[ECOS] Re: CPU Ports for eCos

[Bart Veer <bartv@cygnus.co.uk>]

>>>>> "Charles" == Nelson, Charles <charles.nelson@glenayre.com> writes:

    Charles> Hi All, I have been told that trying to do a custom port
    Charles> of eCos without the full GNU tool chain is not a good
    Charles> idea. I agree with that. But where can I find info on
    Charles> what specific devices are currently supported by the full
    Charles> GNU tool chain.

Assuming you start with the sourceware offering of the GNU toolchain,
I am afraid there is no central source of information about which
architectures and platforms are supported. There are a number of
different tools involved (gcc, g++, gdb, binutils, ...) which have
separate maintainers. For example, ELF support is not available in
e.g. the h8300 toolchain because nobody has contributed it yet. Since
eCos makes use of some compiler facilities that are tied to ELF, a
port to an h8300 would be difficult.

One way to find out what is available is to look at the config.sub
file at the toplevel of the toolchain sources and search for the
architecture you are interested in. There is a good chance you will
find it or something like it, giving you the first part of the config
triplet. Then try to configure the toolchain for e.g.
--target=h8300-elf and see what happens. If the configure works then
there is a good chance you will be able to get a usable toolchain,
although there may still be some build problems later on. In the case
of h8300-elf it would fail when configuring the linker. For more
detailed information you would have to examine the documentation for
the various tools.

I should point out that the toolchain currently available via the eCos
web pages has only been validated for mn10300, tx39, and powerpc. It
may work for other architectures as well, but there are no guarantees.

    Charles> And after I do get the info on devices, where is the info
    Charles> on doing architectural porting?

http://sourceware.cygnus.com/ecos/faq.html#porting_how_would_I
provides a starting point.

Bart Veer // eCos net maintainer