Mips32MaltaLinuxBootingInstructions

Booting Linux on the MIPS Malta Platform

Installing a small Linux 2.6 Ram Disk

The following installers are available for Windows and Linux. They include a Ramdisk and a Linux 2.6 Kernel

[for Windows] Malta Platform booting Linux2.6 (39.9 MB) MIPS Malta Virtual Platform and all peripherals that boots Linux 2.6 on single core MIPS 24K or dual core SMP Linux 2.6 on MIPS 34K. Available as source from library section of website.

[for Linux] Malta Platform booting Linux2.6 (46.25 MB) MIPS Malta Virtual Platform and all peripherals that boots Linux 2.6 on single core MIPS 24K or dual core SMP Linux 2.6 on MIPS 34K. Available as source from library section of website.

When downloaded install the Demo packages on your machine in a convenient location. This will create a skeleton OVP product installation or can be installed into an existing OVP installation and will create a directory IMPERAS_HOME/Demos/OVPsim_Linux_MipsMalta.

The directory OVPsim_Linux_MipsMalta contains the files:

OVP License

You will need an OVP license to run this platform. Please refer to the license page∞ for more details.

Running Linux

Double click on the ovpMipsMalta batch file or sh shell script - and you will get to see the Penguin...



You can then type linux commands in the VGA window. You will need to ctrl_Alt to get your cursor out of the VGA window, and you will need to ctrl_c in the simulation window when you are done.

Running SMP Linux

The version of the Linux kernel provided, in the above download, is compiled to include SMP support. If this is run on an SMP system, such as that provided by the MIPS 34K processor, it will boot in SMP mode.
You can change the processor variant used in the MipsMaltaLinux platform by changing the default variant, set to 24KEc, to the 34Kc variant. This has been done in the ovmMipsMaltaSMP scripts by modifying the variant argument variant 34Kc on the line invoking the simulation.

Start the simulation as described above; when booting SMP Linux you will see two penguins as shown in the figure below.

Installing a complete Debian distribution

This example has been updated to allow the use of the standard kernels downloadable from the Debian website. At this time it has been tested with wheezy and jessie. It should also work with later versions but has not been tested.

The following installers are available for Windows and Linux. They include an initial Ramdisk and a Linux 2.6 Kernel

[for Windows] Malta Platform Downloading Full Linux Distribution (17.66 MB) MIPS Malta Virtual Platform and all peripherals that runs Linux 2.6 Kernel on single core MIPS and performs a full linux distribution download and installation.

[for Linux] Malta Platform Downloading Full Linux Distribution (20.43 MB) MIPS Malta Virtual Platform and all peripherals that runs Linux 2.6 Kernel on single core MIPS and performs a full linux distribution download and installation.

To start the simulation double-click ovpInstallLinux.bat or run ovpInstallLinux.sh
Note: You will not be able to run any of the other scripts before a disk image is created with this script.

When prompted to create a disk image, select a size greater than 1GByte. For example, type 2 at the prompt to create a 2 gigabyte disk.

The complete installation will take a few hours to complete. A section in the document ?OVP MIPS Linux Platform User Guide? shows an example sequence of screenshots and provides an example of the options to select during the download. This is available in the document OVP_MIPS_Linux_Platform_User_Guide.pdf

Warning: When the installation is complete the simulation of Linux must be halted correctly so that Linux shuts down correctly and does not corrupt the disk image. This is described in the user guide mentioned above.

When you have completed the above the result is a full multi-user Linux running on the OVP MIPS Malta simulation running on your desktop PC under Windows XP. Perfect for embedded software development for MIPS processors.

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