Meeting Minutes - July 6, 2007

Participants

• Burkhard Kolb
• Walter F.J. Müller
• Peter Zumbruch

Project Decision

• Project enterprise decided
  Electronic Departments Control System Group decides to work on this project: PZ.

Current Status

Visit of Norbert Abel, KIP, June 13, 2007

• Within 4 hours we (easily) managed to install the KIP environment and get a μCLinux running on the Virtex4 ML403 evaluation board at GSI.
• Afterwards up-to-now all steps up to the configuration, the download of the bitstream file to the FPGA have been reproduced and partly understood and documented.
  • details see documentation
• A small preconfigured example application TestMemory is running on startup
• Still missing is the part of the compilation of the Kernel.

ToDo List

1. Finish documentation of Visit of Norbert Abel, including:
   • configuration
   • test application
   • kernel compilation
2. Learn how to accomplish the cross compilation of a simple "hello world" program to get it running on the FPGA
   • How to include system specific (header) files
   • compiler (gcc) options
3. Install EPICS on the VMware system
4. Build specific configure files for PPC/μCLinux on ML403/Virtex4 architecture for the EPICS built system
5. Build EPICS for this architecture
6. Build EPICS IOC
7. Check semaphore/thread behaviour

• not to get Linux running
• not to care directly for thread/semaphore/POSIX compliance
• not to care in first place: is μCLinux outdated?
  • other Linux ?

open questions

• Is μCLinux POSIX x compliant?
• What about Xilinx Ethernet MAC IP Core licensing models?
  • WFJM will care
• Kernel version of μCLinux?
  • Kernel versioning consistent with Linux?
• milestones:
  • proposal (PZ):
    • "hello world"
    • Build EPICS for ML403
    • Running IOC on ML403

Timescale

• The above mentioned items of the ToDo List, should have been tagged/solved on the platform ML403 up to September/October 2007.
• From then on the SysCore Board should have been sufficiently (at least Ethernet and RS232) equipped and tested to allow to move away from ML403 to the SysCore architecture.

Next Meeting

• undecided