Intel StrongArm EBSA 285

Overview

RedBoot uses the single EBSA-285 serial port. The default serial port settings are 38400,8,N,1. If the EBSA-285 is used as a host on a PCI backplane, ethernet is supported using an Intel PRO/100+ ethernet adapter.

Management of onboard flash is also supported. Two basic RedBoot configurations are supported:

Initial Installation Method

A linux application is used to program the flash over the PCI bus. Sources and build instructions for this utility are located in the RedBoot sources in:
.../packages/hal/arm/ebsa285/current/support/linux/safl_util

Flash management

Communication Channels

Serial, Intel PRO 10/100+ 82559 PCI ethernet card.

Special RedBoot Commands

None.

Memory Maps

Physical and virtual mapping are mapped one to one on the EBSA-285 using a first level page table located at address 0x4000. No second level tables are used.

Address Range            C B  Description
-----------------------  - -  ----------------------------------
0x00000000 - 0x01ffffff  Y Y  SDRAM
0x40000000 - 0x400fffff  N N  21285 Registers
0x41000000 - 0x413fffff  Y N  flash
0x42000000 - 0x420fffff  N N  21285 CSR Space
0x50000000 - 0x50ffffff  Y Y  Cache Clean
0x78000000 - 0x78ffffff  N N  Outbound Write Flush
0x79000000 - 0x7c0fffff  N N  PCI IACK/Config/IO
0x80000000 - 0xffffffff  N Y  PCI Memory 

Resource Usage

The flash based RedBoot image occupies flash addresses 0x41000000 - 0x4103ffff. It also reserves the first 192K bytes of RAM for runtime uses. The RAM based RedBoot image occupies RAM addresses 0x30000 - 0x5ffff. RAM addresses from 0x60000 to the end of RAM are available for general use such as a temporary scratchpad for downloaded images before they are written to flash.

Timer3 is used as a polled timer to provide timeout support for networking and XModem file transfers.

Building eCos Test Cases to run with old RedBoots

If using older versions of RedBoot, the default configuration for EBSA-285 will send diagnostic output to the serial line only, not over an ethernet connection. To allow eCos programs to use RedBoot to channel diagnostic output to GDB whether connected by net or serial, enable the configuration option
CYGSEM_HAL_VIRTUAL_VECTOR_DIAG
"Do diagnostic IO via virtual vector table"
located here in the common HAL configuration tree:
"eCos HAL"
     "ROM monitor support"
          "Enable use of virtual vector calling interface"
              "Do diagnostic IO via virtual vector table"
Other than that, no special configuration is required to use RedBoot.

If you have been using built-in stubs to acquire support for thread-aware debugging, you can still do that, but you must only use the serial device for GDB connection and you must not enable the option mentioned above. However, it is no longer necessary to do that to get thread-awareness; RedBoot is thread aware.

Rebuilding RedBoot

The instructions in Chapter 3 should be followed. The values for TARGET, ARCH_DIR and PLATFORM_DIR on this platform are “ebsa285”, “arm” and “ebsa285” respectively. Note that the configuration export files supplied in the hal/arm/ebsa285/VERSION/misc directory in the RedBoot source tree should be used.