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Linux To Gain Another Chip Family

Posted by timothy on from the assimilation-nation dept.

An anonymous reader submits "Freescale will unveil the first ColdFire processors ever to include a memory management unit (MMU), and therefore able to run full-scale Linux, this week at the Embedded Processor Forum in San Jose, Calif. The chips cost $17 - $25, and are used mostly in industrial control and factory automation. Simultaneously, Freescale tools subsidiary Metrowerks announced plans to offer Linux development tools for Coldfire chips, which previously had been restricted to running uClinux due to the lack of an MMU."

16 of 141 comments (clear)

  1. New Amigas by Amiga+Lover · · Score: 4, Informative

    These chips, distantly related to the 68k motorolas, were once touted as a possible upgrade path for new Amigas in the mid 1990s. Hopefully with these new ones, the more modern AmigaOS4 can be ported to them, and continue the heritage. At the moment the only stock available is AmigaOne G3, G4 and mini-itx PPC boards, which are artificially inflated in price by the apple/ibm/motorola consortium.

    1. Re:New Amigas by Jeff+DeMaagd · · Score: 4, Informative

      which are artificially inflated in price by the apple/ibm/motorola consortium.

      It appears that way when in reality, that probably is an exercise in comparing bananas and oranges.

      Development Evaluation / Reference Design boards are generally higher in price because of their volume, and the fact that they have different levels of support, often times, software, documents and engineering support is available to them for this type of product. Products intended for a slightly different market, the embedded market, are often slightly cheaper but don't always fit the "standard" form factors like ATX and ITX, but they weren't meant to be used as personal computers, so that point is moot, although it would probably help prices and cut development costs a lot.

      The idea is that a prospective manufacturer would buy the Devel board to test the capabilities of the overall system. When they want volume, they take the reference design as a basis for their own fabrication and and make it in volume, but often for proprietary form factors to fit a very specific task.

      One thing I noticed is that reference boards for Intel and AMD chips often cost a little more than those for RISC chips. If the ARM board costs $600, a similar embedded reference board for an x86 chip often costed $700 to $800. The difference here is that there are plenty of consumer boards available for x86 systems, but not RISC systems, so this is where the RISC boards look expensive.

  2. Why is this so important? by raahul_da_man · · Score: 3, Informative

    I thought I knew which processors were important in the embedded world. What exactly is Coldfire, and why does it matter compare to ARM and Motorola's offerings?

    I realise that Yet Another Embedded Processor that can run all of linux is a good thing. I just don't see why that is important, since the difference between embedded and desktop processors has been diminishing sharply.

  3. Metrowerks by lakeland · · Score: 2, Informative
    Freescale tools subsidiary Metrowerks


    Huh? Metrowerks produces apple development tools, and they dabble in linux/embedded development tools. I'm pretty sure that Metrowerks is not a freescale subsidary. See for example this PR.

    1. Re:Metrowerks by Jeremy+Erwin · · Score: 2, Informative

      Founded in 1985, Metrowerks is today an independently operating subsidiary of Freescale Semiconductor. Metrowerks corporate headquarters are in Austin, Texas; Metrowerks Europe is headquartered in Munich; Metrowerks Asia is headquartered in Singapore; and Metrowerks Japan is headquartered in Tokyo.


      In turn, freescale is a subsidiary of motorola. Source (27 April 2004)
    2. Re:Metrowerks by Rosco+P.+Coltrane · · Score: 4, Informative

      Huh? Metrowerks produces apple development tools, and they dabble in linux/embedded development tools. I'm pretty sure that Metrowerks is not a freescale subsidary. See for example this PR.

      1 - Metrowerks is a Freescale "early tester", i.e. they get Freescale stuff first

      2 - Metrowerks acquired Lineo and their Embedix Linux offering a while ago, and offer it as one of their core products. Therefore, they more than "dabble" in Linux.

      --
      "A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
  4. motorola by Coneasfast · · Score: 4, Informative

    freescale is a subsidiary of motorola, here is homepage for coldfire.

    --
    Marge, get me your address book, 4 beers, and my conversation hat.
  5. ColdFire is *already* supported in Linux by gergoid · · Score: 5, Informative

    I added support for ColdFire processors to Linux years ago. This won't be new. It was added to Linus kernels in the 2.5 series, and is fully supported in the 2.6 kernels for all the older ColdFire parts (5206, 5249, 5272, 5282, 5307, 5407). Ofcourse the older parts did not have an MMU.

    Look under the arch/m68knommu branch for all the architecture support...

    1. Re:ColdFire is *already* supported in Linux by gergoid · · Score: 4, Informative

      Wrong. The ColdFire's run the same ISA as the m68k family. They are just a reimplemtation of the their ISA. Go look at the code under arch/m68knommu in the 2.6 linux source. You will find my name next to all the ColdFire bits.

  6. ColdFire is 680x0 w/ recoded ISA by r00t · · Score: 1, Informative

    Just as Power begat PowerPC and x86 begat x86-64,
    so 680x0 begat ColdFire.

    In this case, the instruction set was recoded
    to save memory and reduce power consumption.
    Given some 680x0 assembly code, you pretty much
    have ColdFire assembly code. The mapping from
    opcode to binary is different. Most likely there
    are a few minor changes beyond that, but not much.

  7. Re:This isn't a great as it seems by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    Don't click that link. If you check your status bar, it's "http://www.google.com/url?sa=D&q=http://www.peopl esprimary.com/?n=Sarojin", which redirects to http://www.peoplesprimary.com/?n=Sarojin, not a Google search. The page is nasty

  8. VxWorks is crummy by r00t · · Score: 3, Informative

    Their shell is an abomination. Their filesystem
    is plain old DOS FAT, optionally with an
    incompatible long-filename feature. The "mount"
    command (function? all the same...) is totally
    defective, doing some kind of dumb text substitution
    instead of real mount points. Memory support is
    terribly limited -- is 32 MB enough for you?

    For the cost of VxWorks, you can get a bit of
    extra memory for running Linux. You'll also save
    on development costs that way.

    If you'd really prefer a tiny OS designed for
    strict real-time from the start, use eCos.
    It's free even.

    1. Re:VxWorks is crummy by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

      but most of the embedded systems I have work on require hard-realtime and I tend to choose very conservatively on embedded projects.

      To mention another, RTEMS is a open-source real-time OS with a decent pedigree and commercial support available. (The page is a shameless rip-off of GCC's.)

      There's also Red Hat's eCos but I don't think they support it anymore.

  9. VxWorks is worthless because it lacks one thing... by smcdow · · Score: 2, Informative
    ... Perl.

    We looked at VxWorks for our first-ever embedded project. When we found out there was no Perl for VxWorks, nor any chance of ever, ever having Perl on VxWorks, we quickly abandonded VxWorks in favor of Linux.

    We've have no problems whatsoever using Linux as an embedded OS. Plus, we get to write much of our code in Perl as well. This is as it should be.

    --
    In the course of every project, it will become necessary to shoot the scientists and begin production.
  10. Re:Huge Difference by bhima · · Score: 2, Informative

    I have *never* found a project where VxWorks was worth the cost! In fact if you look they are loosing market share to Linux. Also the two most commonly used systems are either in-house home rolled things like I use or Linux. Of I'm not writing code for space missions, just medical devices.

    --
    Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
  11. ColdFire are not MC68Ks by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    They try to fool you into thinking they are. But they aren't. They are an entirely different architecture that uses similar nmeumonics and addressing modes.

    Even the hexidecimal encodings of those instructions (i.e. the machine language) is dissimilar from 68K machine language.

    ColdFire is a strange product, I moto has been pushing it for some time now. I'm not sure why it is still around.