Raphael Bossek provided the following announcement about the Embedded PowerPC Linux Boot Project (PPCBOOT), which has recently been transferred to SourceForge. The project seeks shared sponsorship of its development activities.

“I'm pleased to announce the Embedded PowerPC Linux Boot Project at ppcboot.sourceforge.net. With support from Wolfgang Denk, we can offer a flexible way to boot embedded PowerPC based devices using Linux. We are also looking for sponsors to support our development team in the future!”

About the PPCBOOT project

The Embedded PowerPC Linux Boot Project (PPCBOOT) intends to implement a common and easily extensible boot program for embedded devices. The entire project source code is released under the GNU General Public License (GPL), and takes advantage of an open development process at SourceForge.net, the highly popular portal of open source software development.

In the embedded world, it is very important to provide a flexible way of configuring the system environment. Accordingly, one of the project's primary goals is to achieve a very flexible way of configuring PPCBOOT. Developers must be able to decide which components are really needed within the actual target system.

It is also important to auto-detect hardware components at runtime, for example flash memory sizes or CPU, in order to allow flexible extention of PowerPC hardware to be possible without needing to change the code.

Another project goal is to support many standard off-the-shelf boards, in order to help speed up the development process at the beginning of new projects.

Future plans

Features like TFTP, BOOTP, or PCMCIA device support are the next goals. Support for other devices such as USB or FireWire will also be implemented in the future, given sufficient interest.

It is expected that the PowerPC Linux community will contribute code to PPCBOOT, to extend its functionality with many new useful features.

Additional details are available here.

 
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