Documentation availability [was Re: Call for SPARCengine 1e BSP]

[Scott Newell]

At 01:24 PM 9/8/2005 , Joel Sherrill <joel at OARcorp.com> wrote:
>Ivan Galkin wrote:
>> 
>> 
>> As for the second-hand boards, our hard-earned experience tells us not 
>> to get on that route without documentation and a ready to use BSP. It 
>> took us a couple of  months and triple the cost of the board to get docs 
>> for our sparcengine 1e.
>
>Motorola seems to be quite good about having their documentation 
>available on-line.  You should be able to download mvme167 documentation
>right now easily.
>
>OTOH any board with a Marvell part is IMO underdocumented.  They have a
>policy that requires an NDA before documentation can be received.  And 
>this is for parts that appear on common VMEBus boards including a few
>Motorola ones.

This is good to know.  What other manufacturers are good and not-so-good
about providing free docs?

I'm not sure if I've asked about this here before or not, but I'm looking
for docs on the Artesyn PM/PPC.  I picked up a handful dirt-cheap..
They're pretty nicely loaded (458MHz, 256MB dram, 16MB flash), but just
about useless without some docs.  Anyone?

I guess I'd put Artesyn and Force in the not-so-good category.
 

--
newell