[ECOS] Re: A suitable x86 based board

[Frank Pagliughi]

R. Vamshi Krishna wrote:

> Grant Edwards wrote:
>
>> In gmane.os.ecos.general, you wrote:
>>
>>  
>>
>>> Yeah PC Motherboard is also fine. But what I wanted was that
>>> is it possible to do away with a floppy drive totally ?
>>>   
>>
>>
>> Just don't install one?  About half of my Linux boxes don't
>> have floppy disk drives.
>>
>>  
>>
>>> We have hard-disk/usb pen drive for logging data .. And we
>>> have ideflash.
>>>   
>>
>>
>> OK.
>>
>>  
>>
>>> Is it possible to have the application on the
>>> hard-drive/usb-pen drive /flash such that manual loading can
>>> be done away with.
>>>   
>>
>>
>> I don't understand teh question.  Assuming it _is_ a question.
>>  
>>
> What I meant was that so far with i386 PC as target I had been booting 
> using FLOPPY + Redboot.
>
> Can I do away with the floppy drive and boot the pc/board and load the 
> application using ideflash and/or
> usb pendrive ??
> -- Vamshi
>
>
I've been using eCos and Linux on a number of different PC/104 boards, 
which are small format, somewhat  hardened, and fully PC compatible. 
There are dozens of manufacturers of motherboards, and I have 
successfully tested eCos & Linux on boards from WinSystems and Tri-M, 
and assume it should work on boards from any reputable manufacturer.

When you have eCos in mind, one thing to look for at is the Ethernet 
controller. Many of the embedded boards come with an I82559ER (or 
similar) controller. This works out-of-the-box with eCos. You'd be 
forced to write a device driver for most of the other controllers.

For Linux, a thing to watch is the processor. Many of the lower to 
mid-cost boards ship with the AMD SC520 processor. This works fine, but 
appears as a 486 to Linux. Since many desktop distributions now ship for 
Pentiums, you  will need to recompile the kernel, or look toward an 
embedded distribution. You'd probably want to do one or the other anyway.

Booting is the biggest headache. Most boards come with a standard IDE 
connector, but it's more common to embed a device with a DiskOnChip 
(DOC) or IDE-based Compact Flash. CF chips are MUCH easier to deal with 
because they appear to be IDE drives to the OS. You can load GRUB onto 
either, but it takes some patching/compiling to get it onto a DiskOnChip.

A few years back a patch appeared to get RedBoot to boot from a 
DiskOnChip or IDE drive, but never made it into the eCos mainline. I've 
used the patch sucessfully to boot off either the DOC or an IDE-CF 
drive. The patch is still available at:
    www.elsis.si/ecos/
but it only applies cleanly to the old source tree (around May 2002).

For using a DOC, it's a bit of a Catch-22. You need to install Linux on 
the embedded board, with the kernel recompiled to support MTD devices. 
Only then can you access the partitions on the DOC.

Frank Pagliughi




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