Porting to Compact PCI

[Silverton Aron-C1710C]

There has been a lot of talk lately about porting to other boards, so I
thought I'd share some of my plans with the list.  As a disclaimer, I should
point out that anything that I do is contingent upon my day job
responsibilities and this makes it difficult for me to commit to any
schedules.

I have some MCIP805 boards which are MPC7410 based with a Harrier ASIC doing
most of the important stuff.  (Documentation is available from
http://www.motorola.com/mcg or from me by request.)  I'd like to port
FreeBSD to this board and I think that doing so will provide a good starting
point for porting to other Compact PCI boards.  I have little to no
experience with this, but I am motivated to learn.  The way I see it, this
is what needs to be done at a very high level:

1.  Boot Linux using U-Boot on this board.  This will show that U-Boot is
working well enough with this board to move onto FreeBSD specific stuff.
There should be pretty good support for this board from Montavista and
Linux-PPC so this step should be largely U-Boot centric without any Linux
hacking.

2.  Try U-Boot and FreeBSD.  I think that this will require a bunch of
U-Boot specific stuff as well as some board specific drivers that could also
be merged with FreeBSD-PowerPC.  This should also firm up FreeBSD support in
general under U-Boot.

3.  Once U-Boot gets to the point where it is trying to boot a FreeBSD
kernel, plug away at the Harrier ASIC, Flash memory, and any other
peripheral support needed by the board and merge with FreeBSD-PowerPC.  The
MCIP805 programmer's manual contains a good list of components and has links
to additional documentation.

There is one other person in my office that has expressed interest in
working on this.

I don't anticipate doing anything other than collecting documentation until
the end of June.  In July I will work on setting up a Compact PCI chassis
with at least one MCIP805 accessible to the outside world.  I'll also set up
console access from a boot server that will also be accessible from the
Internet.  In all likelihood, the boot server will be accessible to the
Internet and from the boot server you will be able to reach the MCIP805 via
a private network or the console port.

Let me know what everybody thinks.

Aron

Aron J. Silverton
Senior Staff Research Engineer
Motorola Labs, Networks and Infrastructure Research
Motorola, Inc.