You can look at AMD Elan CPU's very need and flexible architecture,
with 4MB Flash/ROM, 8MB of DRAM and simple network chip you can
build pretty inexpensive system (<$400 in low quantities).
And there is no problem running linux in there. (I run 2.2.3).
Oleg.
At 12:23 PM 5/12/99 +1000, you wrote:
>Hi Folks,
>
>I'm currently investigating options for a minimal-cost x386 based diskless
>embedded controller running a stripped-down Linux kernel for a reasonably
>simple embedded TCP/IP application. I'm very interested in opinions or
>experience anyone could offer.
>
>My choice of x386 is to allow easy hardware & software prototyping on desktop
>PC's and off-the-shelf embedded biscuit-PC-like boards. Ultimately, I'd like to
>build a tiny BIOS-less system with traditional (i.e. non-IDE) flash/eprom
>memory and minimal RAM. Since the Linux kernel has a larger footprint than
>traditional embedded OS's, it would be nice to run it directly from ROM with
>a ROM-based root filesystem. I'd prefer not to simply copy the kernel into RAM
>or use an "initrd" RAM-disk for root filesystem stuff which is all essentially
>read-only. Demonstrating that Linux can run embedded with very little RAM is
>one of the goals here, even at the expense of slightly more ROM.
>
>My guess is that much of the specifics here can be handled by a ROM-based
>bootloader which sets up the x386 MMU to effectively "load" the kernel, and
>from then on everything is much like running in a desktop box, albeit a
>severely stripped one. Does anyone know of an existing bootloader that can
>perform this sort of magic, or any other pointers to existing solutions?
>
>Thank you,
>Graham
>
