Subject: Status of PPC403-OAK-port? Somebody using it?

From: Niklaus Giger <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 13 Oct 2002 20:03:11 +0200

Hi
I am working in a company which has produced a custom board with a PPC403GCX
on it. As I (my very personal opinion) am not very satisfied with the license
policy of a leading embedded OS supplier (we are still running vxWorks 5.2),
I am investigating some alternatives.

When I was looking the last time (about two years ago) Grant Erickson was just
able to boot the 403GCX and had considerable problems with its ethernet
controller. (As we use the same controller in our board I have also spent a
few months to debug its HW and SW deficiencies.)

A few days ago I got (via Bitkeeper) a copy of the 2.5 development kernel (the
2.4 and 2.4_devel seem to have more problems).

As far as I see the onboard serial controller is not supported. Am I right?
I think it would not be a great deal to add this, as e.g. we would surely need
it as it is for us currently the main debugging device.

Setting the CONFIG_OAKNET to y, produced quite a few warnings, which are fixed
with the attached patch.

As I never posted a patch to the linux kernel, and the documentation is not
very clear about how to submit patches to whom I am trying it with this
email. This patch fixes only compilation errors for the OAK but I do not
think that the ethernet device would run.

I know that TiVo is using the PPC403GCX. Does somebody else use this port? Or
knows of somebody is using it? Are there success stories or tales about
failures? It would be nice to here from you.

Please CC to me directly and do not expect an answer in the next 10 days as I
will be on vacation.

Best regards

--
Niklaus Giger
Wieshoschet 6
CH-8753 Mollis
Tel. ++41 55 612 20 54 (privat)
Tel. ++41 55 618 64 68 (Geschäft)