[Arm-netbook] Marvell Armada and Other ARM Open hardware Software News

[Bari Ari]

On 09/01/2011 04:54 PM, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton wrote:
>   _wowww_ i just looked these up, and... what do you know about these:
>   http://www.st.com/internet/mcu/product/164476.jsp
There are several vendors of inexpensive ARM SOC's that can be used as 
EC's including NXP and TI

http://ics.nxp.com/lpczone/

http://focus.ti.com/mcu/docs/mculuminaryprodsearch.tsp?sectionId=95&tabId=2485&familyId=1755
>
>   and... yaay!
>   http://www.hermann-uwe.de/blog/libopenstm32-a-free-software-firmware-library-for-stm32-arm-cortex-m3-microcontrollers
>
>   ok so.... that looks... damn good!  some of them even have DACs,
> PWMs, USB, SDIO and so on.  so, not only could it do power management,
> gpio and so on, but also it could act as the SD/MMC card reader, the
> Mic / Speaker Audio IC,
>
>   so what's the deal with coreboot?  what's the link there?  i'm just
> asking, because if the overall design is to use an ARM Cortex A9
> embedded CPU as the main processor, and say these STM32s for the I/O
> handling, i'm not entiiirely certain where coreboot would come in to
> that :)
>
coreboot might be used for the firmware to initialize the ARM Cortex A9 
the same as u-boot is often used. coreboot shines over u-boot in more 
complex systems where PCI, PCIe, SAS, SATA, etc. are utilized and must 
be initialized before a kernel is loaded.

For systems like netbooks and notebooks an EC is used to offload the 
power management, battery charging, keyboard scan, gpio, lid 
open/closed, status leds etc. from the main CPU. The EC runs it's own 
firmware as well. In the x86 world the EC and the CPU use ACPI for 
control. An ARM system isn't tied to ACPI. The OLPC X0-1.75 developed 
their own firmware and protocol between the EC and ARM SOC.  
http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/openec/2011-January/000158.html
EC-1.75 was written for an 8051 EC but it could be used as a reference 
for use in a system with an ARM M3 as the EC.

-Bari