You might look at the AMD SC400 which is has most of the standard PC
peripherals integrated onto one chip around a 486 core. They have an
evaluation board that has three 16550's (one internal to the SC400 and two
external). Several people on this list have been sucessfull in booting
Linux straight from flash and running it on this board, the mail thing you
have to do is write a bootloader which isn't that difficult, but will take
some time. On my system, I boot from FLASH, and have all three serial ports
running, plus two ISA NE2000 Ethernet cards with no display or keyboard.
There's been a lot of interest on this group for some published source for a
bootloader, but I think most people seem to be to busy to deal with it at
the moment. If you do go with the SC400, look back through the mail on this
group and you'll see several minor bugs that's you'll have to workaround.
> -----Original Message-----
> From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On Behalf Of Bill Feero
> Sent: Monday, May 17, 1999 10:58 AM
> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Subject: Creating an embedded terminal server
>
>
> I want to create a 4-port terminal server that will support 4
> telnet sessions.
> The target is nit firm yet but so far is a 386 or 486 with 16 (or
> 32) Megs of
> RAM, 2 (or 4) Megs of flash, a boot rom, 4 serial ports (16550's)
> and a 3Cxxx
> network connection; it will not have a display, keyboard or
> mouse. This is a
> board we are building, so I get the change what I must to make it
> work. I have
> data overload with looking Red Hat, Linux-Router, ELKS, etc. (I
> am two weeks
> into this project with no prior Linux or Unix experience).
>
> What should I be looking into to create a ROMable Linux kernel
> and file system?
>
> What do I have to do to create the kernel and file system so I
> can save it in
> the flash, and then get it load? The boot rom will contain
> whatever code I need
> it have (such as switching to protected mode and copying from the
> flash to the
> ram).
>
> In the future, I would like to add HTML support for system
> configuration and
> SNMP for management. Any help for a newbie would be appreciated.
>
> I have just downloaded the Linux-Router files and will look at
> them over the
> next few days.
>
> If you have done something similar, and can give me some advice
> or pointers I
> would appreciate it.
>
>
> Thanks,
> Bill
>
