Linux To Gain Another Chip Family

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."

Comments

New Amigas

[Amiga Lover]

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.

Re:New Amigas

[Jeff DeMaagd]

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.

motorola

[Coneasfast]

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

ColdFire is *already* supported in Linux

[gergoid]

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...

Re:ColdFire is *already* supported in Linux

[gergoid]

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.

Re:Metrowerks

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

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.

Re:This isn't a great as it seems

[Anonymous Coward]

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