I want to buy an ARM dev. board

Morton Lin mtlin1 at ms36.hinet.net
Tue May 25 09:50:29 PDT 2004


> On Tue, May 25, 2004 at 01:51:44PM +0100, Philip Blundell wrote:
> > On Tue, 2004-05-25 at 04:55, Morton Lin wrote:
> > > I found an ARM (ARM940T core) evaluation board : ATB-2510.
> > > ( http://www.vitals.co.kr/Eng/product/t-board/tb_2510.htm )
> > > It had many features such as MiniPCI, PCMCIA, USB and so forth.
> > > I thought it will be a good development environment for FreeBSD/ARM.
> >
> > If I recall correctly, ARM940T doesn't have an MMU, only an MPU.  That
> > core would not be a good choice for running FreeBSD.
>
> Oh yeah it's a problem :-)
>
> Olivier
>

Sure, ARM940T only had Memory Protection Unit, also {I | D}-cache. But I
thought
it can have some similar capabilities like an MCU which had MMU. (Of course,
for
FreeBSD/ARM, it's a lot of work / re-write to achieve that)

IMHO, in modern embedded market, there were many MMUless MCUs used in
valuable field. Even those MCUs which had MMU, the EmbeddedOS/RTOS went
along with, didn't use their MMU functions. For example, uCLinux. There're
cost and
budget issues behind this situation. In low end application I think the
32bits MCU like
the ARM7/9 series will be the main stream. In high end field, I think the
Intel XScale
(w/ MMU) will be the star.

So, are we going to have two directions for the FreeBSD/ARM ? Is it possible
? Can
anyone tell us how much effort do we need to take and how difficult if we
want to port
FreeBSD/ARM to a MMUless core/platform ? Or we just move toward the Intel
XScale
architecture ?

Just my NTD $0.2 and sorry for the poor English.


Best regards,
Morton Lin. (It's midnight here, Taiwan, do we need to send soldier to Iraq
!?  :-P )



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