uboot and ppc405

Hi,

We re starting a disign with xilinx chip Virtex II pro and I wonder the =20
typical size of an uboot binary. This is for our electronician disigner =20
in order to dimension the prom and so on...

Any hint welcome,

Thanks in advance, xavier grave

On Mon, 25 Oct 2004 10:51:08 +0000, grave [off-list ref] wrote:

We re starting a disign with xilinx chip Virtex II pro and I wonder the
typical size of an uboot binary. This is for our electronician disigner
in order to dimension the prom and so on...

It might be worth asking your electronics people whether they're going
to use the Xilinx SysACE chip in your hardware design. If this is the
case then you can program the Virtex and load in the kernel and
bootloader from Compact Flash. I don't know whether uboot supports
this out of the box since I wrote my own Virtex II bootloader, but it
should be quite doable.

Certainly you really want to avoid PROMs in the design if at all
possible - with our design it's possible for us to swap out a CF and
in one step replace all hardware and software, upgrading is a case of
sending the customer a loopback mountable filesystem which reloads the
CF after the customer downloads the "firmware update" via a web page.

Cheers,

Jon.

Hi,

please have a look at "Getting started with U-Boot and ML300" 
http://www.xilinx.com/bvdocs/appnotes/xapp542.pdf that describes how to 
use U-Boot with Xilinx Virtex-II Pro devices.

You might also want to have a look at the README.ml300 in the u-boot 
source tree that provides a quick start.

- Peter


grave wrote:

Hi,

We re starting a disign with xilinx chip Virtex II pro and I wonder 
the  typical size of an uboot binary. This is for our electronician 
disigner  in order to dimension the prom and so on...

Any hint welcome,

Thanks in advance, xavier grave

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On Mon, 25 Oct 2004 09:35:42 -0700, Peter Ryser [off-list ref] wrote:

please have a look at "Getting started with U-Boot and ML300"
http://www.xilinx.com/bvdocs/appnotes/xapp542.pdf that describes how to
use U-Boot with Xilinx Virtex-II Pro devices.

This appnote assumes that he's using the ML300, has the Montavista
tree, and a few other general assumptions that might well not be true
here, but is otherwise interesting if they decide to heed our
suggestions of using the SystemACE in the design.

btw Peter, I've been moaning about the weird interrupt behaviour of
the SysACE on e.g. the Memec board for some time (see archives for
various other people's experiences too) - and I've spoken to several
folks at Xilinx without getting very far. If there's a fundamental
problem then it probably makes sense for us to help get it fixed.

Cheers,

Jon.

This appnote assumes that he's using the ML300, has the Montavista
tree, and a few other general assumptions that might well not be true
here, but is otherwise interesting if they decide to heed our
suggestions of using the SystemACE in the design.

The app note concentrates on one example, however, it is generic enough 
and applies to different setups. The MontaVista Linux preview kit for 
the ML300 is free but you can use other distributions if you wish to do 
so. The only thing you need for u-boot is the PowerPC cross-compiler. 
You can use the cross-compiler that ships with EDK, however, I do not 
recommend it as it is set up for a different environment than for Linux 
and/or U-Boot and it will expect files like boot.o and libxil.a...

Other boards than the ML300 can be used, too. If you look at the 
repository layout in U-Boot there is space for other boards than the 
ML300. I'm sure Wolfgang will appreciate contributions and ports to 
different boards.

btw Peter, I've been moaning about the weird interrupt behaviour of
the SysACE on e.g. the Memec board for some time (see archives for
various other people's experiences too) - and I've spoken to several
folks at Xilinx without getting very far. If there's a fundamental
problem then it probably makes sense for us to help get it fixed.

Hmm, I'm not aware of any interrupt problems with System ACE CF. For 
Linux it works for a long time unchanged as published in the 
linuxppc_2_4_devel and linuxppc-2.4 repositories. I'm operating my own 
web and mail server on a V2P based board using a 1GB MicroDrive through 
System ACE CF as the root and swap filesystems. The system is up and 
running for months now. No special tricks or hacks just a 
straight-forward EDK FPGA design with a MVL kernel.

There is now a MVL preview kit for the Memec board. You might want to 
try it out and see whether the problems you observe persist.

Looking at the postings back in April I can only say that I never saw 
any similar problems. Please let me know if you have a specific test 
case where you see problems and I'll be glad to look at it.

The implementation of System ACE CF functionality in U-Boot is written 
for polled operation. In that case Stephen Williams wrote the actual 
driver and we decided not to publish our own driver but reuse his.

- Peter

On Mon, 25 Oct 2004 22:39:30 -0700, Peter Ryser [off-list ref] wrote:

jcm>> btw Peter, I've been moaning about the weird interrupt behaviour of
jcm>> the SysACE on e.g. the Memec board for some time (see archives for
jcm>> various other people's experiences too) - and I've spoken to several
jcm>> folks at Xilinx without getting very far. If there's a fundamental
jcm>> problem then it probably makes sense for us to help get it fixed.

Hmm, I'm not aware of any interrupt problems with System ACE CF.

It issues an extra interrupt after each sector write on our hardware,
in what seems to be a reasonably reproducible but not entirely
predictable fashion. This is after the interrupt we expect to get on
sector completion - it causes the Monta driver to go belly up because
it has no handling to check for interrupt on QUEUE_EMPTY or similar
error conditions.

I have every confidence that it works on the ML300, just not on other
boards, including both the Memec board and our in house prototypes.
Since it's not a major issue right now to have good performance from
the SysACE (just a reliable driver), I've created the patch I posted
previously to use polled IO instead.

There is now a MVL preview kit for the Memec board. You might want to
try it out and see whether the problems you observe persist.

Is this the one which doesn't actually use the SystemACE for a filesystem?

Looking at the postings back in April I can only say that I never saw
any similar problems.

Others have done so. I'll check with the hardware guys and see if I
can't send you a simple hardware case that falls over at some point -
I'm slightly constrained to release hardware designs and so on until
after this thing is ready to ship.

The implementation of System ACE CF functionality in U-Boot is written
for polled operation. In that case Stephen Williams wrote the actual
driver and we decided not to publish our own driver but reuse his.

So it probably doesn't use the Xilinx HAL, that can only be a good thing :-)

Jon.

I have every confidence that it works on the ML300, just not on other
boards, including both the Memec board and our in house prototypes.

My web and mail server runs on a Memec board. I've seen our and customer 
boards up and running for extended periods of time without any problems 
with regard to System ACE CF.

quoted

There is now a MVL preview kit for the Memec board. You might want to
try it out and see whether the problems you observe persist.
   

Is this the one which doesn't actually use the SystemACE for a filesystem?

System ACE CF can be turned on in the kernel configuration. Making a 
root filesystem on the CF or MD is straight forward.

quoted

Looking at the postings back in April I can only say that I never saw
any similar problems.
   

Others have done so. I'll check with the hardware guys and see if I
can't send you a simple hardware case that falls over at some point -
I'm slightly constrained to release hardware designs and so on until
after this thing is ready to ship.

Ok, that's a plan. When you are ready please file a web case and mention 
my name so that the problem resolution gets tracked properly.

- Peter

Peter Ryser wrote:

quoted

btw Peter, I've been moaning about the weird interrupt behaviour of
the SysACE on e.g. the Memec board for some time (see archives for
various other people's experiences too) - and I've spoken to several
folks at Xilinx without getting very far. If there's a fundamental
problem then it probably makes sense for us to help get it fixed.

Hmm, I'm not aware of any interrupt problems with System ACE CF. For 
Linux it works for a long time unchanged as published in the 
linuxppc_2_4_devel and linuxppc-2.4 repositories. I'm operating my own 
web and mail server on a V2P based board using a 1GB MicroDrive through 
System ACE CF as the root and swap filesystems. The system is up and 
running for months now. No special tricks or hacks just a 
straight-forward EDK FPGA design with a MVL kernel.

The SystemACE in the linuxppc-2.4 kernel works fine for me on
our JSE board. We keep a lightly used ext3 partition for root,
and a FAT partition in the beginning for boot and ACE files.
The Xilinx HAL, though ugly as sin, has not given us trouble.

We use a PPC405GPr with the SystemACE connected to a peripheral
bus. No VIIPro here. this is surely different from the ML300,
yet it works.

-- 
Steve Williams                "The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
steve at icarus.com           But I have promises to keep,
http://www.icarus.com         and lines to code before I sleep,
http://www.picturel.com       And lines to code before I sleep."