uClinux on the Prisma and Prisma 40

Porting base

My Prisma port is based on uClinux/ColdFire. The initial port was based on the ColdFire release dated 5th January 2000 which in turn is based on the Linux kernel version 2.0.38. I have since updated it using the ColdFire release dated 6th July 2000. The cross-development environment has been installed on a PC running Slackware Linux 4.0.

Prisma Driver status

• Keyboard: supported through the terminal serial port.
• Screen: basic text output using the ROM routines.
• RS-232 ports: The mouse and joystick ports are supported as tty devices.
• Network: The Ethernet port is recognised as eth0 . Ping, telnetd and NFS are all working.
• SCSI: No support yet (although only sold as a diskless workstation, the Prisma does have a complete SCSI interface on the CPU board).

Prisma 40 Driver status

• Keyboard: no support.
• Screen: printk() only (using ROM routines).
• RS-232 ports: minimal support for serial console and for mouse on joystick port.
• Network: The Ethernet port is recognised as eth0 . Ping, telnetd and NFS are all working.

See what it looks like

OK, so a uClinux boot display is not very exciting but here they are anyway.

• uClinux booting on a Prisma
• uClinux booting on a Prisma 40

Network Performance

I have added the uClinux numbers to the table of network performance results. On the Prisma, it looks like uClinux has 20-30% better TCP throughput than Minix. I don't know if this is due to differences in the IP stack or in the driver.

How long did it take?

I started this project in January 2000 and progress so far has been very good. Having learned all about the hardware while doing the Minix port, it has been much easier to develop the uClinux drivers. See where the time went in this timeline.

Still to do on the Prisma

• Fix rts/cts handshake in serial driver.
• Write a console driver.
• Re-instate support for the 68881 FPU.
• Write a SCSI driver.

Still to do on the Prisma 40

• Lots of work on the serial interface.
• Write a console driver.
• Migrate from uClinux to Linux-68k.

uClinux Downloads

Download utilities and patches for uClinux on the Prisma.