Hi all,

I am a novice in field of os(linux) porting. I am looking for a powerpc based board/SBC with essential hardware and programming specs(memory map , register address etc..) for porting Linux 2.6 on it. This is for understanding the procedure of OS porting on a custom board.

Any one pls give me pointer on this and suggest some cheap board available in Indian Market (upto INR 10000/-)

Thanks

Deepak

Hi,

I also started to play with PowerPC boards and I had the same questions. I started to read documentation, learn many things at work and I also bought the great book of Christopher Hallinan : "Embedded Linux Primer".

Then, I looked for cheap boards too and unused products are generally expensive (several hundreds of dollars). I had a look at Kurobox and products like that. Finally I found a board AMCC Walnut (PPC405GP) on eBay and then a RPXLite (MPC850).

But what about the Efika ? Is it not documented enough ?

Linux 2.6 is already ported to the Efika..

_________________
Matt Sealey

It is quite hard to find cheap PPC boards and he wants to practice, so in case he fails, it is better to have Linux 2.6 supported by the board !

Before adapting Linux for a unsupported board, there are many things to learn :
- embedded programming : environment, cross-compiler (find or build its own), boot process (bootloader, kernel, memory mapping, filesystems, ...)
- operating system : how an OS works, and then Linux (kernel, drivers, ...)
- hardware : how PPC works

I don't know about the Deepak's knowledge, he only told it was a novice in Linux port. My advices above comes from my own experience and could be precious at least to beginners in embedded programming.

He could however try to port minix3 to the efika. It's not linux, but I think it would be a good os to learn about os development and porting. There's also a powerpc port in development.