Subject: Re: TS-7200 embedded SBC ARM port
To: Werner Backes <firstname.lastname@example.org>
From: Jesse Off <joff@embeddedARM.com>
Date: 11/22/2004 10:23:45
The board currently does boot from the 8MB flash into RedBoot firmware
where the netbsd kernel could reside. It could be possible to have a
kernel and ramdisk, but putting a real read/write filesystem there gets
tricky because of the nature of flash. Linux has what it calls "MTD"
drivers (memory technology device) and a set of filesystems that are very
tightly coupled to each variation of flash chips which seems a bit
overkill. It seems what we need to implement in a driver is the same sort
of hardware built-in controller logic present on USB thumb drives and CF
cards which exposes the flash chip as block devices. I haven't given a
lot of thought to it yet though, so I could be wrong.
On Mon, 22 Nov 2004, Werner Backes wrote:
> Jesse Off wrote:
>> and I'd like to do something useful with the 8Mb onboard NOR flash chip
>> though I'm not sure how or what yet.
> How about booting from it? 8MB should be enough for a small kernel and
> some applications and this would keep USB/CompactFlash free for other