Freescale Coldfire V4s

[Zac67]

Just wondering - what'll you use the Coldfires for?

[Zac67]

A 266 MHz CPU would severly starve on motherboard RAM. There's no way you can avoid a local memory subsystem. While you're at it, don't forget to provide means to use the PCI bus (at minimum, a connector enabling you to route the bus to a replacement daughter board).

Coldfires have several software compatibility issues, so it'll be quite a feat to make present software run without problems.

[Zac67]

In theory, you could modify the binary loader to patch everything it loads by means of a database.

While this wouldn't catch anything loaded by other methods or self-modifying code it would probably work on 95% of the software. However, we'd have a very hard time building the patch database (which would require automated code search and visual inspection of candidates).

[Zac67]

Recompiling source code will be fine - you 'just' require the source. However, some instructions behave differently, so without code analysis you will never know if the code at hand works OK.

[Zac67]

What you do know is that the program entry is code. You can start from there and put traps in sections where you are not sure (e.g jmp tables etc.).

This is what I was referring to - you should be aware that this is a manual task as exhaustively doing this in software is not possible (except for trivial programs). Someone has to check/patch the 68k code and (hopefully) share his findings with others through a database on the 'net which the binary loader uses in turn to patch code while it's being loaded. Not likely to happen.