[linuxsh-dev] Back from the dead

[Stuart M. <Stu...@st...>]

Folks

Sorry about having been 'off-line' for so long, a trip to France and a
small mountain of other work over the last few weeks has been keeping
me otherwise engaged.

Anyway, I've just uploaded a couple of patches to the patch manager
which you may be interested in. They are both fairly large (100K and
250K respectivly), which is why I'm not including them here.

The first patch is probably the one most people will be interested in.
It's primary aim is to add support for 'generic' kernels, i.e. a single
kernel which can be booted onto multiple machines. At the moment its
main focus is on the board/machine level aspects of this, so all the
SolutionEngine/HP600/Overdrive #ifdefs have now been removed from the
code.

However it doesn't cover:
 - endianness
	I don't propose to do anything about this!
 - instruction set: SH3/SH4
	this could be done, I think, but I've yet to convince myself
	that gcc generated code for an SH3 will always run on an SH4
 - sub-architectue: 7708/9/20, 7750/1 (caches, uarts etc)
	this should not be too difficult now the basic structure is
	in place
 - where the kernel executes from and where RAM starts
	could be covered by running the kernel from P3 if we think it
	is worth doing, but will almost certainly require some assistance
	from the boot loader.

The changes have been modelled on the Alpha way of handling this, so
there should be virtually no code size or performance penalty for
building a machine specific kernel, and while the generic kernel is
inevitabley going to be slightly slower and larger, its not a major
change.

The machine is selected from the command line, for example:
  sh_mv=solutionengine
If the machine is not recognised then it defaulst to 'unknown', which
provides support for on-chip peripherials only.

If you want a little more detail, have a look in:
   Documentation/sh/new-machine.txt

There are also some 'incidental' changes which are included, which are
worth pointing out:
 - marking an interrupt as type IPR, without calling set_ipr_data, caused
   the IRQ probing code to crash, so make_ipr_data now takes the extra
   parameters set_ipr_data used to.
 - record number of chars sent and received on SCI(F)
 - a bug fix to the TCP/IP checksumming code for when the src and/or
   destination addresses are misaligned.

The second patch adds PCI support for the Overdrive. Because this is
now so large (mainly becuause of a big FPG program) I've moved all
Overdrive related files into a separate directory. As this is probably
only a temporary measure (this is only needed for prototype boards), I
suggest we don't try and get this directory included in the mainstream
sources yet. Everything will build quite happily with it missing.

Note I've not been able to test on anything other than SH4 SolutionEngine
and Overdrive, so I'd welcome some comments from people with other
hardware, in particular HP600.

Anyway, see what you think, any comments, please let me know.

Stuart