not that good

Been a while now since I wrote something here. Meanwhile I upgraded the SDRAM from 32M to 64M in the hope some programs would give better results. The upgrade was successful after also flashing a new Uboot. I started to test my programs on the 64M.

First the mplayer with playing a song an AAC format. The problem of stopping in the middle of the song wasn't resolved. The strange thing is that when lancing the mplayer using the strace utility the song is playing til the end. Postting a couple of threads on avrfeaks didn't bring a solution.

The second was playing around with my lighttpd webserver running on the NGW. Again the problems I had with my normal website pages remained. The webserver starts to transfer but half way it hangs. Even with no large files here. Also the problem of large files was not resolved with having more ram memory.

It's pitty because my proof of concept was ready to go. But I definitly need the other programs to work correctly to build a nice modern system. In my opinion the linux port for AVR32 has a great lack on matureness. Especially on the low level architecture depend layers like the SD card driver and the TCP/IP communication. I already posted mail to atmel engineering to look in some issues I discovered when testing these layers. This was his final answer:

"... As you say, this is not the sort of usage embedded systems are typically designed for. I agree, of course, that this should be improved, and appreciate that the issue is brought to our awareness. However, it might delay some time before this is given priority... "

Personally I think that the linux port for ARM targets is far more evolved than for the AVR32. AVR32 still misses a bit on popularity and is also rather new comparing to the ARM7/9.
Maybe some day this will change as the AVR32 starts to find his way in hand-held devices.

Conclusion:

I take a break working on this target now. As I saw some possibilities with the FTDI chips. The latest types are very powerful. They even can communicate directly with I2C buses. So I ordered a development kit based on this technology of the FT2232D type. The intention is combining this chip directly with a PC platform. But as I considered this out of topic of this blog I will start a brand new one and keep you posted over there. Maybe I will retake the AVR32 some day when I have some news of the Atmel engineering.