[ECOS] Future development for i386 PC target.

[ECOS] Future development for i386 PC target.

[Alex Mathews]

I would like to know if any more functionality is planned for the i386
port?
I understand that it was a port done by Patrick O' Grady and not by Red
Hat, which makes the port a non-funded effort.

These are the features I'm interested in:

1. Network support for debugging.
2. Separate interrupt stacks.
3. PCI support in the HAL (This I know has been discussed recently).

I've gone through the documentation and read through the mailing list
archives and the current discussions on the mailing list.  I just want
to get an idea whether any future development is planned, or is the
current port where it stands until someone in the community wants to add
functionality, such as the things I've mentioned.  I am fairly new to
eCos and I am in the process of evaluating it for my company.

Thank you.
-- 
Alex Mathews
CrosStor Software, Inc.
908-226-0100 ext 148
alexma@crosstor.com

Re: [ECOS] Future development for i386 PC target.

[Nick Garnett]

Alex Mathews <alexma@crosstor.com> writes:

> I would like to know if any more functionality is planned for the i386
> port?
> I understand that it was a port done by Patrick O' Grady and not by Red
> Hat, which makes the port a non-funded effort.
> 
> These are the features I'm interested in:
> 
> 1. Network support for debugging.

We are working on a better integrated debug/booting system, which
should allow network debugging to be extended to further targets. The
PC will probably benefit from this in due course. No promises,
however.

> 2. Separate interrupt stacks.

No immediate plans.

> 3. PCI support in the HAL (This I know has been discussed recently).
>

Given appropriate documentation, this is little more than a couple of
hours work. It just needs someone to bite the bullet and implement the
HAL_PCI_* macros.

> I've gone through the documentation and read through the mailing list
> archives and the current discussions on the mailing list.  I just want
> to get an idea whether any future development is planned, or is the
> current port where it stands until someone in the community wants to add
> functionality, such as the things I've mentioned.  I am fairly new to
> eCos and I am in the process of evaluating it for my company.

At present the current port probably stays as it is until we either
get an interested commercial customer who is prepared to pay for
further development, or the community contributes further work.

This is not entirely satisfactory I know. Increasingly we are getting
people such as yourself who would like to run eCos on a PC for
evaluation purposes, and having a less than perfect PC port is a
problem.

-- 
Nick Garnett, eCos Kernel Architect
Red Hat, Cambridge, UK