PowerPC embedded board?

[Daan Vreeken]

Hi Rafal,

On Monday 19 January 2009 14:06:02 Rafal Jaworowski wrote:
> Daan Vreeken wrote:
> > For a new product I am looking for an embedded powerpc board. For the
> > project we need the following :
> > o A board that can (in the near future) boot FreeBSD.
> > o Support for hardware floating point arithmetic.
> > o The board should have some form of bus / IO to connect custom-made
> >    peripheral(s) to.
>
> Other than what you alrady pointed out, what is the overall profile of this
> deployment i.e. what level of horse power do you need, networking
> throughput etc.?

The processor will be used for coordinate transformations in a real-time 
position control system. We only need a small amount of memory. A network 
interface would be very nice to have, but it's only used for live debugging 
and to update software/firmware, so I could live without if needed.
What I really need, is a processor that can do a fair amount sine / cosine's 
per second.
I've done some tests with Linux on an MPC5200 board running at 400MHz.
( http://www.freescale.com/webapp/sps/site/prod_summary.jsp?code=MPC5200 )
The processor has more than enough processing power to run our code, but I'm 
looking for a (preferably cheap) alternative that can run FreeBSD (with some 
help).

> > Searching the internet I've already stumbled upon the Efika [1] and
> > SAM440 [2] boards, which both look promising, but as far as my
> > Google-skills go, it looks like both boards need more work to get FreeBSD
> > fully functional on them.
> > I'm thinking of buying a couple of boards and helping an interested
> > developer by either setting up a compile & test environment that is
> > accessible over ssh, or donating an entire board (or both :)
>
> Both MPC5200 (Efika) and PPC440 (SAM440 and others) require quite a bit of
> work to turn into a reliable system to be used in a commercial product.
> They are both at a very similar stage: the kernel initially boots,
> interrupt controller driver ready, console (UART), work is in progress
> towards getting user-space pieces together, getting single user shell etc.
> In both cases virtually all remaining on-chip peripherals need respective
> drivers newly developed.

Given enough hardware documentation, I have no problem with writing a couple 
of drivers. The thing I'm not familiar with, is the lower level development 
of getting a new platform to run FreeBSD. (I have never touched FreeBSD's VM 
subsystem for example.)
What would be needed to get either of these boards to a single user shell?

> > So I've got some questions :
> > o Are there more interresting boards I could/should consider? (Or even
> > boards that can already run FreeBSD?)
> > o What board is most likely to grow FreeBSD support in the near future?
> > o What parts are currently missing to get these boards up and running?
>
> Ready to use and stable is the port for higher-end PowerPC systems:
> PowerQUICC MPC85xx series based on the E500 (BookE) core. You'll find all
> integrated peripherals supported, although the default environment with
> regards to the floating point support is running with emulation and not
> native hard-floats (due to various implemetations of the FPU, or the lack
> of).

What would be needed to get hardware floating point to be supported? Is it 
something that could be imported from NetBSD?


Thanks,
-- 
Daan Vreeken
VEHosting
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