On Thu, Dec 27, 2001 at 10:17:15AM +0530, Chirag Kantharia wrote: > On Wed, Dec 26, 2001 at 04:55:20PM +0100, Erik Mouw wrote: > | How large is the flash? The smallest flash footprint I got on a > > 1MB :( That's not too large. > | rootfs), but I think I can fit it in 1MB when I make the bootloader > | flash partition a bit smaller and use uClibc instead of glibc. > > I've been using uClibc. How do I make the bootloader flash partition > smaller? Depends on the bootloader and the size of the flash blocks. Small flashblocks is nice to have. > | What exactly is the target architecture? > > It's ARM7TDMI with 4MB SDRAM and 1MB flash. I always have problems reading that kind of CPU types. Let me think, it's ARMv4 architecture with Thumb support but without MMU. Right? > | I have written a bootloader for StrongARM systems (blob, see > | https://sf.net/projects/blob/ ) which does exactly that. Normal use is > | that the bootloader loads the kernel and an optional ramdisk from > | flash, but you can download a kernel and a ramdisk over the serial port > | in case you'd like to upgrade the kernel or the flash is too small. > | This requires exactly 0 modifications to the kernel, and the code is > | quite small (the bootloader flash footprint is 16k). > > How easy is it to add support for new architecture? If it is, then > probably I can try and add support for ARM7TDMI. Most of the bootloader is machine independent, only a couple of low level functions are machine dependent. If you would rewrite the initialisation parts of first stage loader, serial port driver, and the timer driver, it shouldn't be too hard to port it to a new architecture. Depending on your flash, you might also need a new flash driver, but right now Intel and AMD flashes are supported. I know that somebody is porting blob to ARM 720T (ARMv4, Thumb, MMU) and he got it working. I'm currently smoothing the code for easy integration. Erik -- J.A.K. (Erik) Mouw, Information and Communication Theory Group, Faculty of Information Technology and Systems, Delft University of Technology, PO BOX 5031, 2600 GA Delft, The Netherlands Phone: +31-15-2783635 Fax: +31-15-2781843 Email: J.A.K.Mouw@its.tudelft.nl WWW: http://www-ict.its.tudelft.nl/~erik/ -- Kernelnewbies: Help each other learn about the Linux kernel. Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/kernelnewbies/ IRC Channel: irc.openprojects.net / #kernelnewbies Web Page: http://www.kernelnewbies.org/
