pc386 BSP and PowerPC questions.

[robini at icecube-consulting.com (robini at icecube-consulting.com)]

Hi,

I have a question about using the pc386 BSP and RTEMS on a number of PC targets.

Build Environment
-----------------

RedHat Linux 5.2
RTEMS-4.0.0
egcs-1.1.1
binutils-2.9.1.0.15
newlib-1.8.1

patches *-rtems-diff-19981027

I applied the patches from RTEMS-4.0.0 release by hand, as they were for egcs-1.1b, binutils-2.9.1 and
newlib-1.8.0.  Most of them appeared to still be relevant.

Targets
-------
1. Current target is an old 486SX-50 laptop using grub-0.5/1.44Mb floppy to boot.

* I had to manually #ifdef out the floating point setup code in _CPU_Initialize in order to bypass the
hard wired floating point assembler in there (causes exception on my machine).  Was there a better way to
avoid this problem?

* I also noticed that the call to main in bspstartup.c appeared to get linked to a __main not _main in the
same file; I renamed it tmain to make it link, but maybe this was a mistake - does this have something to do
with calling global constructors?

* grub-0.5 appears to support .exe.gz formats, but they don't work (appears to fail somehow then revert to
first target in grubmenu).  Has anyone made this work - I would like to be able to squeeze most/all of the
sptests on a single floppy for easy regression testing.

* Other than these issues it seems to work OK, allthough I still have to run the bulk of the test suite.

2. I want to be able to run this on a Gateway Pentium-133 with PCI and dual PCI-based 10/100 ethernet adapters.
I don't care about VGA-console support in the long run (but is nice to have for now).

* Currently I cannot get the BSP to run on either a P233MMX machine or a PentiumII-333 machine.

3. The next step will be to move to a Motorola Yellowknife 740 with the same ethernet boards.

4. Finally the whole thing will move to a custom board - PowerPC 740 with PCI and dual 
10/100 Ethernet adapters.

Questions
---------

Has anyone made the pc386 BSP run on a Pentium/PCI system of any sort - what do I need to do to make it work?

If there is much work to do would it make sense to introduce a new BSP or should the pc386 BSP be updated.  I
suppose that will depend on how much code changes.

Has anyone got experience of the 740/PCI environment - either eval boards or custom - what BSP is best to
start with, and are there any pitfalls I should watch out for.

Thanks in advance for any help - reply to list or private email as you see fit.

Robin
robini at icecube-consulting.com