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Release Notes for Linux on Intel's IXP2000 Network Processor

Maintained by Deepak Saxena <dsaxena@plexity.net>
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1. Overview

Intel's IXP2000 family of NPUs (IXP2400, IXP2800, IXP2850) is designed
for high-performance network applications such high-availability
telecom systems. In addition to an XScale core, it contains up to 8
"MicroEngines" that run special code, several high-end networking 
interfaces (UTOPIA, SPI, etc), a PCI host bridge, one serial port,
flash interface, and some other odds and ends. For more information, see:

http://developer.intel.com/design/network/products/npfamily/ixp2xxx.htm

2. Linux Support

Linux currently supports the following features on the IXP2000 NPUs:

- On-chip serial
- PCI
- Flash (MTD/JFFS2)
- I2C through GPIO
- Timers (watchdog, OS)

That is about all we can support under Linux ATM b/c the core networking
components of the chip are accessed via Intel's closed source SDK. 
Please contact Intel directly on issues with using those. There is
also a mailing list run by some folks at Princeton University that might
be of help:  https://lists.cs.princeton.edu/mailman/listinfo/ixp2xxx

WHATEVER YOU DO, DO NOT POST EMAIL TO THE LINUX-ARM OR LINUX-ARM-KERNEL
MAILING LISTS REGARDING THE INTEL SDK.

3. Supported Platforms

- Intel IXDP2400 Reference Platform
- Intel IXDP2800 Reference Platform
- Intel IXDP2401 Reference Platform
- Intel IXDP2801 Reference Platform
- RadiSys ENP-2611

4. Usage Notes

- The IXP2000 platforms usually have rather complex PCI bus topologies
  with large memory space requirements. In addition, b/c of the way the
  Intel SDK is designed, devices are enumerated in a very specific
  way. B/c of this this, we use "pci=firmware" option in the kernel
  command line so that we do not re-enumerate the bus.

- IXDP2x01 systems have variable clock tick rates that we cannot determine 
  via HW registers. The "ixdp2x01_clk=XXX" cmd line options allow you
  to pass the clock rate to the board port.

5. Thanks

The IXP2000 work has been funded by Intel Corp. and MontaVista Software, Inc.

The following people have contributed patches/comments/etc:

Naeem F. Afzal
Lennert Buytenhek
Jeffrey Daly

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Last Update: 8/09/2004