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I'm curious whether there are developers around here who have already tried OS development on an embedded platform, more specifically some network (dsl/wireless) router? A change im our home setup has brought me an old Netgear WG602 (v1) wireless access point for me to fiddle with, and after some searching, I found quite some information about the inner setup of the device, as well as compatible linux kernel and tool sources. This brought me to the idea to port my OS (at some point in the future) to this platform. It's just an idea for now.
I'm just interested if there is someone who had a similar idea before and maybe has some experiences to share.
I have started to work on my network OS. It is desinged to be run on cisco routers. Right now my test bed is the ultra cheap 2500 series. They are based on the motorolla 68EC030 processor.
Great! Just one question: Do you use the JTAG-port on the board for debugging, and if yes, how do you use it (I mean, where did you get the software)? I think it's probably better to use it, otherwise you'd have to reflash the device everytime you want to test something, thus quite easily trashing the flash. Unfortunately, I've not yet found free jtag debugging software for my board.
My device is based on the IDT 79RC32334 microprocessor, an embedded MIPS processor. As soon as I have time (holidays), I'll activate the soldering iron and attach the serial port, to get some basic debugging information. But again, the JTAG port would be much more interesting. ::)
There is always Linksys's WRT54G wireless router, my mate was messing around with one over last summer and there is a lot of custom firmware for it plus free JTAG software and etc.
Actually the cisco routers have the great feature to boot from tftp. I boot into the normal cisco OS and set the boot command to load from tftp <my-ip> and everytime it reboots it will load that into memory. Makes it real nice. All I have to do to make changes is recompile and then cp the image to /var/tftpboot.
I have been looking around and also cannot find any way to use the jtag port.
