwan for little money.

This sounds really interesting. Do you know what cpu model it actually
has? I tried to lookup SH7105 and it seems to be a model of SH2, which
would not run Debian and almost certainly would not go up to 600 MHz.

Rich

Re: Availability of SH hardware?

[John Paul Adrian Glaubitz]

On 03/25/2016 11:42 PM, Rich Felker wrote:
> This sounds really interesting. Do you know what cpu model it actually
> has? I tried to lookup SH7105 and it seems to be a model of SH2, which
> would not run Debian and almost certainly would not go up to 600 MHz.

Another post on a Taiwanese forum shows the SoC without the heat sink:

> http://digiland.tw/viewtopic.php?id\x1771

This photo shows the type number of the SoC to be ST-9150:

>
http://www.st.com/web/catalog/mmc/FM128/SC1401/PF250067?sc=internet/imag_video/product/250067.jsp

Which is specified to contain an ST-40-300 core with 450 MHz:

>
http://www.st.com/st-web-ui/static/active/en/resource/technical/document/data_brief/CD00258048.pdf

And the ST-40-300 is claimed to be sh4a-compatible (page 33):

>
http://www.st.com/st-web-ui/static/active/en/resource/technical/document/reference_manual/CD17182230.pdf

Adrian

-- 
 .''`.  John Paul Adrian Glaubitz
: :' :  Debian Developer - glaubitz@debian.org
`. `'   Freie Universitaet Berlin - glaubitz@physik.fu-berlin.de
  `-    GPG: 62FF 8A75 84E0 2956 9546  0006 7426 3B37 F5B5 F913

Re: Availability of SH hardware?

[John Paul Adrian Glaubitz]

On 03/25/2016 11:51 PM, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:
> On 03/25/2016 11:42 PM, Rich Felker wrote:
>> This sounds really interesting. Do you know what cpu model it actually
>> has? I tried to lookup SH7105 and it seems to be a model of SH2, which
>> would not run Debian and almost certainly would not go up to 600 MHz.

Here's a kernel tree for this SoC:

> https://github.com/suzuke/kernel-pdk7105

And this Chinese page has some info on running Debian:

> https://sites.google.com/site/debiansh4/home

Apparently the name is not "SH-7105" but "ST-7105" and "ST-9150"
could be a newer version of the SoC.

Adrian

-- 
 .''`.  John Paul Adrian Glaubitz
: :' :  Debian Developer - glaubitz@debian.org
`. `'   Freie Universitaet Berlin - glaubitz@physik.fu-berlin.de
  `-    GPG: 62FF 8A75 84E0 2956 9546  0006 7426 3B37 F5B5 F913

Re: Availability of SH hardware?

[John Paul Adrian Glaubitz]

On 03/25/2016 09:31 PM, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:
> I will get in touch with him. Maybe he can help us acquire multiple
> boxes from Taiwan for little money.

Ok, he got back to me and he pointed me to an auction site in Taiwan.

Those things are extremely cheap:

> http://goods.ruten.com.tw/item/show?21507494565008

This one sells for 499 NTD (New Taiwan Dollar) which is just 15 USD.
Now, I just need to convince the Debian guy from Taiwan to buy these
for us.

Did I mention that I recently just went to Taiwan? If I had only known.

Adrian

-- 
 .''`.  John Paul Adrian Glaubitz
: :' :  Debian Developer - glaubitz@debian.org
`. `'   Freie Universitaet Berlin - glaubitz@physik.fu-berlin.de
  `-    GPG: 62FF 8A75 84E0 2956 9546  0006 7426 3B37 F5B5 F913

Re: Availability of SH hardware?

[Yoshinori Sato]

On Fri, 25 Mar 2016 20:19:09 +0900,
John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:
> 
> Hi Yoshinori!
> 
> On 03/24/2016 12:40 PM, Yoshinori Sato wrote:
> > I got HDL-U (aka LANDISK). And setup latest u-boot / kernel.
> > So we can testing real SH4 hardware.
> 
> That's great to hear. Then you can help Rich setting up his LANDISK
> device once he receives his from Japan. It will be mailed in the
> following days, I already bought it off Yahoo Auction Japan:
> 
> > http://page15.auctions.yahoo.co.jp/jp/auction/t464640538

OK.

> Would probably also be a good idea to write everything related
> to the LANDISK into the Debian Wiki which already has a section
> for SH4 [1].

That's good idea.

> Adrian
> 
> > [1] https://wiki.debian.org/SH4/
> 
> -- 
>  .''`.  John Paul Adrian Glaubitz
> : :' :  Debian Developer - glaubitz@debian.org
> `. `'   Freie Universitaet Berlin - glaubitz@physik.fu-berlin.de
>   `-    GPG: 62FF 8A75 84E0 2956 9546  0006 7426 3B37 F5B5 F913

-- 
Yoshinori Sato
<ysato@users.sourceforge.jp>

Re: Availability of SH hardware?

[Zoltan HERPAI]

On Sat, 26 Mar 2016, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:

> On 03/25/2016 09:31 PM, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:
>> I will get in touch with him. Maybe he can help us acquire multiple
>> boxes from Taiwan for little money.
>
> Ok, he got back to me and he pointed me to an auction site in Taiwan.
>
> Those things are extremely cheap:
>
>> http://goods.ruten.com.tw/item/show?21507494565008
>
> This one sells for 499 NTD (New Taiwan Dollar) which is just 15 USD.
> Now, I just need to convince the Debian guy from Taiwan to buy these
> for us.

Hi all,

I bought an SH3 (T-SHMIN) and an SH4 (USL-5P, which resembles a Landisk 
but with a couple USB ports instead of an ATA port) board with the help of 
Nobuhiro-san a couple years ago, for helping my intention of building an 
OpenWrt target for sh3 and sh4. These could also be a good target to 
acquire, although I'm not aware of the current pricetags. (The sh775x 
target never made it into trunk, but I rebased it privately from time to 
time, I currently maintain two other targets in OpenWrt.)

If someone would help to acquire multiple pieces of any SH4 board, I'd 
also like to jump on the bandwagon - that would likely push me to finish 
the target and commit it. :)

Thanks,
Zoltan H

Re: Availability of SH hardware?

[John Paul Adrian Glaubitz]

Hi!

On 03/26/2016 10:18 PM, Zoltan HERPAI wrote:
> I bought an SH3 (T-SHMIN) and an SH4 (USL-5P, which resembles a Landisk
> but with a couple USB ports instead of an ATA port) board with the help
> of Nobuhiro-san a couple years ago, for helping my intention of building
> an OpenWrt target for sh3 and sh4. These could also be a good target to
> acquire, although I'm not aware of the current pricetags.

I'm constantly checking Yahoo Auction Japan, but so far I have seen only
SH-2A and SH-4 or SH-4A hardware only.

> If someone would help to acquire multiple pieces of any SH4 board, I'd
> also like to jump on the bandwagon - that would likely push me to finish
> the target and commit it. :)

My plan is to buy as many of these NextVoD devices from Taiwan and then
send them out to anyone willing to do SuperH kernel or userland
development, so I'd be happy to send you one.

At a 10-15 USD price tag those are very affordable.

Adrian

-- 
 .''`.  John Paul Adrian Glaubitz
: :' :  Debian Developer - glaubitz@debian.org
`. `'   Freie Universitaet Berlin - glaubitz@physik.fu-berlin.de
  `-    GPG: 62FF 8A75 84E0 2956 9546  0006 7426 3B37 F5B5 F913

Re: Availability of SH hardware?

[John Paul Adrian Glaubitz]

(CC'ing everyone who might want a NextVoD)

Just a quick update:

Paul Liu is willing to acquire several NextVoD boxes which he will
either send over to Germany or hand them over at DebConf16 in
South Africa.

In any case, I thought at a 10 Euro pricetag, I would be happy to
send such a NextVoD box to anyone doing SuperH kernel or gcc
development, that is:

 * Rich
 * Geert
 * Yoshinori
 * Oleg
 * Kaz
 * Zoltan

Anyone else?

See the quoted email for the detailed specs below. But I think we
won't find any other SH4 hardware with a 450 MHz CPU, 256 MiB
RAM and HDMI output for the same or less money.

Adrian

On 03/25/2016 09:31 PM, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:
> On 03/17/2016 10:10 AM, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:
>> So, with Renesas out of the picture, sources for SuperH hardware would
>> be either open source people in Japan who used to work for Renesas -
>> I know, for fact, that Renesas hired lots of people in Japan to work
>> on SuperH support in Linux - or third-party companies like emtrion [1]
>> or Alpha Project in Japan [2]. Another option would be getting an
>> old LANDisk device which can also be used to run Debian's sh4 port [3].
> 
> So, while reading the SH4 page in the Debian wiki [1], I stumbled
> accross another very interesting SH4 machine, the NextVOD from
> Taiwan [2] (Chinese name: 網樂通).
> 
> The specs [3] look very promising:
> 
>  * SH7105 CPU running at 600 MHz (other sources claim 450 MHz)
>  * 256 MiB RAM
>  * 8 GiB Flash storage (through an internal USB stick)
>  * Ethernet
>  * USB 2.0
>  * HDMI
>  * AV out
> 
> Apparently Paul Liu (another Debian guy from Taiwan I know personally)
> has or had such a device as well. At least he's got a filesystem image
> in his Debian webspace [4].
> 
> I will get in touch with him. Maybe he can help us acquire multiple
> boxes from Taiwan for little money.
> 
> Adrian
> 
>> [1] https://wiki.debian.org/SH4
>> [2] http://www.techbang.com/posts/4504-one-television-report-lok-tong-demo
>> [3] http://digiland.tw/viewtopic.php?id\x1771
>> [4] http://people.debian.org.tw/~paulliu/nextvod/
> 


-- 
 .''`.  John Paul Adrian Glaubitz
: :' :  Debian Developer - glaubitz@debian.org
`. `'   Freie Universitaet Berlin - glaubitz@physik.fu-berlin.de
  `-    GPG: 62FF 8A75 84E0 2956 9546  0006 7426 3B37 F5B5 F913

Re: Availability of SH hardware?

[Rob Landley]

On 03/26/2016 04:37 PM, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:
> Hi!
> 
> On 03/26/2016 10:18 PM, Zoltan HERPAI wrote:
>> I bought an SH3 (T-SHMIN) and an SH4 (USL-5P, which resembles a Landisk
>> but with a couple USB ports instead of an ATA port) board with the help
>> of Nobuhiro-san a couple years ago, for helping my intention of building
>> an OpenWrt target for sh3 and sh4. These could also be a good target to
>> acquire, although I'm not aware of the current pricetags.
> 
> I'm constantly checking Yahoo Auction Japan, but so far I have seen only
> SH-2A and SH-4 or SH-4A hardware only.
> 
>> If someone would help to acquire multiple pieces of any SH4 board, I'd
>> also like to jump on the bandwagon - that would likely push me to finish
>> the target and commit it. :)
> 
> My plan is to buy as many of these NextVoD devices from Taiwan and then
> send them out to anyone willing to do SuperH kernel or userland
> development, so I'd be happy to send you one.
> 
> At a 10-15 USD price tag those are very affordable.
> 
> Adrian

I note that if anybody wants to play with a j-core board, the easy way
is to grab a $50 Numato Mimas v2 FPGA board from
http://numato.com/mimas-v2-spartan-6-fpga-development-board-with-ddr-sdram/
and follow the instructions on http://nommu.org/jcore (which are a few
months old but should still work).

I'm trying to get that web page completely rewritten and moved to its
own domain and the repository converted from mercurial to git and up on
github by ELC in San Diego next week. If you're going there, we should
be raffling off a dozen of the Numato boards, along with the micro-SD
card and USB "mini-B" cable each one needs to funciton, which is only
like $5 more hardware but is not included with the board.

Jeff Dionne (founder of uClinux way back when, and now maintainer of the
j-core project) is giving two talks at ELC, one on why we're doing it
and one a design walkthrough of the open source VHDL code (aimed at
software developers who've never done hardware before but might want to
learn a new programming language to poke at a project they can test at
home).

Rob