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Subject:	Re: DJGPP cross compilers for open-source hardware
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> That miniPC uses Vortex86SX, which is the first chip in Vortex86 series. 
> And the x86 Arduino project uses Vortex86EX, which is the sixth chip in 
> Vortex86 series. FPU has been added into Vortex86EX. Currently, Ubuntu 
> 12.04 can directly be installed and run on Vortex86EX without kernel 
> modification.

Nice. I think it was before about 3-4 years when we quickly needed some small, fanless PC with serial ports and some gpios. Then I didn't observed further Vortex devel.

> I am in the design team of Vortex86 SoC.

It's nice you come to talk on this forum. For me it's very hard to talk as engineer to engineer to some hardware manufacturer company because they are walled by tech. support monkeys and I never got some useful reply or even any response from big companies. I like your open HW/FW approach. (Of course it's different approach when you're a big customer)

> The x86 Arduino may be about 50US. (I don't guarantee this. I am an 
> engineer, not sales, so the board isn't priced by me.)

It's acceptable. Maybe I will buy this one toy :) Let us know when it will be on market.

> You can add a PCI-E VGA card to have Display.

It's on pin header? How many PCI-E lanes? I don't know if there are available some smaller PCI-E VGAs than classic cards for x16 slot. Can x16 VGA work e.g. with only x1 with reduced speed? Will you also make some daughterboard with VGA?

> Terminal via UART is also supported by BIOS. The Zero board's PCI-E > connector is a PCI-E UART to host PC (16550 compatible, but with 6Mbps and > 128-byte FIFO).

Does it also support ANSI codes for better control and color interface?
 
> We are developing a DJGPP HDA library for Vortex86EX. 

I think you could save some effort as there are already 2 DJGPP libraries supporting intel HDA - JUDAS (older, abandoned) and WSS (used in mplayer and MAME) and you could add support for your hardware into one of these libs.

> Compatibility to legacy SB/GUS/GMIDI will be reserved to users.

That's pitty because if it would be programmed in SMM tightly to the HW as possible it would be pretty transparent, enabling sound even under pmode programs (I understand you're aimed on your DJGPP SDK but for existing SW...).
Anyway as it will use opensource coreboot it would be possible to programm SMI handler routine (on closed source PC BIOS nearly impossible) - if you provide hardware I/O range trapping, not sure if needed for DMA/IRQ...

> We just submitted codes to the coreboot team recently. They should have 
> known Vortex86EX last weeks.

Confirmed.

> We have tried QEMU (and other x86 emulators), but it is difficult (and 
> inefficient) to be integrated into the Arduino IDE. So we select DOSBOX 
> in the x86 Arduino project.

I think dosbox is less efficient as other emulators/VM that can use HW virtualization (not sure if recent dosbox can) but it's more lightweight and can easy share files on local machine. If I understand well, only issue is LFN support and DOSLFN is not working? I just tried to compile something without LFN under dosbox 0.74 with recent gcc 4.8.1 and djgpp 2.04 and it takes about 10x time than under NTVDM (about 13s for 2 .c files and one .h file total less than 100kB)...

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