Re: An ARM CPU on the S100 bus

[Andrew Bingham <abin...@gmail.com>]

John,

I was trying to find information the other day on historical ARM CPUs thinking about this as well.

One thought though - would writing Linux drivers to use the GPIO pins on this module to interface with the S-100 IO boards be more or less difficult than writing Linux drivers to be able to use the 386 board, or re-spinning the 68000 board to support one of the later 68k versions that will run Linux?  In my mine it seems like we have at least a couple more "direct" options for Linux before going to the highly integrated module.

I'd like to see a HD6120 board.  But I have more things I'd "like to see" than time to make them happen.

Andrew

On Tuesday, July 29, 2014 10:58:58 AM UTC-7, monahanz wrote:

I have been doing some long term planning as to the direction I would take in doing new S100 boards.  To recap, we now have a 6502, Z80, 8080 (Josh), 68000, 8088, 8086, 80286 and soon an 80386 set of boards on the S1000 bus.  Andrew and I have already started laying out an 80486 board. 

 

Since I do a lot of flying on business I have time to read up on chips and recently I have been thinking what would be the best way to get ARM CPU's on the bus.  There are many types, and while one could start with a bare chip it does seem to make more sense to start with an embedded module.  There are many of these, most of which boot up Linux immediately.  One particular one I'm fairly impressed with is an Italian one called "Aria G25"   see:-

 

http://www.acmesystems.it/aria

 

Also it lends itself to easy pin splicing/layout on a board. It has good documentation and software support. I particularly like the fact that it has 60 GPIO pins.  These could be easily spliced into our S100 bus so we could use our current boards for I/O.  (In fact at 400MHz, one could also use the S100 RAM!).   I know some of you will view this as sticking a Lamborghini engine in a Volkswagen, but would it not be neat to see Linus running on the S100 bus.

 

Comments please, in particular I would be interested in any other similar modules.

 

John