Date:	Sat, 19 Feb 2000 15:52:30 +0100 (CET)
From:	Bjorn Wesen <bjorn.wesen@axis.com>
To:	linux-kernel@vger.rutgers.edu
Subject: ANN: Axis releases Linux/CRIS, Bluetooth stack and JFFS

We (Axis Communcations AB, www.axis.com) would like to announce the
availability of our embedded Linux-port to our Thinserver network CPU
Etrax-100, including our Linux Bluetooth stack and our Journaling Flash
File System. Everything is under the GPL of course.

Linux/Etrax-100
---------------

The Etrax-100 is a low-cost 100 MHz 32-bit RISC architecture (CRIS)
optimized for Thinserver network connectivity and small code-size. It
includes on-chip interfaces for 10/100 mbit ethernet, SCSI, ATA, serial
ports and parallel ports. All interfaces support efficient scatter-gather
DMA directly to the system memory. It also has 2 general I/O ports,
supports EDO DRAM's as well as SRAM's, EPROM's and Flash-ROM's, and
features an 8 kB on-chip cache.

The Linux for Etrax-100 port was based on Linux 2.0.33 and the uC-linux
(www.uclinux.org) patches for disabling virtual memory (the Etrax-100
lacks an MMU). It includes drivers for all of the chips built-in
interfaces, a driver for the Axis ARTPEC-1 realtime JPG encoder chip as
well as some other drivers used by embedded systems like I2C, EEPROM, RTC
and infrared control.

A mailing-list for discussing Etrax-100 and the Linux port will come soon.
Please note that until that is up, we cannot give support on how to
compile and use the kernel.

Bluetooth stack
---------------

We have developed a Bluetooth stack for Linux, which currently supports
the LAN profile of Bluetooth (PPP over RFComm). It is still under
development and the kernel architecture is not finalized yet. In
particular, the stacks placement in the kernel related to the serial ports
and PPP line discipline might need tweaking. The stack works on both our
embedded Etrax Linux as well as a normal desktop Linux 2.0. It
communicates with the Bluetooth HW module through the serial port. Later
versions will communicate over USB.

We have set-up a majordomo mailing-list for further discussions and
development of this driver, see the URL's below for more information.
Suggestions on kernel integration are very welcome! The main problem is
that Bluetooth, kind of like USB, is designed to support a lot of quite
different data-streams and protocols.

Journaling Flash File System
----------------------------

Due to the fact that most embedded devices do not have a built-in
harddisk, we needed a way to safely store the r/w parts of the Linux
filesystem (in particular, configuration files) in the Flash-ROM. Because
of the flash-ROM's huge erasable sector-sizes (64 kB) and the need to
never pause for a fsck at boot-up or risk loosing data in a crash or
power-down, we chose to design and develop a log-structured journaling
file-system. It is optimized for the above mentioned Flash chips of
relatively small sizes - it is NOT designed to run on harddisks with
hundreds of thousands of files. But we believe it will come in handy for
people designing embedded Linux devices. It is designed for Linux 2.0 and
will probably require some modifications to run on Linux 2.2 or 2.4 later.

Please note that this is a stand-alone log-structured system, not a
wrapper around an existing block-based filesystem. 

Discussions about this should be directed to the (not yet
existing) Linux/Etrax mailing-list. In the meaintime, please ask the
designer below.

Further information
-------------------

To download the code and read more about our chips and technologies:

   http://developer.axis.com

To browse our products (in particular check out the Axis 2100
network-camera, which is the first shipping product running on
Linux/Etrax!):

   http://www.axis.com

Linux/Etrax kernel maintainer:    bjornw@axis.com

Bluetooth-stack development mailing-list: send email to
majordomo@axis.com with the line

subscribe bluetooth-dev

in the body of the email.

JFFS maintainer:     finn@axis.com



Best regards and hope some of you will have fun with the source!

/Bjorn

---                                                              ---
Bjorn Wesen, M.Sc. Eng. Physics          Technology Strategy Manager
Email: bjornw@axis.com    Phone: +46-46-385928    Fax: +46-46-136130
Axis Communications AB, Lund, Sweden   Visit us: http://www.axis.com



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