Hi Jelliott,
Thanks for the reply. It is much appreciated.
I have good news and bad news. The bad news is, after replacing Ubuntu 11.10 with a clean install of 12.04 LTS, we still had some of the issues with the SDK mentioned above. So we dropped the Sitara and went back to Freescale for this project. It's a shame, as we really wanted to use the PRU-ICSS to interface to our network, as Linux has a hard time with the real-time requirements. But the Sitara / Linux development tools still need work. We have a pile of BeagleBone-Blacks now, so I will keep experimenting. We may try again in a few years, if the tools look more mature.
The good news is that once our Freescale distributor had heard that we were looking at Sitara for this project, he gave us an incredible discount.
I've been saying this for thirty years: It doesn't matter how advanced a particular chip is, it is the development tools that make or break a project. It's ironic that we were switching from Freescale because we thought their support was lacking, and we were surprised with what we found at TI.
Live and learn.
mark