RE: [ECOS] Re: Is eCos project still alive?

["Loginov Alexander" <aloginov@asmpt.com>]

Anthony,

Thanks for your comments. And, please, come down your emotions. 

The question was very simple: why is the latest eCos release 5 years
old? I actually wanted to know the answer only to this question, without
objecting neither eCos nor you.

Don't tell me about snapshots. This is just for eCos itself, for its
further development, because snapshots are always supposed to have bugs,
sometimes even intentional, to help to debug other bugs. Have you ever
heard about commercial companies that install the latest Linux snapshots
to their offices or to the expensive products? Never. Just stable
releases. 

I guess, you are not from the world of the commercial products
development. The considerations here are a bit different than that in
the world of open-source software community.

By the ay, Linux is not RTOS and never will be. We have very tough hard
real-time requirements. So it is not for us. Many great RTOSes in
aviationa and military actually distinguish between privilege levels
(QNX, Integrity, LynuxOS, pikeOS, etc). MMU usage is Ok in real-time if
you use it properly (no page swapping, page locking, etc.).  

Best regards,
Alex
 

> Although I see some activity on eCos
> mailing lists, it doesn't bring a peace to my mind. What happened to
> eCos? It used to be very active in early 00. Why its releases are not
> updated? It is quite strange, that ecoscentric commercially
distributes
> a product that is so old.

Some activity, ah?

How much time did you actually spend researching the subject before
posting your questions on the mailing list?

If you had your homework, you would have found out that eCos is very
much alive, and that snapshots of the latest development tree are issued
every week, not every month or every year. If you had spent more than a
passing moment on the web site of the fine people at eCosCentric you
would have found that under the "DevZone" tab there is menu called
Snapshots. Do you care to guess where that leads you?

And if you had spent more than a passing moment actually _reading_
the mailing lists you would have found that people keep posting patches
almost every day, not only making old packages even better, but
also adding new ones.

> 2) eCOS doesn't distinguish between privilege levels. Is there any way
> to enable it for x86 platform? We need to keep user applications away
> from the control system core that we would like to run in Ring 0.

That assumes that you have full support for an MMU. Ecos' use of MMU
is limited to static configuration of MMUs, even in those architectures
that actually have an MMU built in. Don't blame eCos for missing MMU
support: This is a carefully thought decision on the part of the eCos
architects. Remember that we are talking about real time systems,
where dynamic manipulation of an MMU is not such a great idea.

If you need a full MMU, Linux is your OS.

T

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