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Craig Duffy & Edwin Langley - Bristol UWE

Porting uCLinux on a Coldfire processor: Writing Frame Buffer Drivers

This paper will look at the process of porting uClinux onto a Motorola Coldfire board, using the MCF5206e chip. This board, the Plu to 6, has been developed by Heber in the UK for use in gaming machines and gaming control systems. The company has traditionally relied upon an in-house development for its Pluto board but is exploring the extra resources that using an open source solution, such as uCLinux, could bring.

The paper will briefly outline the resources of the micro-controller and the board, and then go on to look at the general issues of porting a system such as uCLinux onto it.

We will then look in detail at the provision of graphics support within such developments. This will start by looking at the various ways that embedded systems have presented user information; from LEDs through LCDs to streaming video. The provision of graphics cards, controllers and frame buffers will then be discussed. We will then look at the stategies available to a developer when writing a kernel device driver for a frame buffer. The actual device we will discuss will be the Fujitsu MB86290A Cremson graphics controller used on the Calypso 32 graphics card.

We will then look at the graphics support available in such embedded systems as Xfree86, Nano-X and QT/Embedded, and see how easy these systems are to implement. This process of development will be graphically illustrated by a series of increasingly clearer Penguins that the board was able to display as development proceeded.