eCos News Archive

The PPC40x variant support has been improved, adding fairly complete support for the 405GP. Note: although the PC40x variant has been in our tree for years, it has not been used by any published platforms.

This is the first public platform to use the PPC40x framework is the new MOAB development board, from Test & Measurement Systems.

See Supported Hardware for more details.

The QUICC2 variant support has been reworked as mpc8xxx and should now be more flexible for platforms based on these new devices.

The first port to take advantage of this new layout is support for the new Analogue & Micro Rattler, which is outfitted with either a MPC8250 or MPC8270.

See Supported Hardware for more details.

We are pleased to announce the availability of the eCos 2.0 final release. This is the first fully-packaged stable release since eCos 1.3.1 back in March 2000. Thank you to all those who helped in the push to make this release. There are many minor improvements to the eCos Configuration Tool in particular since the beta release and we recommend that all eCos developers switch to the latest version of this tool. Please refer to the downloading and installation page for details of how to get started with eCos 2.0. The complete release is also available on CD-ROM from eCosCentric.

We are pleased to announce the availability of the eCos 2.0 beta release. This fully-packaged release contains many of the recent net contributions which have previously been available by via anonymous CVS only. We have also created an installation tool which simplifies downloading and installation.

We need your help in evaluating and testing this beta release on a wide variety of hardware platforms. We have prepared a set of testing guidelines to assist you in providing the feedback we need. Thank you!

In recent months, eCos has been ported to a number of new platforms. Some of these were contributed and others made by the eCos maintainers. These new ports include:

• Team ASA NPWR Linux Engine - Intel Xscale 80321
• Microplex Printer Controller - Intel Xscale PXA250
• NMI uE250 - Intel Xscale PXA250
• Analogue & Micro Adder - PowerPC 850
• Cogent CSB281 - PowerPC 8245
• Motorola VADS - PowerPC 8260
• IDT79S334A - MIPS based Integrated Communications Processor

There is to be an eCos session at FOSDEM 2003, taking place on Saturday 8th and Sunday 9th February at the Université Libre de Bruxelles (Brussels, Europe). It will be attended by four of the eCos maintainers, and will be shortly after a presentation by Nick Garnett to the FOSDEM embedded track about eCos. More details are available from the messages to the eCos announce mailing list.

Finally we have our first book on eCos, Embedded Software Development with eCos, published by Prentice Hall as part of the Bruce Perens Open Source Series.

Author Anthony J. Massa covers eCos architecture, installation, configuration, coding, deployment, and the entire ecos development platform, including support components. Extensive code examples and a full application case study demonstrate every key programming concept, including exceptions, interrupts, virtual vectors, threads, synchronization, networking, web connectivity, debug/bootstrap, and even porting eCos to new hardware.

This book can be found at any good technical book store, or alternatively can be ordered online directly from the publisher, from Barnes & Noble, from Amazon, or many other online book stores.

Red Hat has updated the anonymous CVS repository with the code for an alpha quality release of eCos v2.0. Information about the contents can be found in this mailing list post. As part of this, eCos will have a new licence in future. Read this mailing list post for more details.

A beta version of eCos v2.0 is being prepared.

Jani Monoses at Astechnix SRL has announced an early port of the lwIP lightweight TCP/IP stack to eCos. An EPK is available.

Anthony Massa has written an eCos Porting Guide article for the January 2002 issue of Embedded Systems Programming magazine.

As part of the eCos/M3 (MobileMultiMedia) initiative 3G LAB have released the first draft of the M3 extensions for eCos. These extensions include support for ELF shared libraries, run-time linking, memory protection and partial POSIX process emulation among many other features.

More information and downloads are available from the 3G LAB eCos developer resources page.

Red Hat is in the process of integrating Yaegashi Takeshi's ports to the Sony Playstation 2 and Sega Dreamcast, as previously mentioned on the contributions page. Expect to see it soon!

eCos has now been enhanced with a port to the Atmel AT91-based EB40 evaluation board. This port, currently a beta, includes RedBoot support, and Flash and Serial drivers. Sources are available from anonymous CVS. More details including prebuilt RedBoot binaries are available here.

The existing x86 support has been reorganized and the PC target has been enhanced with PCI and RedBoot support. Networking support for Intel EtherExpress Pro compatible network cards has been added, including downloading and debugging via RedBoot. The Linux synthetic target has been separated out into a separate HAL and also been improved in many ways. Sources are available from anonymous CVS.

Red Hat are pleased to announce an alpha release of the eCos Configuration Tool version 2.0.

This is a cross-platform version built using the wxWindows toolkit. The tool uses the GTK+ widget set on Linux, and the WIN32 API on Windows 9x, Windows NT and Windows 2000. It is similar to the MFC, Windows-only version but at present lacks a few of its features, such as the Memory Layout Tool and the ability to run tests from within the tool.

More information and downloads are available here.

Both eCos and RedBoot have been ported to the Analogue & Micro PowerPC 860T Viper board, including Flash and Fast Ethernet support. Sources are available from anonymous CVS.

eCos and RedBoot have been ported to the Bright Star Engineering commEngine StrongARM SA1110 board, including Flash, watchdog, serial, ethernet drivers and PCI support. Sources are available from anonymous CVS.

We've given parts of this site a new look, particularly the Supported Hardware section, and added a new area dedicated to RedBoot. Let us know what you think!

Again Red Hat and the eCos community have been working hard to deliver more new ports and features to eCos and RedBoot. Here's a highlight of new functionality we've added. More details can be found in the eCos NEWS file.

• eCos and RedBoot ported to the Compaq iPAQ PocketPC. Try out our eCos Microwindows demo for the iPAQ! Support includes keypad, touch screen, watchdog, FLASH, PCMCIA and Compact Flash drivers. RedBoot includes support for booting ARM Linux. Derived from an initial port by Richard Panton of 3G Lab and enhanced significantly by Red Hat.
• eCos/RedBoot port to the ARM Evaluator-7T. Currently beta quality.
• eCos/RedBoot port to PMC-Sierra RM7000 Ocelot, including PCI, ethernet and FLASH support.
• RedBoot ported to the MIPS Atlas eval board with MIPS32 4Kc or MIPS64 5Kc processor modules, including PCI, serial, ethernet and FLASH drivers.
• RedBoot support for ARM PID/EPI Dev7/ EPI Dev9 targets.
• Port added to the Cosmo CEB-V850/SB1
• Compressed image support has been added to RedBoot
• ROM based file system support has been added, contributed by Richard Panton of 3G Lab.
• Generic FLASH drivers added for Intel FlashFile 28Fxxx, AMD AM29xxxxx, Atmel AT29C040 and Intel StrataFLASH
• Watchdog driver for Intel SA11x0 StrongARM added.

A port to the Intel® XScale[tm] IQ80310 Software Development and Processor Evaluation Kit has been added.

The port includes flash and ethernet drivers, and support for RedBoot, Red Hat's bootstrap firmware. The status of the port is currently beta.

As an Open Source company, Red Hat has made these improvements available from the development repository via anonymous CVS including RedBoot documentation.

Tool binaries and sources are available from ftp://ftp.redhat.com/redhat/gnupro/ or (preferably) a mirror site.

Red Hat has added support for USB slave devices to eCos, the Embedded Configurable Operating System. This includes generic USB slave support, a device driver for the Intel StrongARM SA11x0 on-chip USB device, and an additional support package for developing USB-ethernet and similar peripherals.

These improvements are available from the development repository via anonymous CVS including documentation.

Red Hat has recently added other significant features to eCos, currently only available from the anonymous CVS development repository.

Key additions to generic eCos functionality include:

• EL/IX compatibility layer - POSIX 1003.1 threads and synchronization primitives (beta)
• Plug-in filesystem and network stack support (including a sample RAM-based filesystem)
• RedBoot ROM monitor permitting ethernet debugging and flash management (alpha)
• SNMP support
• PCMCIA and flash support

Support for the following new platforms and peripherals has also been added:

• Intel StrongARM SA1110 Assabet evaluation board
• Intel StrongARM SA1100 Brutus evaluation board port (beta)
• NEC V850 architecture, with an initial platform port to the NEC CEB-v850/SA1
• CqREEK SH7708 (SH3) board (contributed by Haruki Kashiwaya)
• Hitachi SH7707A and SH7709A variants
• PCMCIA and Compact Flash, including drivers for the ARM-Assabet board (beta)
• Flash memory for Intel StrongARM EBSA285 and Cirrus Logic ARM EDB7xxx boards
• Socket Communications Ethernet CF+ Card (tested on the Assabet board only)

The complete list of supported targets has been updated accordingly. A more detailed announcement of all these developments is available in the archives of the ecos-announce mailing list.