linux 2.4 v 2.6 on xilinx

I have a xilinx soc that is running 2.4 of the PPC linux fine. To run 2.6 is it just a matter of copying the arch directory over to the 2.6 tree and compiling? (Assuming I keep the configuration options the same.)

Thanks, Clark

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Anonymous
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Anonymous schrieb:

My bet is NO. you are of course welcome to try!

but Xilinx has announced that

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is supposed to release

2.6.x base linux distributions soon(ppc end of August, microblaze and of 2006) , so I hope whatever there may be issues with 2.6.x are solved by then. on montavista the ppc linux is given as version 2.4.18, but there are also some comments about using the official ppc-linux tree (2.6.x) for V4 without problems.

Antti

Reply to
Antti

Hi,

Antti> My bet is NO. you are of course welcome to try!

It definately won't work.

Antti> but Xilinx has announced that

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is supposed to release Antti> 2.6.x base linux distributions soon(ppc end of August, microblaze and Antti> of 2006) , so I hope whatever there may be issues with 2.6.x are solved Antti> by then. on montavista the ppc linux is given as version 2.4.18, but Antti> there are also some comments about using the official ppc-linux tree Antti> (2.6.x) for V4 without problems.

Yes, V2P/V4 is nicely supported in the kernel (since Dec 2004). What is not included is device drivers for all the Xilix IP cores.

--
Bye, Peter Korsgaard
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Peter Korsgaard

Peter Korsgaard schrieb:

Peter,

could you please please elaborate what does this 'nicely supported' mean?

if there are no drivers then all the stuff is only of 'academic interest' - as it has no real world value. Or is there a way to actually use the kernel that has been available since Dec 2004 as you say in real world applications, in real V2Pro/V4 doing some real tasks?

I am struggling with V4 ppc linux (kernel 2.4.x) where I see SIGSEGV when doing dlclose() - could it be that retrieving the sources from kernel.org ? that problem goes away? hm that problem is related to ppc implementation of the libc actually, but as libc is pretty much a must have part of linux then when its all 'nicely supported' then there should be no problems with libc?

Antti

Reply to
Antti

Hi

Have you see this page:

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It helped me getting an 2.6.17.1. kernel running on an xilinx xup board. The network is doing dhcp but is somehow broken. I managed to install debian sarge on this board.

ST

Reply to
S.T.

If you're starting from scratch I'd strongly recommend going with a 2.6 kernel. 2.6 is very easy to get a serial port driver working, which is crucial for debug output while bringing up the kernel. Google will bring up some step by step instructions for doing this.

The xilinx free uart-lite core is easy to get working. I brought up

2.6 on a virtex-2 pro with the embedded PPC cores. u-boot boots from a small bootloader embedded in one of the BRAMS, which chains to a NAND flash, which contained u-boot. Finally u-boot read out linux-2.6 from a different area of the NAND flash.

I submitted a patch to the u-boot group bringing up u-boot on the Memec Design FF1152 board some months ago, I doubt if it has been included in the main source tree of u-boot though. That included support for the uart lite. Once you've got u-boot linux gets easy to bring up. If you look at the u-boot archive you can find my post of the patch.

Why 2.6? It's the future, man. If you pick 2.4 someday you'll have to upgrade anyway. Pick the latest first.

To answer your specific question, code from 2.4 does not just drop in to 2.6. There are lots of little differences. You can recognize the same basic code flow from a driver for 2.4 vs 2.6, but a lot of the low level details are tweaked. It's fairly easy to adapt 2.4 code to 2.6 code though.

Xilinx has ethernet cores. I haven't found an out of the box linux driver, 2.4 or 2.6, for any of Xilinx's cores. u-boot supports the xilinx ethernet cores. Montevista has drivers for xilinx cores, but presumably you'd need to pay for their linux version.

BTW I wasn't able to compile 2.6 under the windows EDK 8.1 cygwin environment. The build process complains that the versions of binutils and the compiler don't match, or something, and that either one or the other has to be upgraded or downgraded. This was very frustrating, I spent a lot of time trying to get a working setup, without success.

In the end I just built linux-2.6 from a linux host and stopped trying to build software under windows.

Finally one more note. I found it pointless to use Xilinx's source code in any form, or their EDK, for the software side of things. I was always struggling with their includes + IDE + point and click interface. I invested the time in getting a linux build environment up where I could build the software side under linux, and export the ELF executables over to the windows box which would then integrate into the FPGA bitfile. Once I did that development went *fast*. Xilinx software is a nest of fishhooks -- try to get one thing, and it includes more, and that includes more...pretty soon your 100 byte bootloader doesn't fit into the 16K bytes you've allocated out of BRAMs for the PPC init code at FFFFC000...

-Dave

--
David Ashley                http://www.xdr.com/dash
Embedded linux, device drivers, system architecture
Reply to
David Ashley

David Ashley schrieb:

David,

would you please please consider zipping all the stuff that is needed to get ppc linux on the memec board running and uploading it? I do have the same board so I could hopefully get a faster start. Sure if there is anything I can offer in return please ask.

Antti

Reply to
Antti

Antti,

Here's a link from the sourceforge u-boot mailing list archive

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In the little bit of time I spent I couldn't actually download the patch though...I've got to run right now but I'll dig up the code later. See if you can figure out how to get at the patch.

There is also a very small chance they've already integrated it into u-boot. Very small...

Anyway that gets you u-boot. I never released the linux patch since we opted to do our application inside u-boot and linux wasn't needed. I'll see what I can find...

-Dave

--
David Ashley                http://www.xdr.com/dash
Embedded linux, device drivers, system architecture
Reply to
David Ashley

Antti,

Here's the patch. The file should be renamed patch.gz or something like that, then you gunzip it, and that's the patch.

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Boy this is way off topic for this newsgroup...

-Dave

--
David Ashley                http://www.xdr.com/dash
Embedded linux, device drivers, system architecture
Reply to
David Ashley

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