Update on Virtex II Pro Linux

[Jon Masters]

Hi,

I have integrated various patches and the Xuartlite driver from John
Williams to get kernel 2.4.20 up and running on the development board.

Although I have now done this I am interested to hear official board
support status from others. I have yet to hear back from Mind.

Jon.

 

[John Williams]

Hi Jon,

Jon Masters wrote:

Hi,

I have integrated various patches and the Xuartlite driver from John
Williams to get kernel 2.4.20 up and running on the development board.

Good work! Glad the driver is useful - let me know if you find any bugs
or improvements.

Although I have now done this I am interested to hear official board
support status from others. I have yet to hear back from Mind.

Along this line - could you (or anybody else) maybe give us a run-down
of the status of the various linux ports for the V2Pro PPC devices? I'm
aware of the MontaVista commercial port, but am unsure about costs and
licensing and access and so on. Someone suggested to me recently that
the MontaVista V2Pro dev. env. was big $$$. Is it possible to work
around this using free tools and so on?

Then there's this "Mind" group you mention, what's that all about?

I guess the reason I ask is that these "fringe ports" seem to languish
outside the mainstream for a long time, making it difficult for people
to pick them up and get started. For example, the NIOS port of uClinux
was done 2 or 3 years ago, but even now is not fully integrated into the
"official" uClinux source tree[1]. Further, the extent to which it is
there seems mostly due to efforts by the uClinux maintainers, rather
than Altera or Microtronix. I suppose you need some passionate users
who are prepared to do the legwork to get this stuff integrated.

Cheers,

John

[1] I'm doing my best to ensure that uclinux on microblaze doesn't
suffer the same fate!

 

[Peter Ryser]

All the work Xilinx is doing with MontaVista on Linux for Virtex-II Pro
(i.e. PowerPC) is published
under GPL to the open source repository accessible at
http://www.penguinppc.org
(see "Kernel Source", linuxppc_2_4_devel)

This means that all the kernel sources for the different hardware cores
(peripherals) running on
Virtex-II Pro are available from the repository and, thus, make it into
the different distributions from
various "vendors". MontaVista Linux is one of them, SuSE and ELDK are
others.

We (Xilinx) recommend MontaVista as its Linux partners for Virtex-II Pro
FPGA based systems for various
reasons, support is one of them. Said that, you are still free to
do-it-yourself using the the exact
same sources.

There seems to exist a lot of confusion about different ports, so let me
summarize:

- official open source repository with the latest and greatest Virtex-II
Pro (PPC) support:
http://www.penguinppc.org
- professional Linux distribution for Virtex-II Pro with corresponding
support recommended by Xilinx:
http://www.mvista.com

I hope, this helps.

- Peter


Antti Lukats wrote:

John Williams <jwilliams@itee.uq.edu.au> wrote in message news:<bhefdn$q8g$1@bunyip.cc.uq.edu.au>...
Hi Jon,

Jon Masters wrote:
Hi,

I have integrated various patches and the Xuartlite driver from John
Williams to get kernel 2.4.20 up and running on the development board.
[]
Along this line - could you (or anybody else) maybe give us a run-down
of the status of the various linux ports for the V2Pro PPC devices? I'm
aware of the MontaVista commercial port, but am unsure about costs and
licensing and access and so on. Someone suggested to me recently that
the MontaVista V2Pro dev. env. was big $$$. Is it possible to work
around this using free tools and so on?
[]
Cheers,

John

Hi Jon and John,

I also wanted to ask for clarification, because there is uLinux MB
and ?? Linux for PPC V2Pro, I only guess that Jon referred a real PPC
linux, not uLinux for MB running in V2Pro.

as for Linux V2Pro - ELDK has been reported to work on V2Pro devices so
a free linux for V2Pro already exists and has been verified on real
V2Pro development boards. This report was from some avnet guy so his
work is not public ASFAIK, but already the info that ELDK works on V2Pro
(or is easy to get working) should help.

I have only used ELDK to write some Hello.c applications and have run
them in Mvista on ML300, so have not attempted kernel compile or boot
image creation.

antti