Date: Thu, 19 Jan 2006 21:52:06 -0700 (MST) From: "M. Warner Losh" <imp@bsdimp.com> To: wittend@wwrinc.com Cc: freebsd-arm@freebsd.org Subject: Re: ARM5 (?) - PXA255 Message-ID: <20060119.215206.85390099.imp@bsdimp.com> In-Reply-To: <43D0607F.3000404@wwrinc.com> References: <43D0607F.3000404@wwrinc.com>
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In message: <43D0607F.3000404@wwrinc.com>
David Witten <wittend@wwrinc.com> writes:
: For what it is worth, I would really like to be able to run FreeBSD on
: the Gumstix boards.
Assuming that you mean:
http://www.gumstix.org/tikiwiki/tiki-index.php?page=gumstix
: In case someone's not familiar with them, they are PXA255 boards (at
: present) with 6 or 16 MB flash, 64Mb SRAM, a MMC Flash card socket, USB,
: I2C, SPI, and UARTS. Very inexpensive add-ons for robotics, WiFi,
: ethernet and other good stuff are available as well. Essentially a 200
: or 400MHz PDA on an 20mm x 80 mm board (like a stick of gum). The least
: expensive board is < $100 US.
64MB is plenty of space to run FreeBSD. The company I work for is
looking at running in 64MB, and we're thinking it will be plenty for
what we're looking at putting on the box (although sshd might be a bit
ambitious for our chip).
4MB flash will be enough for a kernel, but might not be enough for
both a kernel and a ram disk. At least not without a lot of
subsetting work. We're going to do some, but not likely to the level
of busybox. Busybox might also be a good alternative, but since it is
GPL'd, our company prefers not to use it...
You'll need drivers for I2C, SPI and MMC controller. I'm working on a
mmc stack for the board we're using, but the MMC bridge part might
have a different interface and need its own driver.
This is a doable project.
: I would also really like to have an ARM7 port, probably something that
: could run on the Olimex LPC-H2294 board ($99 US) that has 16k + 1Mb SRAM
: and 256k + 4Mb Flash.
:
: Is either of these projects feasible, and is there anyone out there who
: has done work in either of these directions?
ARM7TDMI-S doesnt have a MMU. You are going to have a tough time
porting FreeBSD. Such a small amount of ram/rom also is likely to be
a problem. While there are some ARM7 CPUswhich do have a MMU that
FreeBSD could run on (like the Cirrus Logic EP7312), I don't think the
Phillips LPC2294 is one of them.
Warner
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