Ethernet, SD card and USB linux driver porting on Aldebaran SoC system

A partial new design and porting of linux device drivers for a commercial Ethernet chip, a proprietary SD card host controller, and open-source USB host controller for an SoC system called Aldebaran is described. Aldebaran is an SoC including a SPARCv8 based dual issue 13 stage pipeline processor core designed by ETRI. How the drivers work in relation to the kernel core is also explained with the porting procedures. The newly written SD controller driver breaks a single command for a scatterlist into many commands for single buffer to fake the kernel as if the host is processing scatterlist DMA. The three peripherals and the drivers proved to work properly after some bug fixes. For driver porting with initial hardware and software bugs, the engineer needs to know many areas of the kernel like memory management and scheduling as well as each related kernel subsystem and this paper hopes to give a basic idea about the linux driver for those who are not familiar with the topic.