[ECOS] Running eCos from PLCC EEPROM?

[ECOS] Running eCos from PLCC EEPROM?

[Daniel Clark]

Has anyone looked at loading eCos from PLCC EEPROM (from a boot loader
such as GRUB2)?

1MB+ PLCC chips are now pretty cheap, and based on my research it
seems like a useable eCos install can be considerably smaller than
that.

My particular interest is that GRUB2 is now booting directly from PLCC
on the Lemote Yeeloong [1] a MIPS64 compatible netbook. However many
useful features such as support for the rtl8187b network card in the
Yeeloong are in development and may not be stable for some time; if an
option could be to boot to eCos from the same PLCC chip that GRUB2 is
installed to, that would make for a really flexible system for doing
whatever with the system from that point on (eg much more so than
PXE).

[1] GRUB as firmware available for Yeeloong
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/grub-devel/2010-04/msg00050.html

Cheers,
--
Daniel JB Clark | http://pobox.com/~dclark | Activist; Owner
           \|/
   FREEDOM -+-> INCLUDED ~ http://freedomincluded.com
           /|\
Free Software respecting hardware ~ Lemote Yeeloong reseller

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[ECOS] Re: Running eCos from PLCC EEPROM?

[Vladimir 'φ-coder/phcoder' Serbinenko]

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Daniel Clark wrote:
> Has anyone looked at loading eCos from PLCC EEPROM (from a boot loader
> such as GRUB2)?
>   
Basically it's 2 questions:
1) Does eCos run on Yeeloong at all?
2) Does it support initrd-only operation mode?
> 1MB+ PLCC chips are now pretty cheap, and based on my research it
> seems like a useable eCos install can be considerably smaller than
> that.
>   
Only 1MiB of adressing space on Yeeloong is reserved for boot rom. I
don't know how many address lines are actually connected. So we're
limited to either 512KiB or 1MiB. There is also a mention of LIO ROM
with 32MiB of addressing space reserved for it. I haven't looked yet if
it's actually present and how it's used on Yeeloong



-- 
Regards
Vladimir 'φ-coder/phcoder' Serbinenko



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