[Linux-c6x-dev] da850 / C6748 support

[Ben Gardiner]

Thank you Sandeep and William,

On Fri, Sep 24, 2010 at 2:38 PM, Paulraj, Sandeep <s-paulraj at ti.com> wrote:
> We do intend to add support for new devices. In the immediate future, support for da850 is not in our plans. That does not mean that we will not add support for the da830/da850 in the future.

On Fri, Sep 24, 2010 at 3:09 PM, William Mills <wmills at ti.com> wrote:
> Right now we don't have any resources assigned to the C674x parts.  This
> would be an excelent project for community members to pick up but I am
> afraid it will be more than just testing.

Thank you for clarifying the 'board support roadmap' of your project.

> The good news is that the GCC port will be supporting the 674x floating
> point core.
>
> The other good new is I have done some preliminary scouting to see if there
> is any extra context swicthing needed in the kernel to handle the floating
> point cores.  The answer seems to be no.  The BIOS guys claim that they did
> not need to do anything special for the floating point as all the context is
> in the existing registers.
>
> So in theory, support for any 674x is just an SOC port and a board port.
>  Not that this is trivial but it is much better than having to add support
> to the arch/c6x/kernel and to GCC.

That is good news; so most of the porting effort would be in the SOC
features of the da850 like pinmux, clock, irq, power management, gpio
-- the soc port (I think) -- and then the peripheral enablement via
registration of platform resources -- the board port (I think).

I guess the additional good news here is that almost all of that has
been done already to arch/arm/mach-davinci for the da850. Although I
think that this could also present integration problems since the
maintainers would not like patches that duplicate code across
arch/arm/mach-davinci and the new arch/c6x.

> Does the above sound like something you would want to try?  If so we can
> discuss how we can help host the work, etc.

Thank you for the offer of helping and hosting the port. I can't say
that this is something we will try at the moment; but we will keep in
mind the potential to obtain Linux support at the cost of performing
the soc and board ports when planning our future development.

> If this is a bit more than you were thinking then stick around and "watch
> this space".  I hope there will be others interested in this same area.

We will definitely watch this space. This is an exciting development
for TI DSPs.

> (I did buy a hawkboard to see if I could do anything "in my free time", but
> my ambition always seems to out pace my "free time.")

:)

Well if your free time ever catches up to your ambitions we would be
happy to offer our help in testing.

Best Regards,
Ben Gardiner

---
Nanometrics Inc.
http://www.nanometrics.ca