Re: eCos MPC860 board support

[Bart Veer <bartv@cygnus.co.uk>]

>>>>> "Brendan" == Brendan Simon <brendan@dgs.monash.edu.au> writes:

    Brendan> MPC860 target !!! Will the current release of eCos build
    Brendan> a sample network program that will respond to pings ?

The core system as available on http://sourceware.cygnus.com/ecos/
does not include a TCP/IP stack. However there has already been one
port of an existing stack to eCos by a third party. A number of
embedded web servers using this technology were demonstrated at ESC
West last week. I expect that more details of this stack will be
announced in the coming weeks.

    Brendan> Are there such things as Board Support Packages in eCos ?
    Brendan> If so is there a BSP for MPC860 board ? Is it the Cogent
    Brendan> CMA286-60 MPC860 Evaluation Board ? How easy would it be
    Brendan> to port/convert this to an ADS860 BSP or and MBX860 BSP
    Brendan> ??

The terminology used in eCos is slightly different. The
hardware-specific details are isolated in hardware abstraction layer
(or HAL) packages, and to build a system you need one architectural
HAL and one platform HAL. The architectural HAL contains mostly
processor-specific information, the platform HAL contains mostly
board-specific information.

I believe that CMA286-60 is the correct part number for the Cogent
board currently supported. The work involved in porting to a different
board using the same processor is essentially copying the existing
Cogent HAL package and modifying it as required, plus updating the
targets and packages files in the eCos component repository. The files
that need changing include cogent.S (board-specific initialization),
cogent.ld (linker script), hal_diag.c (to provide some sort of
diagnostic output facility) and possibly hal_stub.c for gdb support.

For more information, you can look at the online HAL documentation at
http://sourceware.cygnus.com/ecos/docs-1.1/ref/ecos-ref/architectural-hal-files.html
and
http://sourceware.cygnus.com/ecos/docs-1.1/ref/ecos-ref/kernel-porting-notes.html
Of course you can also look at the existing source code.


Bart Veer // eCos net maintainer