which can be synthesised in Altera FPGAs. An altera_sdcardc device
probes during the boot, and /dev/altera_sdcard devices come and go as
inserted and removed. The device driver attaches directly to the
Nexus, as is common for system-on-chip device drivers.
This IP core suffers a number of significant limitations, including a
lack of interrupt-driven I/O -- we must implement timer-driven polling,
only CSD 0 cards (up to 2G) are supported, there are serious memory
access issues that require the driver to verify writes to memory-mapped
buffers, undocumented alignment requirements, and erroneous error
returns. The driver must therefore work quite hard, despite a fairly
simple hardware-software interface. The IP core also supports at most
one outstanding I/O at a time, so is not a speed demon.
However, with the above workarounds, and subject to performance
problems, it works quite reliably in practice, and we can use it for
read-write mounts of root file systems, etc.
Sponsored by: DARPA, AFRL
CPU cores on Altera FPGAs. The device driver allows memory-mapped devices
on Altera's Avalon SoC bus to be exported to userspace via device nodes.
device.hints directories dictate device name, permissible access methods,
physical address and length, and I/O alignment. Devices can be accessed
using read(2)/write(2), but also memory mapped in userspace using mmap(2).
Devices attach directly to the Nexus, as is common for embedded device
drivers; in the future something more mature might be desirable. There is
currently no facility to support directing device-originated interrupts to
userspace.
In the future, this device driver may be renamed to socgen(4), as it can
in principle also be used with other system-on-chip (SoC) busses, such as
Axi on ASICs and FPGAs. However, we have only tested it on Avalon busses
with memory-mapped ROMs, frame buffers, etc.
Sponsored by: DARPA, AFRL
