Stephen Berry ha scritto:
You do have to pay a ransom to MontaVista for the rights to sell their kernel - this I believe is around $6K. I never really understood how this worked since so much of the software was GPL'd.
This is true for the commercial MV Linux; but what about the free version that you can check out from the GIT repository? Accidentally, it should be the "Davinci linux open source" that theoretically gives the name to this mailing list... :)
SPI support is sparse. The kernel is 2.6.10 based with a zillion patches. No cohesive low power scheme. MMC can be booted off of the kernel if you don't need SDHC. If you want that they can be added (and original Ti MMC drivers removed) as loadable modules - but then you can't boot from SDHC. The VPFE/VPBE support is passable, but needs work. Yaffs2 for NAND does not include checkpointing, so expect long boot times with a larger filesystems.
Ok, so basically the status is exactly the same as two years ago: there isn't any working, full-blown kernel that you can use for an actual production device without spending several months-men to modify the kernel, fill the voids, and so on.
Basically the questions can be collapsed into a simpler one: what do I get by just spending the 495$ for the DVEVM? Do I get enough software code/tools to develop an actual product, or other commercial tools are practlcally required?
[...]
You get most of what you need.
Well, actually you didn't give me this idea. :) My intention was to determine if/how this platform could be already useable for low-cost, low-volume applications (100 to 1000 pieces, at best 10000). This basically means that three requisites need to be met: -Availability of low-cost boards based on DaVinci; -Low non-recurring costs (licenses, development system, etc); -Working low-level hardware support (i.e. I don't have to spend months writing kernel code). I've started investigating on the first requisite, and something actually popped up; but as for the last two requisites, it looks like we are just in the same place as two years ago. This isn't really a complaint, it's just an osservation; I totally understand that products like DaVinci are mainly aimed at zillion-pieces applications. What I don't understand is why TI sells the DM355 board at such an aggressive price, if then you have to spend thousand of dollars anyway to get anything working. Cheers, Lorenzo -- Lorenzo _______________________________________________ Davinci-linux-open-source mailing list [email protected] http://linux.davincidsp.com/mailman/listinfo/davinci-linux-open-source
