Slowly but steadily I'm making some progress on this project. First of all I've enhanced RTEMS build machinery to support building Efika BSP from the gen5200 BSP, so now --enable-rtemsbsp=efika is working. After this I started working on tweaking gen5200 to add some basic support for SmartFirmware and to be honest I'm going the most easiest route and hardwiring a lot of important values directly in the code just to have a port in prototype stage up'n'running. Anyway, I was surprised that well _nothing_ was working at all. :-) Next step was obvious: order few MPC5200 related books from nice Freescale support and wait till the pack arrive and start harder study of this PPC implementation. During that time I've made some experiments with as simple as possible assembler based tests and they were working nicely. So few weeks ago I've jumped again to the RTEMS and tried hard to find out what's going wrong and why RTEMS binary is not working at all, while it provides _exactly_ the same instructions at the beginning as my testing debugging example which is working as expected. For your information since Efika lacks JTAG support, I'm using "debug to the memory" method which is described here in a post by Aymeric Vincent.
And I found the reason. It seems Efika's SFW really refuses to start my RTEMS binary, it seems to be kind of confused by it when it contains following mpc5200 region declaration in its linkcmd file:



the purpose of this is to have C struct laid over MPC5200 internal register map. When I remove this and tweak the sources to avoid unresolved symbol errors, I get to the stage where first instructions from the binary are really running well. Perhaps this is just some SFW bug, since the same is running probably well on other MPC5200 boards supported by RTEMS.

Playing with SmartFirmware I got to the "deadend" :-)

I was just curious if the serial console is really working as promised by Matt from Genesi. Well, yes it is. :-) The screenshot is of wterm running on Debian 3.0/AMD64 box. Inside wterm I'm using minicom to connect to Efika's serial console. By doing this quick experiment (everything assembled directly on the working desk) I've found that (1) my purchased null-modem cable is not the best since it does not provide necessary lines for HW controlled transfer and (2) that my PSU is noisy. I'll probably need to look for some PicoPSU in my neighbourhood.

Many thanks to Genesi and FedEx! I've received the Efika today. I hope to the required shopping (null-modem cable, PSU, etc.) soon to see Efika booting. First I'll need to get some SFW user experience before going to experiment with the RTEMS port on the board. :-)

I'm glad to see RTEMS port to Efika was choosen to be supported by Genesi/Freescale. From the several looks into the RTEMS CVS sources, it seems I will need to enhance generic BSP for MPC5200 adding support for 5200B version and most importantly hack booting process to hook into the Efika's OpenFirmware. I prefer #ifdefing gen5200 BSP because of heavy code reuse and why is this bsp called ``generic'' 5200 then? :-)
So in the meantime while waiting for Efika to be delivered to my location, I'm playing with RTEMS's internals configuration just to get an idea how to add virtual BSP using gen5200 BSP.

Karel