How to port ppc-linux to new custom boards? (virtexII)

[Patrick Huesmann]

Hi,

I'm trying to port Linux to a custom board built around a virtexII-fpga
which features a PPC-405 cpu.

I've downloaded the Montavista 2_4_devel tree, which already has some
platform and driver support for the ml300 eval board, and made a few changes
to the xilinx specific header files to reflect our FPGA design.
Then I changed the tophys macro in include/asm/ppc_asm.h to have a sensible
initial mmu.
#define MY_PHYS_RAM 0x90000000
#define tophys(rd,rs) addis	rd,rs,(MY_PHYS_RAM-KERNELBASE)@h;
#define tovirt(rd,rs) addis	rd,rs,(KERNELBASE-MY_PHYS_RAM)@h;

My kernel gets past the initial mmu setup, enters the C code and freezes in
the middle of early_init in arch/ppc/kernel/setup.c when (after?) memset_io
is called to zero the BSS region.

I've some experience with porting ARM-Linux but, unfortunately, the PPC port
seems to be significantly different (there are no mach-types and ATAG lists,
for example).

1) Is there any comprehensive documentation / tutorial on how to port the
ppc-linux to new machines? Where does my board specific fixup stuff go (for
example, memory and IRQ declarations and such).

2) What requirements and responsibilities are imposed on the bootloader? I
suspect that I can't use u-boot or something like that, because we have our
own "company-specific" bootloader so that all our products use the same
protocol for firmware updates.

3) Is there a way to get a self-decompressing kernel image? ARM linux
provides a zImage which the cpu just has to jump into (with some registers
initialized) and then decompresses vmlinux by itself. Now I have to use a
vmlinux file and write it to flash directly, because zImage on powerpc lacks
decompressor code (at least with my configuration). But the 1.3meg vmlinux
file makes for pretty long turnaround times (I can only upload at 115k at
the moment).

Any help is greatly appreciated ;)

Regards,
Patrick






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