On Thu, Jun 27, 2002 at 09:23:41AM -0700, Scott Anderson wrote:

David Gibson wrote:

quoted

Eek, wibble.  It still seems somewhat unlikely to me that you'd be
changing the peripherals "on the fly" in a real life embedded
application.  Especially considering that reboots are likely to be
much less of an issue on an embedded system than on a big server.

My contrived example is a piece of test equipment that has an LCD
touchscreen and some high speed serial collection device.  The LCD is
only used when interacting with the UI and the serial is only used
during a run when the LCD can be blank.  By reprogramming part of the
FPGA on the fly you can squeeze more into a smaller FPGA.  It appears
that Xilinx already has this working:
  http://www.xilinx.com/xapp/xapp290.pdf

I guess I wouldn't be quite so quick to dismiss this as unlikely, but
I must admit, my crystal ball is in the shop this week.  It sure would
be nice to keep such things in mind as OCP is evolving, though.

Heh, well, maybe.  In any case this sounds more like a 2.5 and later
timerframe thing to me, in which case integration into the unified
device model should give us what's needed.

--
David Gibson			| For every complex problem there is a
david@gibson.dropbear.id.au	| solution which is simple, neat and
				| wrong.  -- H.L. Mencken
http://www.ozlabs.org/people/dgibson

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