Description

The NXP STB200 board has a PNX8310 processor, 16MB of external SDRAM, 4MB of external flash, an SMSC LAN9118 ethernet chip, and connectors plus required support chips for various on-chip peripherals. For typical eCos development a RedBoot image is programmed into the external flash. RedBoot provides gdb stub functionality so it is then possible to download and debug eCos applications via the gdb debugger. This can happen over either a serial line or over ethernet.

Supported Hardware

The memory map used by both eCos and RedBoot is as follows:

External SDRAM and flash are normally accessed via the kseg0 segment and hence via the cache. The internal RAM and the peripherals are normally accessed via kseg1 and hence uncached. Accesses to the on-chip RAM are as fast as cache accesses so there is no point in going through the cache for those.

eCos can be configured for one of three startup types:

In a typical setup the first 128K of flash is used for holding the RedBoot image, and the last 64K is used for managing the flash and holding the RedBoot fconfig values. The remaining blocks from 0x98020000 to 0x983EFFFF can be used by application code.

RedBoot can communicate with the host using either uart1 or ethernet. The PNX8310's uart0 is not connected on this board.

All configurations for the STB200 target include an ethernet driver package CYGPKG_DEVS_ETH_SMSC_LAN9118. If the application does not actually require ethernet functionality then the package is inactive and the final executable will not suffer any overheads from unused functionality. This is determined by the presence of the generic ethernet I/O package CYGPKG_IO_ETH_DRIVERS. Typically the choice of eCos template causes the right thing to happen. For example, the default template does not include any TCP/IP stack so CYGPKG_IO_ETH_DRIVERS is not included, but both the net and redboot templates do include a TCP/IP stack so will specify that package and hence enable the ethernet driver. The ethernet device can be shared by RedBoot and the application, so it is possible to debug a networked application over ethernet.

The STB200 board does not have a serial EPROM or similar hardware providing a unique network MAC address. Instead a suitable address has to be programmed into flash via RedBoot's fconfig command.

All configurations for the STB200 target include a serial device driver package CYGPKG_DEVS_SERIAL_MIPS_PNX8310. The driver as a whole is inactive unless the generic serial support, CYGPKG_IO_SERIAL_DEVICES is enabled. Only uart1 has a suitable connector so that is the only device which can be accessed through the serial driver. The hardware flow control lines are not connected so only software flow control is available. If the UART is needed by the application then it cannot also be used by RedBoot for gdb traffic, so another communication channel such as ethernet should be used instead.

All configurations for the STB200 target include a watchdog device driver package CYGPKG_DEVS_WATCHDOG_MIPS_PNX8310. This is inactive unless the generic watchdog support, CYGPKG_IO_WATCHDOG is loaded.

The on-chip interrupt controller is managed by eCos using macros provided by the PNX8310 processor HAL. The on-chip timer TMR1 is used to implement the eCos system clock. If gprof-based profiling is enabled then that will use TMR2, otherwise that timer can be used by the application. TMR3 is normally used only by the watchdog device driver. GPIO pins 17 and 18 are used for uart1, and pin 14 is used for ethernet interrupts. The remaining GPIO pins are not used by eCos. Other on-chip peripherals are left to their initial settings and not manipulated by eCos.

Tools

The STB200 port is intended to work with GNU tools configured for an mipsisa32-elf target. The original port was done using mipsisa32-elf-gcc version 3.4.4 mipsisa32-elf-gdb version 6.3, and binutils version 2.16. The PNX8310's PR1910 core does not implement the full mips32 functionality so all application code should be compiled with -mips2.