BSP for Motorola MVME5500

[Feng, Shuchen]

Hi  Bill,

I am near the completion for writting the BSP for the MVME5500.
It successfully auto booted large (e.g. C++ based EPICS) VME based
applications via the 10/100M ethernet.  My TODO list before the
release of the souce codes are :

1.  1GHZ ethernet.
2.  rtems-4.6.0  (right now it works on rtems-4.6.0pre3)
3.  build the Cexp (written by Till Straumann) to give the BSP
    a VxWorks-like environment (e.g. dynamic loading)
4.  VME device write probe (the read probe is done) to
    detect the absent VME devices.


Joel Sherrill is right. Spring has sprung and the BSPs are
flowering.

Cheers,
Kate

-----Original Message-----
From: Hudson William J CNIN
To: Feng, Shuchen
Sent: 4/14/2004 6:22 PM
Subject: BSP for Motorola MVME5500

Kate,

I saw on the RTEMS message archives where you were looking into a board
support package (BSP) for the Motorla MVME5500 board.  The last message
posted was November 19, 2003.  Do you know if one has been developed
yet?  If it has, I can't seem to find it on the RTEMS website.  Has
anyone had any luck
getting the generic PowerPC BSP to work on the MVME5500 with limited
capability?

I have downloaded the linux BSP from Motorola, but it looks like you
need to have a CDROM and hard disk attached to the board to be able to
use it.  I have neither and want to use the board more as an embedded
device that will boot from flash, boot over ethernet, or boot over VME.
The Linux BSP may
still be a good place to start, but looks like it will take considerable
downsizing and manipulation to get rid of the hard disk requirement.

I'm now looking at RTEMS because it seems like it will do what I want
and won't take up as much room as linux.  Trouble is I don't see
anything that says the board is supported under RTEMS yet.

I've also ran up against the same problem you talked about with the
Marvell GT chip.  I requested a datasheet in November and still haven't
gotten it yet.  This makes it hard to develop anything custom on this
board other than what Motload already does for you.

Do you know what other developers are doing with the MVME5500 board?  I
noticed that VxWorks and TimeSys support the MVME5500 but I was hoping
to find an open source solution that didn't require the licensing
headaches.

What about just using a Linux x86 machine to cross compile a PowerPC
object file?  If I did this could Motload run the object file without
needing RTEMS?  If this works, it would be a starting point at least.
Do you know what compiler options need to be set for this to work?  I've
seen where
Motload will run an ELF file.  I've also seen writeups where "target =
powerpc-eabi" is mentioned.  Which works best for the MVME5500?

Sorry to bother you with all the questions but it looks like you have
already researched a lot of this.
Any help would be appreciated and would save me some time.

thanks,
Bill Hudson