(no subject)

From: Joel Stanley (jstanley@up.edu)
Date: Wed Nov 29 2000 - 23:48:18 EST


Hi folks,

Feel like dispelling some more newbie ignorance? Read on! ;)

For our senior design project we're using the Motorola DragonBall
processor to build a small stand-alone embedded linux system (i.e. we're
not just buying an evaluation board, we're having our own fabricated,
etc).

We're working from the M68EZ328ADS board schematics, and we don't feel
that our design needs to have support for the emulation mode (provided by
the DragonBall processor).  From looking at it, it appears that we can
safely extract and discard the capabilities of that board to support the
emulation mode. Is it a bad thing to ignore the emulation mode? If so,
could you give us an example of why we'd want to use it?

If we ignore the emulation support, we'll be left with 1 meg of flash
and 4 megs of DRAM. In the flash, we'll store the bootloader and the
uclinux code (& rom fs,  etc).  It appears to be relatively easy to put
the DragonBall in debug mode.  After doing so, we think we can use the
UART to directly place the code into DRAM and (using already-written
code) write the bootloader & kernel to flash. Thus, as far as we can
tell, we will have NO need of a ROM burner of any kind for the
project.  In fact, we will need no dedicated ROM other than our 1 meg of
flash.  Have we interpreted this correctly? 

If we can ignore emulation mode & need no other ROM besides flash,
then it appears that all we need to do is write a bootloader to initialize
chip selects / configure memory map, setup basic interrupt service
routines, and then point to the starting memory location of the
kernel. Are we missing anything vital? :)

--
Joel R. Stanley  *  jstanley@up.edu  *  #include <std_disclaimer.h>
"You are in a maze of twisty passages, all alike."

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