Bering-uClibc 5.x - User Guide - Appendices - Hardware-Specific Guides

From bering-uClibc
Revision as of 16:34, 9 April 2012 by Davidmbrooke (Talk | contribs) (→‎Hardware / Driver Details: Added details of Ethernet driver)

Jump to: navigation, search
Hardware-Specific Guides
Bering-uClibc 5.x - User Guide


Introduction

This page provides guidelines for Bering-uClibc 5.x users of specific hardware devices.

Bering-uClibc 5.x developers might also want to consult the equivalent page in the Developer Guide.


ARM CPU Architecture

ARM Versatile Platform Baseboards

Overview

The ARM® Versatile™ system boards are primarily relevant to Bering-uClibc because they are well supported and tested targets for the QEMU ARM emulator which is invaluable when developing Bering-uClibc 5.x implementations which target physical ARM processor hardware.

Several different CPU variants are available:

  • ARM926EJ-S
  • ARM1176JZF-S
    • Same processor as the Raspberry Pi but only supported by very recent versions of QEMU; confirmed as present in QEMU 1.0.1
  • ARM11MPCore
  • Coretex-A8

Hardware / Driver Details

  • The network controller chip is an SMSC LAN91C11x (SMC91C11xFD) and needs kernel Module smc91x.ko
  • The disk controller chip is an LSI Logic / Symbios Logic 53C895a and needs kernel Module sym53c8xx.ko
    • This is a SCSI disk controller. Disk devices appear as e.g. /dev/sda


Raspberry Pi Model B

Overview

The Raspberry Pi is a physically small and very low-cost single board computer. The "Model B" variant includes a 10/100 Ethernet port and two USB 2.0 ports.

Hardware / Driver Details

Refer to the example boot log from an Alpha board here

  • The network controller is integrated with the USB controller as part of an SMSC LAN9512 chip.
    • This is supported by kernel Module smsc95xx.ko ??? Davidmbrooke 16:34, 9 April 2012 (UTC)
  • The disk controller chip is an ???

Boot Disk Layout

The Raspberry Pi must boot from its SD card and some vital files must be present in the right location.

The first disk partition must be formatted as a FAT-32 filesystem which must contain:

  • A file called start.elf which contains the GPU binary driver
  • A file called bootcode.bin which is the second stage bootloader
  • A file called loader.bin which is the third stage bootloader
  • A file called kernel.img which is the Linux kernel
    • This seems to be a standard (uncompressed) Linux kernel Image file with a special 32KB prefix. See here
  • A file called cmdline.txt containing the kernel command line

It seems customary to put the files relating to a particular Linux distribution on a second disk partition. We therefore need a second FAT-32 disk partition for leaf.cfg, all the .lrp Package files etc.

Note that the Raspberry Pi references the first disk partition as /dev/mmcblk0p1 and the second disk partition as /dev/mmcblk0p2.


Up
Retrieved from "http://bering-uclibc.zetam.org/index.php?title=Bering-uClibc_5.x_-_User_Guide_-_Appendices_-_Hardware-Specific_Guides&oldid=1031"