aw> On Wed, 28 Jan 1998, J.D. Bakker wrote:
>> At 5:17 PM +0000 26-01-1998, Jason McMullan wrote:
>> >Adam Wiggins (madman@zip.com.au) wrote:
>> >> Myself and a few other comp sci/eng studnets at the Uni of NSW,
>> >> australia want to do a little pocket linux box project. To get the ball
>> >> rolling we have to decide on a suitable chipset. I'm writting to ask what
>> >> the best arcitecture for this project would be. We need a low cost, low
>> >> power usage chip with a bit of grunt and with a solid nitch in linux
>> >> support. Mips comes to mind though i'm not sure of the power usage of
>> >> these. We'd rather not deal with intel though we may have to.
>> >> As well as the cpu we need a support chipset for standard i/o
>> >> using the laptop based interfaces like pcmcia or other popular standards.
>> >> The focus is nice cheap low power consumption hardware while maintainning
>> >> good software support from linux.
>> >> Please relay your comments.
>> >
>> > ARM. Low power consumption varieties available, reasonably
>> >good support from the manufacturer(s), As of 2.1.79 mainlined
>> >kernel support, etc. And cheap, too.
>>
>> Don't rule out the PowerPC chips, though. IBM has some nice inexpensive
>> embedded versions, like the PPC403 series, with cache, DRAM interface,
>> multiple DMA and more goodies. Do a search on the IBM website; there's
>> pretty complete documentation on all chips.
Well the MPC860 port is doing well. The only problem left is the
missing accessed bit in the MMU, making page ageing rather
difficult. Finaly we designed and implemented an interface to a
bootloader (you don't have LILO or the BIOS) and i'm about to make a
more cleaner implementation which could be merged with the original
PPC port.
Currently the kernel executes on an ADS1 development port and mounts
it's root file system via NFS and gets configured by BOOTP.
initrd works also (with ext2 fs because of minix troubles) a shell is
executing (ash) and you may can mount the /proc filesystem,
configure the networkinterfaces, ....
--
Michael Lausch/g.a.m.s. edv dienstleistungen gmbh
See my web page <http://www.gams.net/~mla> or query PGP key server for PGP key.
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away".
-- Philip K. Dick