[LinuxBIOS] geode LX

[Steve Spano]

Hi There

we are getting ready to make a custom Geode LX + CS5336 SBC.

It looks like there already is support for this in the LinuxBios - is there
a quick FAQ/etc on how to setup the toolchain/configure/etc so we can get a
build?

Thanks

Steve Spano, President

Finger Lakes Engineering

607-277-1614

www.fl-eng.com

[e-mail]

[ron minnich]

One LX port has been done, I'm doing another, and you would hence be
the 3rd or 4th. You have contacted AMD I assume concerning
redistribution rights for the LX VSA? You are going to need to do
that.

The build depends on what you put on the board. The best thing you
could do would be to talk to this mailing list a little so we can help
you design the board with linuxbios in mind.

Also, do you intend to put linux in flash, for linuxbios to load, or
... in other words, how do you want this thing to boot? There are now
several options, so you want to think about how you want it to boot.
We've worked with a number of vendors recently on putting linux in the
BIOS flash, and having linux load it. They find the debug flexibility
very useful. This just started getting to be popular when the 1 MBYTE
parts hit the street.

thanks

ron

[Steve Spano]

Hi Ron

Thanks for the fast reply!

Our board design is for a custom product we are developing

We will put

1) LX-800 (500Mhz part)
2) CS5536 Companion
3) RealTEK Ethernet (from the reference design)
4) We will use the USB Host port
5) We will take an RS232 port (or use the Parallel Port perhaps) to a
secondary Microprocessor to implement some LCD, keypad, and other I/O
functions

We don't need the Video Support for our product release, we may 'borrow' it
for development though.

Ideally, we could stream all debug/startup/etc to the RS232 port and use
other I/O functions to talk to our custom hardware - but we can deal with
that later.

In the future, we may use the true video output though.

What's the process for doing that?

I would like to model our LX design after the most straight forward way to
implement the opensource bios.

Regarding storage, we will put a NAND flash on the output of the CS5536 to
store the linux image, full fillsystem, bios, etc

Thanks!

Steve Spano
FLE

-----Original Message-----
From: ron minnich [mailto:[e-mail]] 
Sent: Sunday, January 14, 2007 9:50 PM
To: Steve Spano
Cc: [e-mail]
Subject: Re: [LinuxBIOS] geode LX

One LX port has been done, I'm doing another, and you would hence be
the 3rd or 4th. You have contacted AMD I assume concerning
redistribution rights for the LX VSA? You are going to need to do
that.

The build depends on what you put on the board. The best thing you
could do would be to talk to this mailing list a little so we can help
you design the board with linuxbios in mind.

Also, do you intend to put linux in flash, for linuxbios to load, or
... in other words, how do you want this thing to boot? There are now
several options, so you want to think about how you want it to boot.
We've worked with a number of vendors recently on putting linux in the
BIOS flash, and having linux load it. They find the debug flexibility
very useful. This just started getting to be popular when the 1 MBYTE
parts hit the street.

thanks

ron