[Balloon] Re: kernels

[Nick Bane]

Chris Jones wrote:
> Wookey wrote:
> 
>>So on a 2.052 board one can have samosa simply by wiring up to the pads of
>>the Smartmedia socket? So in fact it should be fine to leave samosa compiled
>>in by default? If that is true we need to find out why the kernels we have
>>been building don't appear to boot if samosa is configured. Are there
>>corresponding CPLD changes? I had been under the mistaken impression that
>>samosa implied hardware changes.
> 
> 
> Yes, you can indeed implement an 8-bit Samosa bus by soldering lots of
> little bits of wire to the SmartMedia pads on a 2.052 board. The only
> changes in the CPLD (that I can remember at the moment) are an update to
> allow it access both 8- and 16-bit NAND Flash. That really shouldn't
> affect booting.
> 
Yes, that was when we were considering exploring yaffs2 on 16 bit wide 
NAND until the industry dropped 16-bit NAND.

> A thought occurs: Samosa-aware software tends to assume that if
> SM_ABSENT is asserted (ie, there's no SmartMedia card in the slot) it's
> safe to do Samosa-type things. I can't quite see why the boot loader has
> anything to do with Samosa, though, since no-one's ever built any Samosa
> peripherals which are useful before the Kernel's booted - Nick?
> 
All true.

Nick
> Chris