Bare Metal Application Template for MPC8641 Simics Model
--------------------------------------------------------
By Tennessee Carmel-Veilleux (tennessee.carmelveilleux -at- gmail.com)

This application template allows you to do "bare-metal" testing on the
MPC8641 model of the Simics virtual platform. I can be used for OS 
courses, learning PPC assembly, learning complex CPU boot sequences, 
etc). It is for use with the Simics virtual platform ONLY and was tested
on version 4.0 and 4.4, but should work on subsequent versions also.

See the Simics website: http://www.windriver.com/products/simics/

The gist of the features:
- UART console API
- Boot-up code with MMU setup
- Clean interrupt/exception handling and handler samples
- Linker-script
- Pre-booted U-Boot Simics checkpoint to get started

Read the manual (PDF) for more information about what it can do for you.

The test program (src/main.c) is a good example of all the features of 
the exception and IRQ handling code, as well as some extra tidbits of 
U-Boot integration magic.

The repos contains:
* All source code
  * Startup code
  * Linker script
  * Interrupt processing code (PIC + standard exceptions)
  * Example program
* Makefile
* PDF manual with bookmarks
* Simics test script (./Simics/bare_metal_test.simics), paths must be 
  adjusted.
* Simics checkpoint used by the test script (based on mpc8641-simple and 
  U-Boot 1.3.0)

Pardon the quick'n'dirty nature of this, but it was done while I was
quite busy with my actual thesis work so I'm sure you will understand :)
I still think it's pretty clean for a hack, especially the manual, which I 
usually don't bother doing for this kind of release.

Basically, it has pieces from U-Boot 2010.03, XtratuM and XtratuM-PPC 
(the latter is my masters project) and a bit of Linux 2.6.33. That is 
why there are about 5 intermixed coding conventions in the source.

I did add a significant amount of commenting to all the code, 
especially low-level and assembly code, as is my habit. Most 
importantly, all the exception handling code, including context save 
and restore are fully commented, so they are easy to modify. I still 
cannot believe that I had to do that and that the Linux kernel accepts 
low-level code submissions without any more than a single line of 
comment... If you are using CDT under Eclipse or another IDE, you will 
probably be able to use the online Doxygen doc that accompanies all 
functions.

The code is entirely GPL (because of the licensing requirements of the 
parts from which it is composed).

I only tested building under Cygwin 1.7 with the Sourcery G++ 
distribution of powerpc-eabi-gcc. If you have any problems compiling 
the code, please let me know and I can help adapt the Makefile and 
documentation to suit.

Bugfix submissions and forks welcome.

Thanks to Jakob Engblom of Wind River Systems for his encouragement
and testing.