New CPM/DPRAM allocator

[John Dallaway <jld at ecoscentric dot com>]

Hello eCos maintainers

I'm concerned to read of the incompatibility between newer eCos builds and 
older RedBoot builds due to the new CPM/DPRAM allocator. If I understand 
correctly:

a) The incompatibility which has arisen was not intentional.
b) The new allocator is highly desirable.
c) There does not appear to be any way to avoid the incompatibility 
robustly.

A few of questions:

1) Does this incompatibilty affect _all_ targets which run both RedBoot and 
eCos?
2) Could the new allocator implementation be modified in any way to preserve 
compatibility?
3) To what extent might the new allocator perturb eCos functionality other 
than by a stepwise "it will work or it will be completely broken".
4) Is a further break in compatibility possible as potential issues with the 
new allocator are ironed out?

We need to determine how to manage the switch over to the new CPM/DPRAM 
allocator smoothly for everyone. From my perspective, it is certainly 
unfortunate that this innovation has arrived between 2.0 beta and 2.0 
final. Were it not for the break in compatibility, I would vote against 
incorporating this change for 2.0 final since the change will (to a certain 
extent) invalidate beta testing by the net community. However, it would 
also be undesirable for 2.0 final RedBoot to be incompatible with anonCVS 
eCos from day 1. Users are likely to want to stick with a release version 
of the firmware while experimenting with eCos from anonCVS.

John Dallaway