Re: [ECOS] Common GNU apps (busybox) on ecos possible?

[Andrew Lunn <andrew@lunn.ch>]

On Mon, Oct 17, 2005 at 03:49:46PM -0700, Ghazan Haider wrote:
> Hi all.
> 
> I'm awaiting my spiffy new Olimex lpc2138, and cant
> wait to get ecos running on it. Given the POSIX
> interface and eCos' whole niche market, I have some
> questions...
> 
> Can you run small gnu-compliant apps on eCos?
> Specifically busybox and things like vi, ash etc?
> 
> GCC is used for ecos, and these simpler apps are quite
> portable and use (AFAIK) nothing Linux or BSD specific
> in the API. In short, I wonder if you can run a
> standalone ecos system with some desktop-like tools
> like you can with QNX, uclinux, minix and the likes.

I don't know of anybody who has done this. 

There are some of the problems you need to address:

No exec[l|lp|le|v|vp] functions. So there is no way to create a
process using the normal POSIX API.

There is no concept of a process. eCos is all thread based. This has a
few concequencies:

Global variables are global across all programs since they are linked
into the same image....

There is no resouce tracking. When a Unix process exists any memory it
has allocated is freed, files it has open are closed etc. eCos has
none of this, so you are likely to suffer from memory leaks and file
descriptor leaks etc...

        Andrew

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