As part of a deal with Phytec I wrote an AC97 driver for their mpc5200 development system. We use these Phytec boards as a prototype platform. They are reasonably priced and they work well.

The code for this driver has already been accept for the Linux kernel and it will appear in 2.6.31. AC97 and I2S are both implemented by the same PSC block on the SOC. This code will become the basis for the tri-amp Digispeaker I2S driver.

While I was at it I also implemented AC97 support for the Efika. The Efika is a $99 mpc5200 based development board available from Directron. The Efika was useful for driver development since it has USB and a PCI slot. The current version of the Phytec development system has now added these features making the Efika less useful. Note that it is hard to add custom hardware to an Efika since they didn't bring all of the pins out form the CPU.