a MINIMAL405 submodel

a MINIMAL405 submodel

[David Updegraff]

Greetings.

I have made a trivial little patch (and a few files..) to define a
"minimally configured" 405[gp] board.  Its basically a 405 with
no KB, RTC, PCI, et.al.  The idea being that if you define this
submodel of CONFIG_4xx then you write loadable modules on your own
to handle peripherals; this being just enough in the kernel to
get you to net- or flash-boot.

Its like a "WALNUT" but without any peripheral bank setup, RTC or
KB assumptions.. you get the idea.

In our case we bolt on lots of silly junk to the expansion banks
and do DMA... but all inside of custom little drivers that set those
banks up.  Might we be able to limit the proliferation of submodel
in the PPC 4xx world with the addition of my proposed MINIMAL405
submodel and then let vendors write drivers instead of kernels?

For any who care, have a peek at
	http://www.toimi.com/linuxppc
for the .patch file and a .tar file of needed additional platform
files.

Cheers.

--
Dave Updegraff / dave@cray.com / 218-525-1154


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Re: a MINIMAL405 submodel

[Dan Malek]

David Updegraff wrote:

> ... Might we be able to limit the proliferation of submodel
> in the PPC 4xx world with the addition of my proposed MINIMAL405
> submodel and then let vendors write drivers instead of kernels?

The 8xx and 8260 are almost like this.  What you will discover over
time is a driver you write is 99% of what someone else wants.  In your
proposal, you would end up with a whole new driver that is almost identical
to another, which isn't practical to maintain.  Just follow the convention
of adding a board descriptor for your platform.  If it is truly identical
to another, then the platforms can share the same files and this knowledge
is implicit in the configuration.  Now, if the current configurations make
assumptions about platforms that use a 405GP (and it shouldn't), that is
what needs to change.

Thanks.

	-- Dan


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Re: a MINIMAL405 submodel

[David Updegraff]

Dan Malek wrote:

>
> David Updegraff wrote:
>
>> ... Might we be able to limit the proliferation of submodel
>> in the PPC 4xx world with the addition of my proposed MINIMAL405
>> submodel and then let vendors write drivers instead of kernels?
>
>
> The 8xx and 8260 are almost like this.  What you will discover over
> time is a driver you write is 99% of what someone else wants.  In your
> proposal, you would end up with a whole new driver that is almost identical
> to another, which isn't practical to maintain. Just follow the convention

> of adding a board descriptor for your platform.  If it is truly identical
> to another, then the platforms can share the same files and this knowledge
> is implicit in the configuration.  Now, if the current configurations make
> assumptions about platforms that use a 405GP (and it shouldn't), that is
> what needs to change.


I'm happy with that approach too: so we'd have a new board description of

a MINIMAL405. Or.. with some minor surgery to the WALNUT description, I
could fit in there (additional CONFIG_* things maybe to adjust presence
of peripherals and presumption of PPCBOOT vs. IBM-BIOS..).  It boils
down to almost same thing: a board defn. that can be configured down to
a peripheral-less 405gp.  I has assumed that my chances of lobbying
for a "new" board description might be a bit better than lobbying for
a bunch of changes to the WALNUT or EP405.  Though either of those
would work fine if they just consistently obeyed CONFIG_PCI,
CONFIG_RTC, CONFIG_NVRAM, CONFIG_VT, and we had a mechaninsm for
ppcboot cognizance of board_t.  Infact, it looks to me like they could
be merged in that case..

Please advise.

--
Dave Updegraff / dave@cray.com / 218-525-1154


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Re: a MINIMAL405 submodel

[Matthias Fuchs]

Hi David,

what do you mean by a peripheral-less 405gp ? It is possible to deselect all OCP functions
from the kernel config. You do not need a new plattform to do this.

I am using the current 2.4.x devel tree with the CPCI405 config on a custom 405CR board.
The 405CR does not have PCI or Ethernet. So its nearly a peripheral-less GP. I only had to deselect PCI and
Ethernet.

So why a new plattform ?

Matthias

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building gdbserver 5.0

[Mark Pilon]

I've searched for info on building gdbserver from gdb5.0 w/o
success -- any pointers?

I cd .../gdb-5.0/gdb/gdbserver,
./configure --target=powerpc-linux --host=i586-pc-linux-gnu
make CC=powerpc-linux-gcc

3 objects are created:
remote-utils.o  server.o  utils.o

and the following are undefined @ link:
mywait, kill_inferior, mythread_alive, registers and a few others.

I suspect that some other source should be compiled in but am not
seeing how to configure so that it's mentioned in the Makefile.

suggestions appreciated,
Mark

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