On Mon, 2004-05-10 at 23:49, Ralf Baechle wrote:
> On Mon, May 10, 2004 at 04:24:51PM +0200, Emmanuel Michon wrote:
>
> > I plan to port linux-mips to a a 32bit 4KEc based (little endian)
> > hardware design.
> >
> > I have three questions:
> >
> > Q1- The nice book `see mips run' states that it's better that the
> > physical address map fits entirely in kseg1 (in 0x0-0x2000_0000).
> >
> > I would not be the first to plan for a lot of RAM and I understand
> > HIGHMEM patch is ok if an extra RAM area is out of reach of kseg1.
>
> Using highmem in general is a baaad idea. The option only exists at all
> for MIPS because of a user who didn't want to try something as unorthodox
> as 64-bit kernels ...
>
> Highmem implies significant extra overhead and complexity for software
> that runs in kernel space. Avoid like the plague if you can.
>
> > But what if my PCI devices I/O do not lie in kseg1? I may program the
> > TLB to see them thru kseg2 (but kseg2 seems to be the place where page
> > tables are stored...)
>
> Doesn't really matter. It's nice to have devices in the lower 512MB of
> physical address space because that means the TLB will not be used - a
> nice performance bonus.
>
> Whatever - the driver API to use is ioremap.
You mean that after basic probing you always access PCI devices thru the
TLB?
>
> > Q2- Most hardware platforms have their SDRAM chips mapped at
> > physical address 0x0. Mine does not. Am I going ahead of problems?
>
> It won't work ;-)
>
> You at least need some memory at physical address zero because exception
> vectors are located in the first few k of physical address space. Of
> course you could avoid that by having the BEV bit set in the status
> register so exceptions would go via 0xbfc00000 - but that's an uncached
> address, likely even in a flash so performance would go down the drain ...
Well my 4KEc core has a CP0 register called EBase (15 select 1) that
allows to put the vectors anywhere (excepted reset/softreset/nmi/ejtag).
>
> > It seems to be assumed at a lot of places (I have already ported YAMON).
> >
> > Q3- I'd rather stick to a 2.4.x linux port. But... should I use:
>
> Depending on what exactly you want to do you should take a look at 2.6.
>
> > a- the latest official 2.4.x kernel
> > b- the latest 2.4.x-preY kernel
>
> kernel.org kernels won't work out of the box or at least your chances
> are worse due to the lag in merging MIPS code from to kernel.org.
>
> > c- the latest linux-mips.org 2.4.x kernel
> > d- cvs -z3 -d :pserver:cvs@ftp.linux-mips.org:/home/cvs co -r linux_2_4
>
> D - where C and D are the basically the same anyway - I've stopped making
> snapshot tarballs years ago, so you'll have to fetch from cvs.
Thanks
Sincerely yours,
E.M.
>
> Ralf
>
>
|