eCos 2.0 Beta announcement

[Jonathan Larmour <jifl@eCosCentric.com>]

We are pleased to announce that the eCos 2.0 Beta release is now 
available. This is a substantial release incorporating many new features 
and support for more than 80 publically available evaluation and 
development platforms.

Architectural support now covers ARM (including StrongARM and XScale), 
SuperH, Intel x86 (IA32), PowerPC, MIPS, Matsushita AM3x, Motorola 
68K/Coldfire, SPARC, Hitachi H8/300H and NEC V850.

System enhancements (relative to the previous eCos 1.3.1 release) include:

     * RedBoot, the open source bootstrap and debug firmware based on eCos
     * A choice of TCP/IP stacks including options for BOOTP/DHCP, DNS,
       TFTP/FTP, SNMP, IPv6 and HTTPD
     * RAM, ROM and flash file systems
     * Power management support
     * USB slave support
     * A POSIX-compatible API
     * Symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) support

Further enhancements are listed in the NEWS file included in the release.

eCos 2.0 Beta is also the first release under a new license which provides 
compatibility with the well-known GNU General Public License (GPL) while 
also allowing application source code to remain proprietary.

Alongside many public contributions to the eCos sources, a set of 
pre-built GNU toolchains for all the major architectures supported by eCos 
and RedBoot has been contributed. These toolchains, together with a new 
download and installation script, make it much easier to get started with 
eCos.

For download details, please visit the eCos project home page at:

     http://sources.redhat.com/ecos/

The complete release, including the pre-built GNU toolchains is also 
available on CD-ROM from eCosCentric:

     http://www.ecoscentric.com/ecos/cdrom.html

We need the help of the eCos net community in evaluating this beta release 
on a wide variety of hardware platforms. The eCos maintainers have 
prepared a set of testing guidelines to assist you in providing the 
feedback we need:

     http://sources.redhat.com/ecos/testing.html

Please consider supporting the eCos community in this way.

Thank you!

Jonathan Larmour
Chief eCos Maintainer
on behalf of the eCos maintainers