From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (qmail 6778 invoked by alias); 19 Mar 2003 10:18:45 -0000 Mailing-List: contact ecos-maintainers-help@sources.redhat.com; run by ezmlm Precedence: bulk List-Subscribe: List-Post: List-Help: , Sender: ecos-maintainers-owner@sources.redhat.com Received: (qmail 6540 invoked from network); 19 Mar 2003 10:18:40 -0000 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8" From: John Dallaway Organization: eCosCentric Limited To: eCos Maintainers Subject: New CPM/DPRAM allocator Date: Wed, 19 Mar 2003 10:18:00 -0000 User-Agent: KMail/1.4.3 References: <200303180848.24682.jld@ecoscentric.com> <1048014798.7462.3684.camel@hermes.chez-thomas.org> In-Reply-To: <1048014798.7462.3684.camel@hermes.chez-thomas.org> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Message-Id: <200303191019.45969.jld@ecoscentric.com> X-SW-Source: 2003-03/txt/msg00022.txt.bz2 Hello eCos maintainers I'm concerned to read of the incompatibility between newer eCos builds and older RedBoot builds due to the new CPM/DPRAM allocator. If I understand correctly: a) The incompatibility which has arisen was not intentional. b) The new allocator is highly desirable. c) There does not appear to be any way to avoid the incompatibility robustly. A few of questions: 1) Does this incompatibilty affect _all_ targets which run both RedBoot and eCos? 2) Could the new allocator implementation be modified in any way to preserve compatibility? 3) To what extent might the new allocator perturb eCos functionality other than by a stepwise "it will work or it will be completely broken". 4) Is a further break in compatibility possible as potential issues with the new allocator are ironed out? We need to determine how to manage the switch over to the new CPM/DPRAM allocator smoothly for everyone. From my perspective, it is certainly unfortunate that this innovation has arrived between 2.0 beta and 2.0 final. Were it not for the break in compatibility, I would vote against incorporating this change for 2.0 final since the change will (to a certain extent) invalidate beta testing by the net community. However, it would also be undesirable for 2.0 final RedBoot to be incompatible with anonCVS eCos from day 1. Users are likely to want to stick with a release version of the firmware while experimenting with eCos from anonCVS. John Dallaway