Subject: Re: mpc5121e port status

From: David Jander <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 2 Sep 2008 12:50:52 +0200

On Thursday 28 August 2008 00:07:11 Andrés Calderón wrote:
> Is the mpc5121e kernel port mature enough to be used in commercial
> appliance?

That depends. For any use of the linux kernel in a "commercial appliance", the 
manufacturer of the appliance has the sole responsibility of testing for 
stability and fitness.

That said, the status of MPC5121e support in the linux kernel is as follows:

Latest mainline (git) kernel: Only basic CPU support, almost no drivers for 
anything.

LTIB distribution from Freescale (downloadable on Freescale web-page of the 
MPC5121e), latest version: kernel 2.6.24.5 with a lot of drivers for (among 
other things): DIU, NAND-flash, PSC-I2C, PSC-Uarts, CAN, DMA, Ethernet, USB 
(ehci host works well), etc....
Notably missing from this version is support for MBX, SATA and SDHC.
One thing that you shouldn't count on quite yet is the MBX (3D-acceleration), 
because it will not have open-source drivers in any forseeable time AFAIK 
(probably never)... only some promise of a commercial driver and OpenGL-ES 
library which probably will be more of a hassle than useful to anyone.

We have a custom board running the LTIB version of the kernel, and the 
existing drivers work surprisingly well, but are IMHO not useable for 
production right out of the box. The NAND-flash driver for instance is broken 
for most uses, and the DIU driver has some cache-related issues (glitches in 
the image). Those problems are more or less easily fixed however. Ethernet 
and USB (host) seem pretty stable however (I am running on NFS-root all the 
time).

There are effords underway to get the drivers ported and fixed for mainline 
linux, but the process is quite slow at the moment. That has us for instance 
locked in the ancient 2.6.24.5 version of the kernel.

Best regards,

-- 
David Jander