Call for SPARCengine 1e BSP

[Ivan Galkin]

Inspired by Joel's invitation, here's a call for a BSP port to 
SPARCengine 1e board.


SPARCengine 1e is a SPARC V7 board in VME, circa 1991.
This CPU was used as a prototype for the ERC32 chipset.
The existing RTEMS ERC32 BSP does not work on SPARCengine 1e (see below).

Motivation for BSP port:
An ERC32 evaluation board can be found at $15-18K from Atmel or Tharsys, 
whereas a used Force CPU-1CE or CPU-2CE boards are a mere $100 on ebay. 
The ERC32 VME boards continue to be a viable choice of 
radiation-hardened embedded systems for space applications.

Known problems with Rtems ERC32 on SPARCEngine 1e:
ERC32 BSP is in ELF format, whereas SPARCengine bootloader supports 
a.out-sunos-big only.
Very little expert help can be found, the board is too old.
Original SUN libraries for this board are hard to find.

Potential problems:
MMU got redesigned in ERC32.
VME support looks board-specific.

Hope to hear from someone interested.
Ivan