Communication with EmbeddedARM reguarding the ts7200

[John-Mark Gurney]

Shelby Reed wrote this message on Thu, Oct 18, 2007 at 13:47 -0400:
> -I remember talking to somebody who had ported FreeBSD and had successfully
> booted a TS7200. However, I -believe they were having ethernet driver
> troubles. Its been a couple years, but I do remember because it was -posted
> to our engineering department as a hardware problem and not a software
> driver problem. Engineering -spent several hours investigating and was able
> to prove it wasn't the hardware, but we never heard from the -individual or
> his FreeBSD effort after that. 
> -
> -//Jesse Off

He never proved conclusively that it wasn't a hardware issue...  We
were basicly using the same driver, and he apparently was able to send
the packet that I was unable to, but I don't remeber him providing
logs that the packet matched exactly what I was sending... (ethernet
mac and all)...

The ethernet issue is that apparently the MAC hits both an underrun
(on an 80 byte packet while 1500 byte nfs writes clear fine) and a
loss of CRS durning the preamble...

It's likely that there is some special non-ethernet MAC setting that
could be messing things up that NetBSD sets much earlier in boot, and
we aren't setting, but tracking down what that setting is won't be
easy...

> Hm. So at least we still have a line of communication/some interest from
> Technologic. 

He forgot to mention that his research was after a year and a half of
ignoring my requests for support before that...

> I like the price of this board though
> http://www.glomationinc.com/product_9302E.html
> 
> I talked to them and that price is at quantity 1000, I accidentally got
> prices from the EX model (from what I can tell it just has an expansion
> bus) but extrapolating from those prices I'd say one of the E models is
> ~$105, 25 would be ~$95, and 100 would be ~$85. If somebody wanted, I could
> purchase them a board if they were interested in trying to get one working.

I'm willing to help someone, but short of having the vendor(s) be truely
insterested in solving the ethernet issue, I'd be careful...  I did
have a request in to Cirrus a long time ago, but I can't seem to log
in to see the status..

-- 
  John-Mark Gurney				Voice: +1 415 225 5579

     "All that I will do, has been done, All that I have, has not."