Main Page

Welcome to the XINU for Routers Main Page. This is for developing documentation for our development process over the summer of 2006. As this is a wiki, you can sign up and begin adding and editing content, uploading images, and generating the needed documentation for our efforts.

As fair warning from a certain professor, this should be very comprehendable and well written. Below is a rough outline of what should be documented, it is very flexible so feel free to change it as you see fit. Add links to any sites you need to reference and (hopefully) once this is fairly completed we will be able to export it in a plaintext or static html format--since I don't want to host it on my server forever...

Project Outline

• Goals

1. Infect WRT54GL Routers with a XINU kernel
2. Develop XINU to a point where it can control the router's basic functions
3. Use this platform for a course in embedded systems and/or networking

• Hardware (Mod that LinkSys!)
  • Why we add serial ports
  • How we add serial ports
    • Pictures of building
    • Wiring Diagrams
    • Chip Diagrams
• Software
  • How to connect to a modified router
  • Our Project's Directory Structure
  • And then there was light: the Common Firmware Environment
    • Interacting with the CFE Command Line Interface
    • Fun freebies in the CFE API
    • How code can Interface with CFE
  • OpenWRT (When all else fails, steal it from Linux!)
    • Important OpenWRT places of interest
  • XINU (an O/S of our own)

More Research

• TODO: (concrete tasks)
  • Lab Setup Tasks
    • Automate the tftp boot process, so that by default the routers pull down their image from morbius.
    • In the RS-232 in the infrastructure for remotely accesible power cycling.
  • XINU Tasks
    • Port libxc from xinu-ppc so that it compiles and works in xinu-mips
    • ...
• TOTHINK: (abstract goals and wishlists)
  • Learn more about the memory structure
  • Get interrupts working?
  • Figure out silicon backplane stuff?
  • Is there a better way to get serial port info?
  • How do we access flash memory?