eCos is distributed under the GPL license with an exception which permits proprietary application code to be linked with eCos without itself being forced to be released under the GPL. It is also royalty and buyout free.
As an Open Source project, eCos is under constant improvement, with an active developer community, based around the eCos web site at http://ecos.sourceware.org/.
Powerful GUI-based configuration system allowing both large and fine grained configuration of eCos. This allows the functionality of eCos to be customized to the exact requirements of the application.
Full-featured, flexible, configurable, real time embedded kernel. The kernel provides thread scheduling, synchronization, timer, and communication primitives. It handles hardware resources such as interrupts, exceptions, memory and caches.
The Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL) hides the specific features of each supported CPU and platform, so that the kernel and other run-time components can be implemented in a portable fashion.
Support for µITRON and POSIX Application Programmer Interfaces (APIs). It also includes a fully featured, thread-safe ISO standard C library and math library.
Support for a wide variety of devices including many serial devices, ethernet controllers and FLASH memories. There is also support for PCMCIA, USB and PCI interconnects.
A fully featured TCP/IP stack implementing IP, IPv6, ICMP, UDP and TCP over ethernet. Support for SNMP, HTTP, TFTP and FTP are also present.
The RedBoot ROM monitor is an application that uses the eCos HAL for portability. It provides serial and ethernet based booting and debug services during development.
Many components include test programs that validate the components behaviour. These can be used both to check that hardware is functioning correctly, and as examples of eCos usage.
eCos documentation included this User Guide, the Reference Manual and the Components Writer's Guide. These are being continually updated as the system develops.