Re: Xilinx UART and TEMAC driver

[Andrew Lunn <andrew@lunn.ch>]

On Tue, Oct 14, 2008 at 11:29:55AM +0200, Rainer Adlich wrote:
> Hi eCos maintainers,
> 
> although I've been working with eCos for more than a year I am new to
> this mailing-list. I like eCos very much and had very good experience
> with it - thanks to all the people maintaining and contributing to it.
> 
> During the work on our "Spyder IV" board (based on Xilinx Virtex-4 with
> PowerPC), drivers for Xilinx' opb_uartlite UART- and plb_temac
> Ethernet-IP cores (the latter with DMA support) arose.
> 
> If these drivers could be of use for someone, I would like to contribute
> them. As this would be my first contribution, I would be glad to obtain
> some help. Please let me know how to proceed.

We are always interested in contributions.

I can help with the Software aspects. However the hardware parts is
out of my knowledge. So i guess i need to ask some dumb questions
first...

What are the licenses for these cores? Is there anything which would
restrict the distribution of the software? Is all the documentation
publicly available or did you need to sign an NDA for them?

From what i understand of cores, they are normally parameters you can
tune for the hardware, to add or remove features etc. How generic are
your drivers? Are there similar tunable settings so that the driver
can be made to match the core? Or is the driver set for just one
specific configuration and is this well documented?

         Thanks
                Andrew