README.boston

MIPS Boston Development Board

---------
  About
---------

The MIPS Boston development board is built around an FPGA & 3 PCIe controllers,
one of which is connected to an Intel EG20T Platform Controller Hub which
provides most connectivity to the board. It is used during the development &
testing of both new CPUs and the software support for them. It is essentially
the successor of the older MIPS Malta board.

--------
  QEMU
--------

U-Boot can be run on a currently out-of-tree branch of QEMU with support for
the Boston board added. This QEMU code can currently be found in the "boston"
branch of git://git.linux-mips.org/pub/scm/paul/qemu.git and used like so:

  $ git clone git://git.linux-mips.org/pub/scm/paul/qemu.git -b boston
  $ cd qemu
  $ ./configure --target-list=mips64el-softmmu
  $ make
  $ ./mips64el-softmmu/qemu-system-mips64el -M boston -m 2G \
      -bios u-boot.bin -serial stdio

Please note that QEMU will default to emulating the I6400 CPU which implements
the MIPS64r6 ISA, and at the time of writing doesn't implement any earlier CPUs
with support for the CPS features the Boston board relies upon. You will
therefore need to configure U-Boot to build for MIPSr6 in order to obtain a
binary that will work in QEMU.

-------------
  Toolchain
-------------

If building for MIPSr6 then you will need a toolchain including GCC 5.x or
newer, or the Codescape toolchain available for download from Imagination
Technologies:

  http://codescape-mips-sdk.imgtec.com/components/toolchain/2015.06-05/

The "IMG GNU Linux Toolchain" is capable of building for all current MIPS ISAs,
architecture revisions & both endiannesses.

--------
  TODO
--------

  - AHCI support
  - CPU driver
  - Exception handling (+UHI?)
  - Flash support
  - IOCU support
  - L2 cache support
  - More general LCD display driver
  - Multi-arch-variant multi-endian fat binary