[ECOS] Recommodation for start of new chip-family support

[Manuel Borchers <manuel at matronix dot de>]

Hi all,

I'm in the process of starting a research-project at the Technical
University in Berlin together with a SoC firm located in Berlin
(Hilscher SoC Technology [hilscher.com] where I've already been working
and designing some modules in that processor family).

The first part of the research project is porting eCos to this
processor-family. So I'll try to give a quick overview of the problem
I'm currently facing.

The processor-family has 4 (main) members as of today. They share
some/many periphherals but are also somewhat different in some aspects.
All relevant members incorporate ARM9 system CPUs.

The processors:
netX500 / netX100  use an ARM926 with cache and MMU
netX50             uses an ARM966 (without any cache and MMU)
netX10             uses an ARM966 (with tightly coupled memory)

Hilscher (located in Hattersheim) is designen products / software in the
automation area. They have a lot of different boards for each of the
processors in the portfolio which differ in what is placed (amount of
SDRAM, type of flash, used UART channels, etc).

I'd like to support as much as possible or better said, I'd like to
establish a starting point to add many boards without doing too much
coding and sharing the same codebase.

I started with the HAL port for one of the boards. I chose to do a
board-level port to use the ARM9 variant infrastructure. But I'm getting
the feeling, that this isn't the right way to go, because the UART
(code) for example is the same on all the boards for all the processors.

So, I'd like to have some inputs from people that do know the eCos
codebase better than I or may already have been at a similar point as I
am now.

Any pointers and hints are very welcome! I guess I will be sticking
around and asking a LOT of questions in the future ;)


Cheers,
Manuel

-- 
Before posting, please read the FAQ: http://ecos.sourceware.org/fom/ecos
and search the list archive: http://ecos.sourceware.org/ml/ecos-discuss