Author Topic: Build Your Own Linux Powered Pda  (Read 214207 times)

Da_Blitz

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« Reply #345 on: July 18, 2006, 03:33:14 am »
keyboard is nice but too big

i was under the impresion that the cerrunt Z keyboards are membrane bassed and not switches. the mebrane keypads give the option for the metal dome (yaou have to look for it in the links i gave out)

32bit all the way, i am aware of the LCD causing that much of a performance hit however i belive the flash is a performance penalty comes from times where you need data from flash and DDR ram at the same time (ie watching a moive) also some have mentioned audio work with this thing.

ethier way i have repetadly said that i only want a small flash area to bootload so it dosent matter how the flash is connected, it just seems to be easier to interface to if we chuck it on the 8 bit bus as i dont see the flash chips as needing high speed acsess

i know putting the flash on the ddr bus makes wireing simpler, i will have to check the boot diagrams and see how placing the flash there will affect the over starting of the CPU
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« Reply #346 on: July 18, 2006, 03:56:55 am »
Quote
keyboard is nice but too big

i was under the impresion that the cerrunt Z keyboards are membrane bassed and not switches. the mebrane keypads give the option for the metal dome (yaou have to look for it in the links i gave out)

32bit all the way, i am aware of the LCD causing that much of a performance hit however i belive the flash is a performance penalty comes from times where you need data from flash and DDR ram at the same time (ie watching a moive) also some have mentioned audio work with this thing.

ethier way i have repetadly said that i only want a small flash area to bootload so it dosent matter how the flash is connected, it just seems to be easier to interface to if we chuck it on the 8 bit bus as i dont see the flash chips as needing high speed acsess

i know putting the flash on the ddr bus makes wireing simpler, i will have to check the boot diagrams and see how placing the flash there will affect the over starting of the CPU
[div align=\"right\"][a href=\"index.php?act=findpost&pid=135511\"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a][/div]


The flash isn't on the SDRAM bus, it is separate, unless you are talking about the core side of the arbiter, then it is unavoidable and moot because everything is contending for this bus. If booting is all that the flash is needed for then I agree totally, keep it as simple as possible. I do like the idea of XIP tho' ( although it appears I am the only one  ). XIP will also give an advantage when the bus does get clogged with graphics data. because the GPU and IPU can operate without CPU intervention and using DMA around the CPU busses you can effectively get 100 % of flash bandwidth to run from, as opposed to 25% of SDRAM bandwidth.

We don't want to get bogged down with semantics anyway

I think I mis understood what you meant by membrane and keyswitch. I thought you were thinking of something along the lines of a cheap calculator style membrane, or one like on the ZX80, and keyswitches along the lines of..well a keyboard switch

If there are keyboards avaialable off the shelf, then that is the way to go. It will be very hard to make a keyboard from scratch. Getting a scratch built case to fit will be get the maker huge kudos

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« Reply #347 on: July 18, 2006, 04:01:52 am »
How about breaking this up into seperate threads....

starting new threads for keyboard, screen, memory, expansion. It seems that this thread is too large and daunting to any newcomers to the project. Can we talk the admins into giving us our own section?

Da_Blitz

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« Reply #348 on: July 18, 2006, 04:08:55 am »
I was under the impression you wanted to put the flash on the same bus as the DDR using WIEM stuff. i guess that is where the confusion is comming from (seems to be alot of that here i will ask for that seperate fourm)

XIP is nice but with huge amounts of RAM (ie greater than 64MB) i dont see the point really as i would expect the program to be running out of cache rather than directly from the DDR RAM. running form flash rather than cache would cause a huge performance hit so i would avoid it however there are times when XIP is handy

but yes the flash is only to bootload thats why i say to chuck it on that little 8bit buss that was designed for the specific purpose of booting the device

with the keyboard i am thinking that we make the bottons as large as posible with no gap between them so that we only have to cut out a huge rectangle and push it throgh.

yeah i should have clarified on the membrane keyboard, i dont like that no tactile feedback style ethier
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Da_Blitz

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« Reply #349 on: July 18, 2006, 04:09:57 am »
sorry lag

anyway it has been sugested we break this up and i will asap.

i will send the email off tonight
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« Reply #350 on: July 18, 2006, 04:12:48 am »
Quote
I was under the impression you wanted to put the flash on the same bus as the DDR using WIEM stuff. i guess that is where the confusion is comming from (seems to be alot of that here i will ask for that seperate fourm)

XIP is nice but with huge amounts of RAM (ie greater than 64MB) i dont see the point really as i would expect the program to be running out of cache rather than directly from the DDR RAM. running form flash rather than cache would cause a huge performance hit so i would avoid it however there are times when XIP is handy

but yes the flash is only to bootload thats why i say to chuck it on that little 8bit buss that was designed for the specific purpose of booting the device

with the keyboard i am thinking that we make the bottons as large as posible with no gap between them so that we only have to cut out a huge rectangle and push it throgh.

yeah i should have clarified on the membrane keyboard, i dont like that no tactile feedback style ethier
[div align=\"right\"][a href=\"index.php?act=findpost&pid=135519\"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a][/div]


But WEIM doesn't sit on the SDRAM bus. Also I wasn't thinking of making the flash non-cacheable, but was thinking of not having it copied to RAM to execute. You can have the Flash cacheable, no problem there, it just seems a waste to me in an embedded environment to copy code from flash to execute rather than just XIP. Again, it does not mean it is not cached.

Da_Blitz

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« Reply #351 on: July 18, 2006, 04:33:43 am »
cant really see any infomation to prove or disprove the WEIM  stuff, as far as i could tell the adress and data pins are all shared between the EMI stuff if it isnt, then think of the posabilities

if this is the case then i may bring back the CF slot

i can see your point about XIP in that case however we are only really using it to boot and i was going to use squashFS on it which would mean no XIP
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« Reply #352 on: July 18, 2006, 04:50:34 am »
Quote
cant really see any infomation to prove or disprove the WEIM  stuff, as far as i could tell the adress and data pins are all shared between the EMI stuff if it isnt, then think of the posabilities

if this is the case then i may bring back the CF slot

i can see your point about XIP in that case however we are only really using it to boot and i was going to use squashFS on it which would mean no XIP
[div align=\"right\"][a href=\"index.php?act=findpost&pid=135523\"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a][/div]
aaah, so the CF has gone? If you are just thinking of using the flash to boot, why does it affect whether there is a CF in the system?

lardman

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« Reply #353 on: July 18, 2006, 05:35:55 am »
You can create an irc channel on irc.freenode.net by just typing "/join <some name here>". I suggested one earlier, but I think we'd want it logged otherwise it's again going to lose info. Koen, how does one employ ibot to do logging?

Another alternative is to break the info up on the wiki, but it's still inaccessible...


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Da_Blitz

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« Reply #354 on: July 18, 2006, 05:43:00 am »
No if there is no performance hit from the CF card because it has its own dedicated IO pins then i will reintroduce it
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« Reply #355 on: July 18, 2006, 06:06:17 am »
So at that point would we lose the internal ATA, or just have both? (Like a C4X Zaurus) I'm going to assume that the 16bit CF bus will be slower than the 32bit ATA. . .

If you've ever dismantled a Nokia phone, they have a rubber layer, and those minature SMD keyswitches underneath (The rubber is just a set of buttons).

Would that work? We could use a transparent silicon-based rubber for the keypad, although we'd have to find somewhere to mould it for us.

A small gap between keys is preferrable over no gap between keys, even if it's just a thin crack line. (See the Motorola Razr keyboard.) I do alot of keyboard work by feel, so it helps me alot if i can tell when I've actually changed key.

Also, to use MDDR we'd need 8 chips for the full 512mb memory we're looking at. In an MSN conversation with DB, we were looking at using 2 standard DDR chips, which come in much larger values than MDDR - 512MB by two chips will probably not take much more power than 512 by 8 M chips, and will save alot of our precious board space.

Ok, I'm happy with the initial Bootloader being permanent etc etc. If I can boot AROS then I'm happy. (Even though the port isn't even done yet.)

Maybe we should start up OEHF.org?
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« Reply #356 on: July 18, 2006, 06:11:18 am »
So at that point would we lose the internal ATA, or just have both? (Like a C4X Zaurus) I'm going to assume that the 16bit CF bus will be slower than the 32bit ATA. . .

If you've ever dismantled a Nokia phone, they have a rubber layer, and those minature SMD keyswitches underneath (The rubber is just a set of buttons).

Would that work? We could use a transparent silicon-based rubber for the keypad, although we'd have to find somewhere to mould it for us.

A small gap between keys is preferrable over no gap between keys, even if it's just a thin crack line. (See the Motorola Razr keyboard.) I do alot of keyboard work by feel, so it helps me alot if i can tell when I've actually changed key.

Also, to use MDDR we'd need 8 chips for the full 512mb memory we're looking at. In an MSN conversation with DB, we were looking at using 2 standard DDR chips, which come in much larger values than MDDR - 512MB by two chips will probably not take much more power than 512 by 8 M chips, and will save alot of our precious board space.

Ok, I'm happy with the initial Bootloader being permanent etc etc. If I can boot AROS then I'm happy. (Even though the port isn't even done yet.)

Maybe we should start up OEHF.org?
Cortana: PXA250/Poodle: OZ/GPE 3.4.2RC1
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Nemuri Neko

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« Reply #357 on: July 18, 2006, 06:58:29 am »
Quote
No if there is no performance hit from the CF card because it has its own dedicated IO pins then i will reintroduce it
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It will definitely stall the SDRAM, also because of the async nature it could slow things down unacceptably. I'm not a fan of CF anyway, there is nothing that it cannot do that could not be done faster and better with SD or USB. Looks like some sort of consensus is breaking out  anyway, we definitely need a faster way to knock ideas back and forth..

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« Reply #358 on: July 18, 2006, 07:19:19 am »
What you say here about the EMI contradicts what has been said earlier

if it stalls the SDRAM then it must share the SDRAM adress and data pins if so then i will avoid it as it is WAY to slow

i still dont think everyone is on the same page. it seems that some points have already been adressed in other posts that people have not read or do not understand. i will clean up the wiki and post the overview here to clear it up. we are getting to much fragmentation here

as for the CF vs ATA, think 16MB/s vs 66MB/s with DMA acsess. (not that that really means anything) and also think shared bus vs dedicated bus. keeping in mind that the CF card might not reach that speed and those are theroaticl maximums
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« Reply #359 on: July 18, 2006, 08:41:14 am »
Quote
What you say here about the EMI contradicts what has been said earlier

if it stalls the SDRAM then it must share the SDRAM adress and data pins if so then i will avoid it as it is WAY to slow

i still dont think everyone is on the same page. it seems that some points have already been adressed in other posts that people have not read or do not understand. i will clean up the wiki and post the overview here to clear it up. we are getting to much fragmentation here

as for the CF vs ATA, think 16MB/s vs 66MB/s with DMA acsess. (not that that really means anything) and also think shared bus vs dedicated bus. keeping in mind that the CF card might not reach that speed and those are theroaticl maximums
[div align=\"right\"][a href=\"index.php?act=findpost&pid=135545\"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a][/div]

It's all in the nature of the transactions. Only the Address pins are multiplexed between WEIM and SDRAM, and because of the burst nature of the transactions they will not interfere too much with each other. Because each is actually attached to a different arbiter it is my understanding that these transactions can overlap, in that one can start before the other finishes. Even within the same arbiter they can and will overlap, being held until a slot is ready. Now the WEIM flash interface because it is fast, and because it is on a different path ( ie internal bus in the memory interface ) will not slow down the SDRAM access to any noticable degree. When DMA is underway for the graphics subsystem, then the WEIM will rarely "interfere" with these transactions because of the overlapping or interleaved transactions. With the PCMCIA things are totally different, in that a transaction can be slow, very slow, and held off by the PCMCIA card ( or CF card ) using the control pins. From my reading of the datasheets, this "beat" of a transaction will not be split or aborted, and thus will cause overall system degredation. To a lesser extent ( much lesser ) the NAND interface suffers the same problem. It can have relatively slow transactions, but when a single "beat" of a transaction is complete the arbiter will throw it off the bus if something else comes along. The request from the SDRAM controller is cascaded down to the peripheral arbiter, and so will take highest priority.

The address phase of each burst transaction is a small percentage of the total transaction time that it should not impact noticeably on the other arbiter.

The NAND controller decouples from the SDRAM bus by using the NAND IO bus, which is comparitively slow when put against the WEIM, not particulary efficient, but is easier to hook up.

Again all this is moot in that if you are only using the flash to boot then it is as good to put it on NAND controller. It will be a little slower to boot and launch off of, but I doubt anyone would notice.

I think you are getting hung up on the shared/dedicated bus thing. The NAND bus will always be slower than the WEIM. The SDRAM will barely be slowed by the WEIM, and the flash on the WEIM will produce a faster system. As you do not intend to run from flash then it doesn't matter. If you intend to load apps from flash, then again I would consider the WEIM.