Re: [Qemu-devel] SMP for PReP architecture

[Alexander Graf]

On 02.07.2012, at 12:10, Eli Lewis wrote:

>>> I need to modify
> 
>>> and test a very simple kernel (actually running on a single-core only) on
>>> a multi-core PReP platform; I currently have no real multi-core HW so I am 
>> looking
>>> for a multi-core PReP emulator. 
>> 
>> Why would anyone do PReP today still?
> 
> 
> Good
> question :-) 
> 
> I
> am working on an European project about real-time embedded systems and we are
> interested in modifying a real-time kernel for PowerPC. The most simplest RTOS
> we found was POK, a kernel that supports PReP BSP
> only (actually it runs also on x86 and Leon3 but we were interested in 
> PowerPc). So we modified POK and performed some experiment on single core, 
> now we would
> like to modifyand run it on a
> multicore.

Well, PReP is dead since the mid-90's, no [1]? :) I'd be surprised if you could 
get recent hardware still supporting it. Plus, I don't think it really makes 
all that much sense. PReP is basically a 90's x86 machine with PPC CPU. Not 
exactly what you'd consider elegant design.

Why not go for something that has a bit wider architecture support and 
multi-core support built in, like rtems?

  http://wiki.rtems.org/wiki/index.php/BoardSupportPackageInformation

That would allow you to go with actual available hardware, like something based 
on FSL e500 or AMCC 44x cores. For e500, we even have SMP emulation support in 
QEMU.


Alex

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PReP