eCos on NIOS II (Altera) processor

eCos on NIOS II (Altera) processor

[Arie Elias]

Hello,
My name is Arie Elias and I am the director of SW development in Iamba
Networks.
We are using the Altera's Stratix II FPGA with NIOS II.
I found out that there is a porting of the eCos RTOS on the NIOS II
processor.
I tried to trace your FAQ but I have some preliminary questions, for
example:
1. The RTOS is royalty-free and license-free so from what "paths" your make
the money?
2. If it is from maintenance, is there a way to get from you an assistant
directly, an expert engineer that will build for us the initial environment?
3. What about a maintenance support in the long run?
4. How much time is needed to establish a working environment on the NIOS II
(Stratix II)?
5. You mentioned that eCos is not Linux! Is it close to Linux concept or to
general concept of RTOS like lets say VxWorks? Is it having a virtual memory
management like linux or common one like standard RTOS? (I specially want to
"feel" the hardware so linux is really frighten me with its memory
virtualization)
6. About the TCP/IP stack - do you know about SIP stack (Voice Over IP) that
running on your TCP/IP stack?
7. Is the TCP/IP stack supporting DNS Client, SNMP-v3, IGMP-v3 and TLS (or
other openSSL)?
8. What about the IDE environment" Do I use Altera's environment?
9. What about debugging? Do I use the Altera's environment? What about
kernel awareness in the debugger?
10. Is the eCos using the Altera's HAL? Altera's environment to get all the
information about the HW directly?
11. Do you have any users that I can ask about their experience with this
RTOS? In Israel or maybe in other places.
12. What about footprint of the eCos environment for the NIOS II?
13. Benchmarks?
14. Do you have a comparison document to other RTOSes running on the NIOS
like: ucLinux, Nucleus, MicroC-OS-II, etc?

These are very preliminary questions but we are here in a very advanced
stage and I just now found out your RTOS and it seems very interesting.
In this case I will appreciate if you can answer me ASAP.

Thanks a lot,

_______________________________________
Arie Elias
Director, Software Development

Iamba Technologies Ltd.
Tel:        +972-9-7400899ֳ½, (ext. 120)
Fax:       +972-9-7400886
Mobile:  +972-54-5565657
Arie_Elias@iamba.com
http://www.iamba.com


_______________________________________
Arie Elias
Director, Software Development

Iamba Technologies Ltd.
Tel:        +972-9-7400899ֳ½, (ext. 120)
Fax:       +972-9-7400886
Mobile:  +972-54-5565657
Arie_Elias@iamba.com
http://www.iamba.com

Re: eCos on NIOS II (Altera) processor

[Andrew Lunn]

On Thu, Jun 09, 2005 at 02:34:19PM +0200, Arie Elias wrote:
> Hello,
> My name is Arie Elias and I am the director of SW development in Iamba
> Networks.
> We are using the Altera's Stratix II FPGA with NIOS II.
> I found out that there is a porting of the eCos RTOS on the NIOS II
> processor.
> I tried to trace your FAQ but I have some preliminary questions, for
> example:
> 1. The RTOS is royalty-free and license-free so from what "paths" your make
> the money?

Why would we want to make money? We do it for fun!

OK, those who make money from eCos do so by offering services. ie
ports to new boards, new features, testing and certification,
answering the stupid questions customers ask etc.

> 2. If it is from maintenance, is there a way to get from you an assistant
> directly, an expert engineer that will build for us the initial environment?

You want to talk to the companies who make money, not the
maintainers. There is quite an overlap between the two, so they have
received this email and there marketing/sales guys will be in contact soon i
expect.

> 3. What about a maintenance support in the long run?

There are two main paths for this:

You get a support contract from they companies who are making money
from eCos. If they go out of business, you find another one.

You take part in the open source community and ask questions
there. But answering questions is totally free will and the community
will only help you solve your problems, where as with a company giving
support you can pay so they solve your problems for you.

> 4. How much time is needed to establish a working environment on the NIOS II
> (Stratix II)?

No idea, i've not used this device at all.

> 5. You mentioned that eCos is not Linux! Is it close to Linux concept or to
> general concept of RTOS like lets say VxWorks? Is it having a virtual memory
> management like linux or common one like standard RTOS? (I specially want to
> "feel" the hardware so linux is really frighten me with its memory
> virtualization)

It like a standard RTOS. You can directly get at the hardware. There
is not virtual memory support or memory protection at all.

> 6. About the TCP/IP stack - do you know about SIP stack (Voice Over IP) that
> running on your TCP/IP stack?

The TCP/IP stack is a port of the FreeBSD stack. So any SIP stack that
works on the FreeBSD stack should work on the eCos stack.

> 7. Is the TCP/IP stack supporting DNS Client, SNMP-v3, IGMP-v3 and TLS (or
> other openSSL)?

Architecturally, these are not part of the stack, they are
applications which run on top of the stack. They generally use the BSD
Sockets API which eCos has. There is DNS client support, there is a
port of the UCD-SNMP toolkit which supports from -v3 but its rather
old. There is a port of openSSL, but again its quite old. IGMP is more
of a problem. I don't think anybody has that working at the moment,
but i could be wrong.

> 8. What about the IDE environment" Do I use Altera's environment?

From what i understand there is a tool which parses the Altera's
configuration files and then configures the eCos port with information
about the hardware components you have available. Once that is done
you can use any IDE you want. Some of the people making money will
probably sell you Eclipse as part of there package. I just use the
standard Linux CLI and eCos as my IDE. You choice. 

> 9. What about debugging? Do I use the Altera's environment? What about
> kernel awareness in the debugger?

gdb is the standard debugger. You can put wrappers around that if you
don't like the CLI. eg Insight or DDD. GDB should be thread aware.

> 10. Is the eCos using the Altera's HAL? Altera's environment to get all the
> information about the HW directly?

See above,

As for people with experiance with NIOS II and eCos you might want to
ask on the ecos-discuss mailling list where the real users hang out.

    Hope this helps,
          Andrew