Hi thombus,
I agree that MicroBlaze users may quickly find themselves running out of resources on the LX9 device when adding additional hardware to the embedded platform. However, in order to make the MicroBoard an affordable board, we needed to be cost conscious on the device selection during design.
I just wanted to point out that we do offer a Spartan-6 LX16 Eval Board that has quite a few more features than the LX9 MicroBoard.
http://www.em.avnet.com/spartan6lx16-evl
Of course, more features usually means higher cost and this board is no exception. Also, in switching to the Spartan-6 LX16 Eval board, you would be changing your platform form factor, but you keep a lot of the embedded features such as Pmods, Flash config memory, DDR SDRAM memory, and Ethernet capability.
If you need to keep the MicroBoard form factor for your application, another option would be to swap devices like relinux did above. Again, this has an added cost factor to it since you would need to purchase the larger density device and find a rework shop who is capable of swapping the BGA devices for you. Also, there is some risk involved in doing this since it would void your MicroBoard warrenty plus there is the possiblity that swapping devices is not as successful as relinux found it to be.
The LX9 MicroBoard is a board design that just turned two years old and it is with the older generation of devices. As a result, I doubt that we would ever come out with a supported LX16 version of the MicroBoard.
One more thing that I wanted to point out... If you are serious about running Linux on a board that has programmable logic capability, please allow me to suggest our more recent ZedBoard. Again, a board with higher cost but A LOT more functionality, a hard ARM Cortex-A9 MP core, a ton of community support, plus we had Linux running on it the 2nd week we got prototype boards back!
www.zedboard.org
Regards,
-Kevin
