I�m designing a very low power project with a TS board on linux. It
will work to 6 month on battery.
For hardware, I need : 2 Ethernet, 3 COM minimum, 1 fast SPI, 2 USB, 1
SD/MMC socket.
The TS-7300 seem to be a good choice so I�ve just acquired TS-7300
board and started some test �
I had a companion microcontroller which, amongst other things, switch
on the power supply of the TS board only when I need it (in average,
less 1 hour per day).
This companion manage some task with the TS board on external real
time event.
The critical task need that a daemon using the SPI and one COM port,
have to work (external digital acquisition) only 5 second (max) after
the power-on.
So, my first test on the TS-7300 was to analyse the boot process. It
seem to be very different than the other board from TS beacause there
is no onboard flash, only SD
Default TS-7300 boot process : BOOTROM then boot from SD card
Default TS-7260 boot process : BOOTROM then Redboot then boot from
on-board flash
If I detail the TS-7300 boot process :
BOOTROM message  3 sec
Default INITRD load  25 sec (without partition check)
Default Linux boot (2.4.26-ts10)  75s
In analysing the dmesg file, the default INITRD integrate this init :
64MB RAM, devfs, Serial driver, Real Time Clock Driver, ep93xx_eth,
RAMDISK driver, IP Protocols: ICMP, UDP, TCP, IGMP, frame buffer,
ttyTS0 to ttyTS7, sdcard0, sdcard1, eth1, usb
For the TS-10 linux, I�m very surprised : It�s loading on the SD card,
and it�s use 208MB (/dev/sdcard0/disc0/part3) and use 57MB of the 64MB
RAM.
The TS-10 linux seem to be only a light debian and not a embedded linux.
On the other board (TS-7260 datasheet) the linux is stored in an
on-board flash and use only 2MB (boot loader + kernel).
For this project, I envisage to rebuild a small INITRD with only the
RAM, the EP9xxx serial driver, the the EP9xxx SPI driver and a custom
driver which use the SPI and COM to store in RAM the external digital
acquisition.
So I have some questions :
In the datasheet, it�s said : � Power-on to bootup firmware exit/OS
bootloader start less than 0.5 seconds (typical linux startup is
another approx 3 seconds) �, can you explain in more details �.
Is-it realistic to have a SPI+COM task working in less 5s after the
power-on on a TS-7300? Is it more reasonable to use a TS-7260 for this
project ?
Is-it only the TS-10 linux to operate on the TS-7300 ?
Is it possible to a accelerate the boot process of the BOOTROM (less
thant 3sec) ?
What�s the faster process ? :
TS-7300 boot : (BOOTROM + SD card boot)
TS-7260 boot : (BOOTROM + REDBOOT + on-board)
Is-it possible to have on-board NAND flash linux on the TS-7300 ? (
:- ( perhaps considering the others threads , no)
What�s the minimum INITRD I can envisage (RAM, COM, SPI, SD card 0
without checksum) ?
Can I load the FPGA bitstream, the ethernet, usb, and extra COM port
outward the INITRD ?
Is TS give all the patch and tools to create a custom INITRD ?
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