RTEMS on a Kontron AM4002

[Steven Grunza]

Hello,
  I'm looking into a project that requires a small executive to run on
an AMC module.  I have a Kontron AM4002 which has a Pentium M processor,
2 GB of Flash and 2GB of RAM.  The Flash is implemented as a bootable
2GB Solid State Disk.  This module has a serial port and the BIOS
redirects the BIOS to the serial port.  If I boot into MS-DOS I can use
a serial port to enter and view the results of commands.  FreeDOS
doesn't work, the serial console output gets out of sync and eventually
stops updating.

  My goal is to configure the SSD with GRUB and a FAT filesystem.  My
application would include provisions for loading new versions of the
application over one of the Ethernet connections.  I could probably use
a USB-based floppy to get the original GRUB and application images onto
the machine.

  My first step in this project is to get RTEMS to boot and run on a
Dell Latitude D400.  This hardware is somewhat similar to my target
hardware and has the benefit of having a real VGA display, keyboard,
etc.  It's also closer to hardware available to the RTEMS community in
general.

  I've followed all of the various "Getting GRUB to boot on a PC"
tutorials and created a USB flash drive that can boot into Grub and
allow me to choose an RTEMS image to boot.  It's not stable.  The
hello_world example will boot occasionally, maybe 1 in 20 tries.  Other
boot attempts end up with a blank screen.  I've tried with using the BSP
for pc386 and pc686.  The hello_world executables I build from the
examples directory (following the "Getting Started" documentation) never
work.  The hello_world executables installed in the
/opt/rtems4.11/i386-rtems4.11/pc[36]86/lib/rtems-4.11/tests directory
are the ones that sometimes work.

  I'm using a USB boot so that I don't have to wipe out the NTFS
formatted C: drive in the WinXP based laptop.  While I could try to get
the eXtender mentioned on the Pc386 Wiki page (the link to it is broken)
using MS-DOS isn't my final environment so I don't want to put a lot of
effort into something I won't be using long-term.

  If anyone has suggestions on how to proceed with getting Hello_World
to run on a Dell Latitude D400 using Grub as the bootloader I would
really appreciate hearing them.


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"Unix is user friendly, it's just  Steven Grunza
particular about with whom it      voice: (856) 787 - 2759
makes friends."                    fax:   (856) 866 - 2033
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