[ECOS] eCos 2.0 planned release

[Jonathan Larmour <jlarmour at redhat dot com>]

A New Year's present from the Red Hat eCos team to the eCos community!

It's been a while coming, but Red Hat are planning to make a new full
public release of eCos, version 2.0. This is expected to be released around
the end of January or start of February - no firm date set yet. It will
also be available tagged in anonymous CVS.

As well as the many, many improvements over 1.3.1 already available from
anonymous CVS, there are a number of new features and ports that we plan to
add in the 2.0 release. These are likely to include the following:

- Symmetric Multiprocessor (SMP) functionality, including specific support
for x86 PC based SMP hardware

- DNS support for eCos and RedBoot

- JFFS2 (Journalling Flash File System v2) support for eCos and RedBoot
(beta)

- Power management support

- IDE device boot support for RedBoot

- RedBoot/eCos ports to:
  * Agilent AAED2000
  * Altera ARM9 Excalibur
  * Hitachi SH3 HS7729PCI
  * Hitachi SH3 Solution Engine SE77x9
  * Hitachi SH4 Solution Engine SE7751
  * Matsushita AM33-2 ASB230x
  * MIPS Malta
  * NEC MIPS Vr4300 DDB-VRC4375
  * Samsung ARM SNDS100

- RedBoot-only ports to:
  * Fujitsu FR-V 400
  * Samsung CalmRISC16 eval board
  * Samsung CalmRISC32 eval board

The release will include other improvements, such as a move to the new eCos
Configuration Tool version 2, featuring new support for Linux hosts.
Version 1 of the Configuration Tool will still be included for Windows
users that require the Memory Layout Tool. There will also be a change in
licensing to improve compatibility with existing Open Source projects.
Documentation is being overhauled and will be made available under the Open
Publication License with full Docbook format source.

We have other new features lined up that we hope to announce nearer the
time. Have patience :-).

As a result of some of these developments, automatic updates to the
anonymous CVS repository will be suspended soon until 2.0 is released. Any
specific fixes can still be applied manually on demand though.

It's worth mentioning that the DNS support was based on a contribution from
Andrew Lunn; the SNDS100 port was developed by Grant Edwards; and the Power
Management support and JFFS2 support were done in collaboration with 3GLAB.
Thanks guys!

Jifl
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