Old project completed around 1H 2014. I found the Amber Core on opencores.org and using a Google translation of porting instructions for Marshod2 board, I was able to load the Amber 32bit SoC onto the DE0-Nano board. This is a Quartus II project called "mARM" from the hw/marshod2 directory.
Overall the project was successful, but generally, the organization is a mess as I wasn't using Github or any versioning system.
Starting from the baseline of the Marshod2 porting instructions that was translated from Google, I followed the steps outlined in the document, updating to Cyclone IV, 32Mbytes of SDRAM memory and pinout for FPGA. For the Software portion, I had to make some adjustments to the Address Map.
Original system Marshod2-Altera Cyclone III based board, 8 MBytes of memory.
- Adjusted to 32 MBytes of memory with WB_SDRAM_CTRL core.
- Added TTL serial to USB adapters for console/serial ports
- LEDs show system reset, system ready and GPIO 2-7
- Added SPI
- Removed Ethernet
I was able to load Linux from vmlinux-my in SW directory. It is Linux 2.4, so it is very Old version and is of limited use.
Also provided is an in-system memory tester in the memtest3 directory; it must be loaded from the bootloader. A version that runs in place of the bootloader is in the memtest-ldr directory
UART baud: 921600
> b 700000
Send file w/1K Xmodem protocol from terminal emulator now...
CC> l
Send file w/1K Xmodem protocol from terminal emulator now...
CCCCCCCCCCCCC
elf split
> j 80000
j 0x00080000
Linux version 2.4.27-vrs1 (nick@ubuntu) (gcc version 4.5.2 (Sourcery G++ Lite 2011.03-46) ) #1 Tue Jan 22 23:48:37 PST 2013
CPU: Amber 2 revision 0
Machine: Amber-FPGA-System
On node 0 totalpages: 256
zone(0): 256 pages.
zone(1): 0 pages.
zone(2): 0 pages.
Kernel command line: console=ttyAM0 mem=8M root=/dev/ram
19.91 BogoMIPS (preset value used)
Memory: 8MB = 8MB total
Memory: 6304KB available (783K code, 222K data, 64K init)
Dentry cache hash table entries: 4096 (order: 0, 32768 bytes)
Inode cache hash table entries: 4096 (order: 0, 32768 bytes)
Mount cache hash table entries: 4096 (order: 0, 32768 bytes)
Buffer cache hash table entries: 8192 (order: 0, 32768 bytes)
Page-cache hash table entries: 8192 (order: 0, 32768 bytes)
POSIX conformance testing by UNIFIX
Linux NET4.0 for Linux 2.4
Based upon Swansea University Computer Society NET3.039
Initializing RT netlink socket
Starting kswapd
ttyAM0 at MMIO 0x16000000 (irq = 1) is a WSBN
pty: 256 Unix98 ptys configured
Serial driver version 5.05c (2001-07-08) with no serial options enabled
ttyS00 at 0x03f8 (irq = 10) is a 16450
ttyS01 at 0x02f8 (irq = 10) is a 16450
RAMDISK driver initialized: 16 RAM disks of 208K size 1024 blocksize
NET4: Linux TCP/IP 1.0 for NET4.0
IP Protocols: ICMP, UDP, TCP
IP: routing cache hash table of 4096 buckets, 32Kbytes
TCP: Hash tables configured (established 4096 bind 8192)
NET4: Unix domain sockets 1.0/SMP for Linux NET4.0.
RAMDISK: ext2 filesystem found at block 0
RAMDISK: Loading 200 blocks [1 disk] into ram disk... done.
Freeing initrd memory: 208K
VFS: Mounted root (ext2 filesystem) readonly.
Freeing init memory: 64K
BINFMT_FLAT: Loading file: /sbin/init
Mapping is 2b0000, Entry point is 8068, data_start is 8e4c
Load /sbin/init: TEXT=2b0040-2b8e4c DATA=2b8e50-2b8e83 BSS=2b8e83-2b8e88
start_thread(regs=0x21f9fa4, entry=0x2b8068, start_stack=0x2affb4)
Hello, World!
