Description

This document covers the configuration and usage of eCos and RedBoot on the Intel XScale IXDP425 Network Processor Evaluation Board. The IXDP425 board contains the Intel XScale IXP425 processor, 256Mbytes of SDRAM, 16MByte of parallel NOR flash memory, an I²C EEPROM, hexadecimal debug display, LEDs, and external connections for two serial channels, two NPE ethernet daughterboards and an expansion bus based on the Utopia-2 interface standard. eCos and RedBoot support for the devices and peripherals on this board is described below.

In normal operation, a RedBoot image is programmed into the flash memory, and the board will boot into this image from reset. RedBoot provides gdb stub functionality so it is then possible to download and debug stand-alone applications via the gdb debugger. RedBoot can also load and execute Linux kernels. This can happen over either a serial line or over ethernet.

This document should be read in conjunction with the Intel XScale IXP4xx Network Processor Support processor HAL documentation in the eCos documentation set, as well as the generic HAL documentation.

Supported Hardware

The parallel NOR flash memory supplied by default with the IXDP425 - a single Intel StrataFlash 28F128J3 - consists of 128 blocks of 128Kbytes each. In a typical setup, the first four blocks, 512 Kbytes, are reserved for the use of the RedBoot ROM image. The topmost block is used to manage the flash and hold RedBoot fconfig values. The remaining blocks can be used by application code. There are 123 blocks available between 0x50080000 and 0x50FE0000.

RedBoot supports the built-in high-speed and console UARTs. The default serial port settings are 115200,8,N,1.

There is an ethernet driver CYGPKG_DEVS_ETH_INTEL_I82559 intended for use with a PCI I82559-based ethernet device to allow communication and downloads. A separate package, CYGPKG_DEVS_ETH_ARM_IXDP425_I82559, is responsible for configuring this generic driver to the IXDP425 hardware. This driver is also loaded automatically when configuring for the IXDP425 target.

IDE support is available to support most PCI IDE controllers. Separate support is also available to support CompactFlash cards fitted to an optional daughterboard, in True IDE mode. These features are described in the IXP4xx processor HAL documentation.

Tools

The IXDP425 support is intended to work with GNU tools configured for an arm-eabi target. The original port was undertaken using arm-elf-gcc version 3.4.4, arm-elf-gdb version 6.3, and binutils version 2.15.