Linux To Gain Another Chip Family 141
An anonymous reader submits "Freescale will unveil the first ColdFire processors ever to include a memory management unit (MMU), and therefore able to run full-scale Linux, this week at the Embedded Processor Forum in San Jose, Calif. The chips cost $17 - $25, and are used mostly in industrial control and factory automation. Simultaneously, Freescale tools subsidiary Metrowerks announced plans to offer Linux development tools for Coldfire chips, which previously had been restricted to running uClinux due to the lack of an MMU."
New Amigas (Score:5, Informative)
Why is this so important? (Score:3, Informative)
I realise that Yet Another Embedded Processor that can run all of linux is a good thing. I just don't see why that is important, since the difference between embedded and desktop processors has been diminishing sharply.
Metrowerks (Score:2, Informative)
Huh? Metrowerks produces apple development tools, and they dabble in linux/embedded development tools. I'm pretty sure that Metrowerks is not a freescale subsidary. See for example this [metrowerks.com] PR.
motorola (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Metrowerks (Score:3, Informative)
In turn, freescale is a subsidiary of motorola. Source (27 April 2004)
ColdFire is *already* supported in Linux (Score:5, Informative)
Look under the arch/m68knommu branch for all the architecture support...
Re:Metrowerks (Score:5, Informative)
1 - Metrowerks is a Freescale "early tester", i.e. they get Freescale stuff first
2 - Metrowerks acquired Lineo [lineo.com] and their Embedix Linux offering a while ago, and offer it as one of their core products. Therefore, they more than "dabble" in Linux.
ColdFire is 680x0 w/ recoded ISA (Score:1, Informative)
so 680x0 begat ColdFire.
In this case, the instruction set was recoded
to save memory and reduce power consumption.
Given some 680x0 assembly code, you pretty much
have ColdFire assembly code. The mapping from
opcode to binary is different. Most likely there
are a few minor changes beyond that, but not much.
Re:ColdFire is *already* supported in Linux (Score:4, Informative)
Re:This isn't a great as it seems (Score:4, Informative)
VxWorks is crummy (Score:3, Informative)
is plain old DOS FAT, optionally with an
incompatible long-filename feature. The "mount"
command (function? all the same...) is totally
defective, doing some kind of dumb text substitution
instead of real mount points. Memory support is
terribly limited -- is 32 MB enough for you?
For the cost of VxWorks, you can get a bit of
extra memory for running Linux. You'll also save
on development costs that way.
If you'd really prefer a tiny OS designed for
strict real-time from the start, use eCos.
It's free even.
Re:New Amigas (Score:5, Informative)
It appears that way when in reality, that probably is an exercise in comparing bananas and oranges.
Development Evaluation / Reference Design boards are generally higher in price because of their volume, and the fact that they have different levels of support, often times, software, documents and engineering support is available to them for this type of product. Products intended for a slightly different market, the embedded market, are often slightly cheaper but don't always fit the "standard" form factors like ATX and ITX, but they weren't meant to be used as personal computers, so that point is moot, although it would probably help prices and cut development costs a lot.
The idea is that a prospective manufacturer would buy the Devel board to test the capabilities of the overall system. When they want volume, they take the reference design as a basis for their own fabrication and and make it in volume, but often for proprietary form factors to fit a very specific task.
One thing I noticed is that reference boards for Intel and AMD chips often cost a little more than those for RISC chips. If the ARM board costs $600, a similar embedded reference board for an x86 chip often costed $700 to $800. The difference here is that there are plenty of consumer boards available for x86 systems, but not RISC systems, so this is where the RISC boards look expensive.
VxWorks is worthless because it lacks one thing... (Score:3, Informative)
We looked at VxWorks for our first-ever embedded project. When we found out there was no Perl for VxWorks, nor any chance of ever, ever having Perl on VxWorks, we quickly abandonded VxWorks in favor of Linux.
We've have no problems whatsoever using Linux as an embedded OS. Plus, we get to write much of our code in Perl as well. This is as it should be.
Re:Huge Difference (Score:3, Informative)
ColdFire are not MC68Ks (Score:2, Informative)
Even the hexidecimal encodings of those instructions (i.e. the machine language) is dissimilar from 68K machine language.
ColdFire is a strange product, I moto has been pushing it for some time now. I'm not sure why it is still around.
Re:VxWorks is crummy (Score:1, Informative)
To mention another, RTEMS [rtems.com] is a open-source real-time OS with a decent pedigree and commercial support available. (The page is a shameless rip-off of GCC's [gnu.org].)
There's also Red Hat's eCos [redhat.com] but I don't think they support it anymore.