Constant reboots on DSP Design's TB486 card

QNX Newsgroups (Archives) qdn.public.qnxrtp.installation
1

Hi everyone,

I’ve downloaded QNX RTP 6.1 ( the ISO image ),
and installed it on my home machine with no problems.

One of my other interests is electric cars, and I’d like
to use a TB486 card from DSP Design to monitor the battery
pack in the car I’m converting. It’s a 486 based card,
with the AMD Elan SC400 processor, Chips 65550 graphics, etc.
( see www.dspdesign.co.uk )

When I tried installing the RTP, it installed, but then when
it boots it gets as far as looking for the base .qfs filesystem,
and then reboots. I had installed to a 64 Mb CompactFlash card.
Perhaps this is just too small?

This board has a watchdog timer - maybe the RTP is clobbering this?

Has anyone got RTP running on this card, and if so, what special
steps did you have to take?

Thanks,

Richard Bebbington

2

Hi
I believe this has to do with the A20 line.
Try changing this setting in the BIOS.
Also, do contact DSP Design about this, I know they have
been working on a Starter Pack for QNX 6.

On Fri, 2 Nov 2001 17:37:53 +0000, Richard Bebbington <richard@rbebb.demon.co.uk> wrote:

Hi everyone,

I’ve downloaded QNX RTP 6.1 ( the ISO image ),
and installed it on my home machine with no problems.

One of my other interests is electric cars, and I’d like
to use a TB486 card from DSP Design to monitor the battery
pack in the car I’m converting. It’s a 486 based card,
with the AMD Elan SC400 processor, Chips 65550 graphics, etc.
( see > www.dspdesign.co.uk > )

When I tried installing the RTP, it installed, but then when
it boots it gets as far as looking for the base .qfs filesystem,
and then reboots. I had installed to a 64 Mb CompactFlash card.
Perhaps this is just too small?

This board has a watchdog timer - maybe the RTP is clobbering this?

Has anyone got RTP running on this card, and if so, what special
steps did you have to take?

Thanks,

Richard Bebbington

3

Alex Cellarius wrote:

Hi
I believe this has to do with the A20 line.
Try changing this setting in the BIOS.
Also, do contact DSP Design about this, I know they have
been working on a Starter Pack for QNX 6.

Hi Alex,

Thanks for that, I’ll give it a try - although I’ve
never understood what the A20 gate thing was all about…
…I’m an Amiga fanatic at heart so never had to worry
about that sort of stuff :wink:

I have talked to DSP about it, they suggested posting here!
They did say they know someone has had QNX RTP working on
their TB486 card, so it must be possible somehow…

Thanks,

Richard Bebbington

4

Earlier I wrote:


One of my other interests is electric cars, and I’d like
to use a TB486 card from DSP Design to monitor the battery
pack in the car I’m converting. It’s a 486 based card,
with the AMD Elan SC400 processor, Chips 65550 graphics, etc.
( see > www.dspdesign.co.uk > )

Sorry, I got the URL wrong!
Try www.dspdesign.com for info on the card.

Doh!

5

On Fri, 02 Nov 2001 22:28:40 +0000, “Richard.Bebbington” <electric.mini@ntlworld.com> wrote:

Alex Cellarius wrote:

Hi
I believe this has to do with the A20 line.
Try changing this setting in the BIOS.
Also, do contact DSP Design about this, I know they have
been working on a Starter Pack for QNX 6.


Hi Alex,

Thanks for that, I’ll give it a try - although I’ve
never understood what the A20 gate thing was all about…
…I’m an Amiga fanatic at heart so never had to worry
about that sort of stuff > :wink:

Cancel the previous advice about A20.
I’ve tried QNX 6.1.0 on the TB486 with a custom boot image and see exactly the
same symptom IF it’s got 4MB RAM.
Fitted with 32MB, no problem.
YMMV (ito RAM sizes) depending on what you are trying to run with.

How much memory (RAM) is fitted to the TB486?
Try fitting more RAM, or try out a custom boot image that consumes less memory.

The recommended route would be to install on a real desktop
computer, and to customise your boot image for the application & target
hardware.

6

In article 1104_1004911377@pentiumii, Alex Cellarius
<acellarius@systems104-don’t-you-spam-me!.co.za> writes

Cancel the previous advice about A20.
I’ve tried QNX 6.1.0 on the TB486 with a custom boot image and see exactly the
same symptom IF it’s got 4MB RAM.
Fitted with 32MB, no problem.
YMMV (ito RAM sizes) depending on what you are trying to run with.

How much memory (RAM) is fitted to the TB486?
Try fitting more RAM, or try out a custom boot image that consumes less memory.

I think the card I’ve got has 8 Megs, that might explain it…

As far as a custom boot image goes, I’ve done that before
for an Elan based product we designed in work, but that was
under QNX 4.25. How different is it for RTP ?

Thanks,

Richard Bebbington

7

Richard Bebbington <richard@rbebb.demon.co.uk> wrote:

In article 1104_1004911377@pentiumii, Alex Cellarius
acellarius@systems104-don’t-you-spam-me!.co.za> writes

Cancel the previous advice about A20.
I’ve tried QNX 6.1.0 on the TB486 with a custom boot image and see exactly the
same symptom IF it’s got 4MB RAM.
Fitted with 32MB, no problem.
YMMV (ito RAM sizes) depending on what you are trying to run with.

How much memory (RAM) is fitted to the TB486?
Try fitting more RAM, or try out a custom boot image that consumes less memory.

I think the card I’ve got has 8 Megs, that might explain it…

As far as a custom boot image goes, I’ve done that before
for an Elan based product we designed in work, but that was
under QNX 4.25. How different is it for RTP ?

Quite :slight_smile:

Check out:

http://qdn.qnx.com/articles/oct1901/Using_buildfiles.html

It explains this quite well.

Erick.


Thanks,

Richard Bebbington

8

Erick wrote:


As far as a custom boot image goes, I’ve done that before
for an Elan based product we designed in work, but that was
under QNX 4.25. How different is it for RTP ?


Quite > :slight_smile:

Check out:

http://qdn.qnx.com/articles/oct1901/Using_buildfiles.html

It explains this quite well.

Erick.

Thanks for that, together with the Embedded Systems pages,
I think I understand it now. I’ll give it a try, and see if I
can get it to boot up with just a console to start with.

As a (somewhat) related question, the company I work for did an
embedded Elan SC400 design, loosely based on the SC400 reference
platform for one of our clients.
QNX made a BSP for us, and later we did some “hacking” in the
low-level bootstrap loader ( we had no BIOS on board ) -

  • we set up the Elan AND we initialised the Chips 65545 chip to
    turn on the VGA in the mode we wanted.
    ( yeah, I know it’s horrible, goes against the modular QNX concept
    and is not portable, but I was voted down. :frowning: ).

My crazy question is this:

Could this loader work for QNX RTP, or will it be QNX 4.25 only?
i.e. could I use this binary to initialise the board and then
pass control to the Neutrino kernel?

The reason I’m asking is that we’ve got several of these boards
lying around, and I’d quite like to try RTP on them, but they have
no BIOS…



Regards,


Richard Bebbington

9

Hi Richard,

Actually I just found out something, the reason you were having
constant reboots was because the way the x86 image is setup
by default is so that it starts up it places the image
into memory at the 4M mark. In the case when you only had
4M, the image was getting placed in an area where there is
no memory. There is a way to override this, but I want to
test it out here first, just to make certain.

Keep reading throught the link I sent you as it will explain
alot as well.


Richard.Bebbington <electric.mini@ntlworld.com> wrote:

[clip]

Thanks for that, together with the Embedded Systems pages,
I think I understand it now. I’ll give it a try, and see if I
can get it to boot up with just a console to start with.

As a (somewhat) related question, the company I work for did an
embedded Elan SC400 design, loosely based on the SC400 reference
platform for one of our clients.
QNX made a BSP for us, and later we did some “hacking” in the
low-level bootstrap loader ( we had no BIOS on board ) -

  • we set up the Elan AND we initialised the Chips 65545 chip to
    turn on the VGA in the mode we wanted.
    ( yeah, I know it’s horrible, goes against the modular QNX concept
    and is not portable, but I was voted down. > :frowning: > ).

My crazy question is this:

Could this loader work for QNX RTP, or will it be QNX 4.25 only?
i.e. could I use this binary to initialise the board and then
pass control to the Neutrino kernel?

The reason I’m asking is that we’ve got several of these boards
lying around, and I’d quite like to try RTP on them, but they have
no BIOS…

There should be a os image in /boot/build for the sc400 already, so
there would be a good place to look. However the loader…hmmm depends
really, but in theory I think it should work.

Erick.


Regards,

Richard Bebbington

10

Hi Richard,

Ok, what you have to do is at the top of the OS build file
(if you are using 4M or less) you must have the following
line:

[image=0x1000000]

The examples say [image=1m] but I haven’t been able to
get that to work. So I used the line above which did.

Let me know if you are still having problems.

Thanks

Erick.


Hardware Support Account <hw@qnx.com> wrote:

Hi Richard,

Actually I just found out something, the reason you were having
constant reboots was because the way the x86 image is setup
by default is so that it starts up it places the image
into memory at the 4M mark. In the case when you only had
4M, the image was getting placed in an area where there is
no memory. There is a way to override this, but I want to
test it out here first, just to make certain.

Keep reading throught the link I sent you as it will explain
alot as well.



Richard.Bebbington <> electric.mini@ntlworld.com> > wrote:

[clip]

Thanks for that, together with the Embedded Systems pages,
I think I understand it now. I’ll give it a try, and see if I
can get it to boot up with just a console to start with.

As a (somewhat) related question, the company I work for did an
embedded Elan SC400 design, loosely based on the SC400 reference
platform for one of our clients.
QNX made a BSP for us, and later we did some “hacking” in the
low-level bootstrap loader ( we had no BIOS on board ) -

  • we set up the Elan AND we initialised the Chips 65545 chip to
    turn on the VGA in the mode we wanted.
    ( yeah, I know it’s horrible, goes against the modular QNX concept
    and is not portable, but I was voted down. > :frowning: > ).

My crazy question is this:

Could this loader work for QNX RTP, or will it be QNX 4.25 only?
i.e. could I use this binary to initialise the board and then
pass control to the Neutrino kernel?

The reason I’m asking is that we’ve got several of these boards
lying around, and I’d quite like to try RTP on them, but they have
no BIOS…



There should be a os image in /boot/build for the sc400 already, so
there would be a good place to look. However the loader…hmmm depends
really, but in theory I think it should work.

Erick.



Regards,

Richard Bebbington

11

Erick wrote:


Actually I just found out something, the reason you were having
constant reboots was because the way the x86 image is setup
by default is so that it starts up it places the image
into memory at the 4M mark. In the case when you only had
4M, the image was getting placed in an area where there is
no memory. There is a way to override this, but I want to
test it out here first, just to make certain.

Keep reading throught the link I sent you as it will explain
alot as well.

Ok, it’s useful to know about the 4M placing, but actually my
board has 16 Megs fitted. I believe Alex had tried it on a 4 Meg
board…
One quick question, the “0x1000000” value doesn’t seem to equal
4 meg bytes, what does it represent? 0x1000000 is actually
16,777,216 whatevers ( according to Windows calculator )

Perhaps it’s making the image be loaded at the 2meg point
( 16,777,216 / 8 = 2 megs )…

… so on my board, if I specified 0x4000000 , would it load in at
the 8 megs boundary?

Or am I just being a bit dumb at the moment?
( which is quite possible!!! :wink:



The reason I’m asking is that we’ve got several of these boards
lying around, and I’d quite like to try RTP on them, but they have
no BIOS…



There should be a os image in /boot/build for the sc400 already, so
there would be a good place to look. However the loader…hmmm depends
really, but in theory I think it should work.

Ok, I’ll dig around in there, my question was really
“Do we need to buy another BSP from you to get RTP to run at all”
Hopefully not, but one step at a time. I’ll try the DSP card first.


Thanks,


Richard Bebbington

12

Hi Erick,

Some good news - I’ve managed to create a bootable
floppy, and get Neutrino to load and stay running!
( no rebooting )
It’s an extremely basic system, I’ve just got serial
and parallel drivers running, but it’s stable

But now I have a new problem…

If I try to start devc-con, use “waitfor /dev/con1”
and then redirect stdio/stdout
and stderr to a console ( “reopen /dev/con1” )
the TB486 immediately reboots.

This even happens if I just start devc-con, but
don’t redirect stdin/stdout/stderr.
I’m sure there’s something obvious I’m missing, which
devc-con needs…


My build file is below.

Thanks

Richard

---------custom build file for TB486 booting from floppy-------
[image=0x100000]
[virtual=x86,bios] .bootstrap = {
startup-bios -D0x3f8.115200 -vv
PATH=/proc/boot procnto -vv
}

[+script] .script = {
display_msg Yeehaaw!

#start up driver for the 3 serial ports, ser3 is at 2E8, irq5
devc-ser8250 -b115200 -e -S 3F8,4 2F8,3 2E8,5 &

#start parallel port driver
devc-par &

#make sure serial driver is up and running
#before we try redirecting IO
waitfor /dev/ser1

#redirect IO onto ser1
reopen /dev/ser1
[+session pri=10r] PATH=/proc/boot esh &
}

[type=link] /usr/lib/ldqnx.so.2=/proc/boot/libc.so
[type=link] /dev/console=/dev/ser1

note, I change the line above to read

[type=link] /dev/console=/dev/con1

if I’m trying to start devc-con

libc.so

[data=c]
devc-ser8250
devc-con
devc-par
pidin
esh
ls
cd
use
------------------------end of build file----------------------

13

A few days ago I wrote:


Some good news - I’ve managed to create a bootable
floppy, and get Neutrino to load and stay running!

-snip-


But now I have a new problem…

If I try to start devc-con, use “waitfor /dev/con1”
and then redirect stdio/stdout
and stderr to a console ( “reopen /dev/con1” )
the TB486 immediately reboots.

Ok, I’m making a bit more progress, now have a boot floppy,
that “talks” to a qtalk session over a serial port, and can
mount a compactflash card connected to the IDE port.
I can type commands in and see the output ok.

But now it gets even wierder…

If I try to start devc-con, the TB486 immediately resets.

If I start devc-con with the -k option to disable the keyboard
interrupt handler, it works, but I can’t type anything into the
shell ( I expected this :wink:.

Aaarrgghh! What on earth’s going on?

( the TB486 uses IRQ1 for keyboard, and IRQ12 for PS2 mouse.
The are provided in hardware by a PC87306 SuperIO chip. )

Any advice gratefully received!

Richard Bebbington