eCos x86 HAL improvements and other additions

[Jonathan Larmour <jlarmour at redhat dot com>]

Red Hat are pleased to announce that many improvements have been made to
the eCos x86 HAL. The HAL has been reorganized, and the PC target enhanced
with PCI and RedBoot support. Networking support for Intel EtherExpress Pro
compatible network cards has also been incorporated, including downloading
and debugging via RedBoot. Red Hat would like to thank Fabrice Gautier,
whose initial work on PCI and RedBoot support for x86 provided the basis
for these changes.

Prebuilt RedBoot binaries for the PC, suitable for writing to a floppy disk
are available linked off http://sources.redhat.com/ecos/boards/pcmobo.html

As part of the reorganization, the Linux synthetic target support has been
separated out into its own HAL, and a number of improvements have been
made. It should be noted that these changes require the use of updated host
side configuration tools. As yet, only the command line tools have been
updated, although the graphical tools will also be updated shortly. Go to
http://sources.redhat.com/ecos/anoncvs.html to find out how to obtain the
latest versions of the host side tools.

Additionally, support has been added in the C library for multiple
character sets, including provisional support for being able to plug in
additional character sets easily. Character sets supported are now SJIS,
EUCJP and JIS which are all Japanese character sets; using the C-SJIS,
C-EUCJP and C-JIS locales respectively.

Finally, a flash driver for the AM33 STB platform has been added.

As usual, all these latest changes are available from the eCos anonymous
CVS repository. Go to http://sources.redhat.com/ecos/ for more details.

As a reminder, Red Hat are able to provide a wide range of engineering
services, including porting, drivers, customization, technical support,
training (including on-site training) and extensions of functionality to
eCos and RedBoot. If you would be interested in _any_ of these aspects,
just e-mail ecos-info@redhat.com.

Jifl
-- 
Red Hat, Rustat House, Clifton Road, Cambridge, UK. Tel: +44 (1223) 271062