Yang Minqiang

Ethernet is not exactly known as a fieldbus - but it is reliable, fast and inexpensive technology, openPOWERLINK has a strong potential to turn ethernet into a full featured field bus for the automation industry. At the same time, due to Loogson 2F’s low power-consumption, fanless operation, availability of RT-PREEMPT based GNU/Linux RTOS and integration in form-factors suitable for industrial usage,we have been working on porting openPOWERLINK to the loongson 2F. The primary work is implementing a driver for RTL8169 which Loongson 2F uses as its ethernet apater. To benchmark and improve the performance we will implement an application over openPOWERLINK utilizing a typical multi-node setup. In this paper, we will state the motivation for the port to Loongson 2F and concentrate on key technical issues of porting driver for openPOWERLINK, which hopefully will aid others in similar tasks.

The problems we faced, some possible problems to be careful of and some tips how to tackle the porting task should provide some initial guidance for a openPOWERLINK porting job. Further we will present some benchmark results based on RT-PTREEMPT comparing the result on different flatform (Loongson and VIA C3) and a short outlook on future work in this area.