Re: [ECOS] Porting RedBoot to NEC V850 platform

[Jonathan Larmour <jifl at eCosCentric dot com>]

Stephan Eisvogel wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I'm in the process of putting eCos 2.xx onto the NEC startWARE V850/SA1
> development board to evaluate its capabilities as a RTOS. Our lab has
> so far been using MULTI2K from GHS and a NEC V850 ICE for development,
> but we want to try out GNU together with RedBoot. I get to work on eCos
> for the V850 as an internship project.
>
> Now, I realize nobody has ported RedBoot to V850, and I'm willing to
> do this myself, but I can't find documentation on how to go about this.
> I'm also relatively new to eCos. I really could use maybe a top 10 list
> of things that have to be done to get RedBoot over to V850, maybe one
> of the long-time developers can help me here?

To add to what Nick said, the reason RedBoot wasn't ported before was 
primarily because V850 targets tend to be memory constrained, and the V850 
isn't a particularly whizzy chip anyway. Certainly be aware of the former, 
depending on your target.

After that consideration, it probably doesn't need much at all to run 
RedBoot. If you are memory-constrained, you may want to look at various 
options to constrain the memory size and set those in the .ecm files. Also 
depending on the result you may need to increase the amount of reserved 
RAM for the ROM monitor in the MLT RAM startup files.

Note, before you get too excited about various things mentioning V850 ICE 
debug support, don't get too happy.... it required a Red Hat proprietary 
bit of software that was never (AFAIK) released. Sorry.

Jifl
--
eCosCentric    http://www.eCosCentric.com/    The eCos and RedBoot experts
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