Porting to Compact PCI

[Aron J. Silverton]

Comments inline.

owner-freebsd-ppc at freebsd.org wrote:
> Hi Aron,
> 
>> 1.  Boot Linux using U-Boot on this board.
> 
>  I suspect this will be an easy step.
> 

I hope so, but I've been reading the U-boot list and I have my doubts.

>> 2.  Try U-Boot and FreeBSD.  

<snip>

> 
>  The main issue with U-Boot is that it doesn't export a low-level
> driver interface, which the loader really wants to see. The
> alternative is to implement polled-mode drivers in loader, which is
> really replicating what U-Boot already does, so I think the best path
> is to extend U-Boot's "syscall" interface to allow access to it's
> existing driver code.     
> 

I've heard that U-Boot is already supposed to have some support, albeit
rudimentary, support for FreeBSD.  Are you familiar with the extent of this?

<snip>

>  The PPC port is currently way too tied to OpenFirmware, but it's
> always been known that this has to be split out. 
> 
>  Another issue is JFFS2 support in FreeBSD, which is what U-Boot uses
> for it's flash filesystem. This would probably involve ext2fs-like
> copyright issues.  
> 

What is the copyright issue?  I'm not familiar with this.

>> Let me know what everybody thinks.
> 
>  It's an excellent plan, and will help to realise the ultimate goal
> of the PPC port which was embedded systems. It is very handy to have
> a fast G4 Mac for native builds though :-)  
> 

I hope that we can help.  Others should feel free to join us.  We'll be
cross compiling on our end as we have no Macs.

> later,
> 
> Peter.
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