On Sunday 11 March 2007 13:56, Ralf Baechle wrote: > On Sun, Mar 11, 2007 at 11:59:11AM +0530, PhilipS wrote: > > Hello All, > > I am looking for MIPS Development boards for my hobby projects like Linux > > Porting and Development, I am here by looking for an Expert suggestion to > > buy a MIPS custom boards, so far on Google I could come across > > vendor selling MIPS Evaluation target boards which is Obviously expensive > > which ,I cannot afford to buy. I hope I am asking this question at the > > right place, else please suggest me where I can post my request if one > > knows about it. > > You're touch a big problem here, so I'm going to use this opportunity to > post a rant ... > > Most of the eval boards are have very high price tags due to low volume and > esotheric components such as very large and fast FPGAs or pricey matched > impedance connectors for logic analyzers. Another factor is that the > vendors making these boards usually target their commercial customers and > factor in a fairly generous markup for the post-sale support into the sales > price of the board. > > From a Free Software perspective this is a bloody disaster. Even if for a > moment I put on my dot com hat again, it's one. Over the past years the > commercial contributions have primarily focused on hardware support. In > many cases I received large code drops of lousy to medicore quality and > no maintenance at all after the initial code drop. I won't go into the > reasons here nor do I think I need to name companies here - but it's a big > problem. > > As usual exceptions proof the rule and also as usual there are alot of > grey shades between white and black. Some companies seem to have > tremendous difficulty to be good open source citizens - but they throw some > free hardware into the crowd. Not enough to satisfy the demand and usually > only a few key people are really able to take advantage of that. > > Otoh many if not most important and highest quality contributions over the > years have come from hobby hackers, so in the end the lack availability of > modern hardware is making everybody suffer. Meanwhile the importance of > Linux as OS for MIPS is continuing to rise ... > > I hear similar complaints from other, mostly embedded architectures such as > ARM. But that's not an excuse - this problem wants some remedy. > > But let's also look at the options you have right now: > > o Eval boards end on ebay relativly rarely, but you can try anyway. > Another option is something like a surplus MIPS workstation. > o A bunch of wireless routers and other devices such as some the Linksys > WRT54 models have been recycled for hacking use with good success. > o Routerboard which is not yet supported out of tree (working in cleaing > the patches) would be another reasonably priced option. Generally you Which of their boards are you working on patches for? The RB532 seems to be working OK now with a 2.6 kernel on OpenWrt, but I tried to migrate some patches for the 1xx series (the ADM5120 based cards) and I could not get them boot beyond the dnode and inode table initialisations. If you have anything better that would work with current kernels I would be very interested to have a look. David > may want to look at the list of platforms supported by > http://openwrt.org/ - many of their platforms have friendly price tags. > Of course alot of those are purpose built hw so may be a bit quirky to > use. > o Apparently AMD Alchemy boards used to be fairly cheap, on the order of > $100. I have not idea this is true or still true for the new owner of > Alchemy Raza Microelectronics. > o For the meager investment of a few megabytes of disk space Qemu is a > really nice and well performing system which also is rapidly improving. > > Ralf
