Marvell 88W8388 (OLPC Laptop - an open source substandard ?)

[Bernardo Innocenti]

Ivan Krstić wrote:

> Gabor Dolla wrote:
>> Can we reanimate this "gpl'd firmware for Marvell's 88W8388" thing somehow ?
> 
> Patience, grasshopper. It's being worked on. I might have found a way to
> put a person on it full-time, in fact; stay tuned.

 - Is there any public developer documentation for the 88W8388?

 - Did anyone build a cross GCC toolchain for the ARM9e embedded
   processor?  Hopefully, a regular arm-elf toolchain with newlib
   would suffice.

 - Is there any existing code that could be leveraged as a starting
   point?


The RTOS part seems to be the easiest.  In their press releases,
Marvell says they've been using this RTOS:

 http://www.rtos.com/txappinterface.asp

Judging from the API, it's just a naive cooperative scheduler and
a couple of synchrononization primitives.

We developed something very close to it as part of our in-house
library of reusable components, which is already available under
the GPL:

 http://www.develer.com/oss/DevLib

And this is the part implementing process scheduling and IPC:

 http://www.develer.com/devlib/devlib-current/kern/


Another GPL'd RTOS I would recommend for this application
is this one:

 http://www.ethernut.de/en/software/index.html
 http://www.ethernut.de/api/index.html

It's a bit thicker, but maybe we can afford it.

-- 
   // Bernardo Innocenti - Develer S.r.l., R&D dept.
 \X/  http://www.develer.com/