Oleg,
I have SC410 HW prototyped along the lines you are discussing. I am now
looking to see what I need in terms of a loader (I don't want a PC stype BIOS.)
Can you tell me what your solution was? I was thinking a MILO style loader
would be best, but it may be overkill.
I have been watching this mailing list for some time and this seems to be a
recurring barrier, anyone have some definitive ROMable loaders available for
the AMD Elan family that allow boot from flash?
Chris Wyszkowski
On Wednesday, May 12, 1999 12:39 PM, Oleg Perelet [SMTP:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
wrote:
> You can look at AMD Elan CPU's very need and flexible architecture,
> with 4MB Flash/ROM, 8MB of DRAM and simple network chip you can
> build pretty inexpensive system (<$400 in low quantities).
> And there is no problem running linux in there. (I run 2.2.3).
>
>
> Oleg.
>
>
> At 12:23 PM 5/12/99 +1000, you wrote:
> >Hi Folks,
> >
> >I'm currently investigating options for a minimal-cost x386 based diskless
> >embedded controller running a stripped-down Linux kernel for a reasonably
> >simple embedded TCP/IP application. I'm very interested in opinions or
> >experience anyone could offer.
> >
> >My choice of x386 is to allow easy hardware & software prototyping on
> >desktop
> >PC's and off-the-shelf embedded biscuit-PC-like boards. Ultimately, I'd like
> >to
> >build a tiny BIOS-less system with traditional (i.e. non-IDE) flash/eprom
> >memory and minimal RAM. Since the Linux kernel has a larger footprint than
> >traditional embedded OS's, it would be nice to run it directly from ROM with
> >a ROM-based root filesystem. I'd prefer not to simply copy the kernel into
> >RAM
> >or use an "initrd" RAM-disk for root filesystem stuff which is all
> >essentially
> >read-only. Demonstrating that Linux can run embedded with very little RAM is
> >one of the goals here, even at the expense of slightly more ROM.
> >
> >My guess is that much of the specifics here can be handled by a ROM-based
> >bootloader which sets up the x386 MMU to effectively "load" the kernel, and
> >from then on everything is much like running in a desktop box, albeit a
> >severely stripped one. Does anyone know of an existing bootloader that can
> >perform this sort of magic, or any other pointers to existing solutions?
> >
> >Thank you,
> >Graham
> >
