On Sun, Apr 14, 2002 at 09:24:31PM -0700, Charles Chiou wrote:
Hi,
I have been trying the VERA package for IXP1200. I have a couple of questions and would really appreciate it if you could respond to them.
Now, I am trying to use the libraries to compile a standalone application instead of using a linux host to download. I compile using a big-endian arm cross-compiler. I am getting some errors in Libcii (fmt.c), as well as ethernet port initialization, and systimer and a few other initialization routines. Has anybody successfully compiled IPmm or others to run as a standalone (with cygmon as boot loader) in big-endian mode? Are there any firmware-specific or big/little-endian portion of the libraries that needs to be ported?
We chose little-endian for VERA for simplicity: IXP1200 powers up in little-endian mode, the PCI bus is little-endian, and the Pentium is little-endian. That said, it shouldn't be too hard to make the libraries endian-agnostic where they currently are not. We have been writing the code with the idea that someday we might consider running big-endian. For now, it hasn't been an issue for us. Therefore, there are no-doubt places in the code which assume little-endian and will need to be updated. Dealing with the VERA firmware/start-up code is trickier. Sometime after powering-up into little-endian mode, the IXP1200 will need to switch to big-endian mode. As far as I know, no one has tried to get the VERA application code to run using the stock IXP1200 firmware. Scott