On Fri 16 Feb, William Staniewicz wrote:
> I am just curious what people are now doing or plan
> to do with the 80200 XScale now that Linux has been
> made to run on it.
>
> Are there any projects in the making and if there are what
> are some good links to them? Could the same ideas and
> concepts of the LART be applied to this?
We have a partner who is designing an Xscale+FPGA board, and they are keen to
make this available as a LART-style design for developers. The neat part is
that having just an FPGA means you can apply open source principles to the
hardware part as well as the software. People can contribute vhdl for bits of
virtual hardware to put on it. Thus you can have whatever you like on your
version of the device. The designers expect to be able to release a fair
amount of what they have alteady done (UARTS, Interrupt controller,
framebuffer, IO controller, touchscreen, USB, although they have some bit
they aren't allowed to let out eg firewire).
This seems like a great idea to me, and ought to be a cost-effective way for
developers to get the hardware they need and to mess about with it before
going to a final production version, or even an ASIC if unit cost is
sensitive. And we'd be happy to make them available to developers as we've
done with LARTs. Mind you, if everyone says 'nope, those LARTs are too
expensive' then maybe this isn't a viable thing to do on a small scale and we
(as developers) will just have to take whatever hardware people are making
for other reasons (Balloon, iPAQ etc)
So, if you'd like this sort of open hardware thing to continue then put your
money where your opinions are and start with a LART, then there'll be more
toys to follow.
Wookey
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work: http://www.aleph1.co.uk/ play: http://www.chaos.org.uk/~wookey/
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