Wolfgang,

Right now, code has been developed for two new boards from Freescale: the 8555CDS and the 8541CDS. These are the first introductions for a series of new boards in the "CDS" family. There are future variants of new boards within this family that will be introduced later.

The CDS Architecture is a modular system that allows a "board" to be built from pluggable modules. There is a backplane into which a carrier card is plugged. The carrier card has components like flash and SDRAM on it. The carrier card also has a place where different CPU modules can be plugged into it. Together, the carrier card and the CPU module form the "board" concept.

BOARD CPU MODULE CORE WHEN -------------------------------------- 8555CDS 8555 E500 NOW 8541CDS 8541 E500 NOW 85??CDS 85?? E500 PLAN 86??CDS 86?? 74xx(E600) PLAN

I can not be more precise on either the 85?? or the 86?? boards and CPUs as their details are not public yet. I use them as examples of the issues that need to be addressed. Note that each of the board names above is an individual product that already can be or soon will be a product offered by Freescale. It is expected that there will be many products offered on this platform.

The CPU support for the 85xxCDS boards is already available in the cpu/mpc85xx directory. Nothing needs to be done or modified for that.

However, I need to introduce a directory structure for the new Freescale family of CDS boards. There is some amount of shared code that can be leveraged in these boards due to the carrier-card based architecture specifically around areas like the SDRAM, flash, etc. There is also board-specific code like init.S that must be present for each of the different cores.

We would, of course, like to avoid duplicate code for the new CDS variants. Do you have a suggestion as to how we should properly introduce a directory structure for the CDS family and the individual boards?

Thanks, jdl