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[ts-7000] Re: draft TS-7500 documentation

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Subject: [ts-7000] Re: draft TS-7500 documentation
From: "charliem_1216" <>
Date: Thu, 03 Sep 2009 16:22:00 -0000
--- In  "jesseoff" <> wrote:
>
> --- In  "charliem_1216" <charliem_1216@> wrote:
> > 
> > Is there a developers manual available for this chip from Cavium?
> 
> There is.  Our copy of this manual was given under NDA though and has a 
> watermark saying so on every page of the 344 page PDF.  If I remember 
> correctly, it was not difficult to get the NDA from Cavium.  Next time we 
> talk to our Cavium rep, we'll try to lobby them to release a more open 
> datasheet we can send to curious customers.

OK, got it but had to register.  Once registered, you can also DL their linux 
2.6.24 BSP.


> This CPU cannot run EABI.  The EABI architects did not accomodate the 
> possibility in their specification that there may be a CPU created that did 
> not have Thumb support.  EABI uses a couple ARM opcodes ("bx", and "blx") 
> explicitly created for ARM -> Thumb interworking that an ARM processor 
> without Thumb does not have.  The Faraday core that Cavium/STAR semiconductor 
> uses removed the Thumb core likely since it is mostly obsolete and 
> unnecessary on a 250Mhz CPU with 64MBytes DDR SDRAM.  Unfortunately, the 
> FA526 CPU core will never run EABI in its current form.

One option, I think, is to do a linker fixup, changing all 'bx  Rm' into 'mov  
pc,Rm'.  This is in binutils since v2.15, using the '--fix-v4bx' option to the 
linker (and assembler).  But you would really have to rebuild *everything* from 
scratch, since debian did choose ARMv4t as their minimum processor.  

Hmm, I'll have to look at a recent mainline kernel.  This processor is  
supported now, and I don't recall anything in the patchset that turned off EABI.

> 
> > I found these binaries on the FTP site.  Any plans to release the sources 
> > also?  They seem to be core requirements for running this card well.  When 
> > the inevitable bugs are found by customers beating on them, the TS-7500 
> > community could participate in solving them, rather than putting the onus 
> > back onto an over-burdened TS support team.
> 
> Yes, I'll be releasing this source code shortly.
   
Great!

regards, ........ Charlie




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