Dear Poh Kit,
What's the difference between setting up the system with libixprouter and VERA and plugging it into the PCI slot of a motherboard with a host processor and just flashing the boot ROM with Cygmon and booting a Linux kernel image on the original Intel chassis as shown at http://www.netwinder.org/~urnaik/ixp1200_howto.html ?
The main difference is that Princeton's Vera allows a programmer to have more computing power at his disposal if said, one is using the PC+SA+UE configuration. Note that Vera, being a multi-processors design, does not restrict itself to PC+SA+UE configuration. In the IXP1200 hardware reference manual Pg.31,2.7.1, Intel suggests that the SA core may be used in different ways, depending on the application. If the system contains a higher end processor like Pentium, SA can leave system maintenance to Pentium and runs a mini-kernel whilst the Pentium and IXP1200 communicate via PCI bus. Vera accomplishes exactly that. In design where no host processor like Pentium is available such as that described in netwinder, SA is seen as the main processor and runs an RTOS. Vera's router infrastructure and the router in Intel reference designs use different data structures. In short, we have 2 different routers using the IXP1200 board.
Also, are there any archives of the IXP1200 mailing list which I can go through. This would give me a clearer view of the picture much faster and maybe avoid asking questions which may have already been asked before.:)
do "index ixp1200" to retrieve the archive. do "get ixp1200 filename" to get the specified file in the archive. kind regards, cheewei