eCos 2.0 Released

Jonathan Larmour points out the "release of eCos 2.0, the configurable RTOS for the deeply embedded market. This release features a new licence based on the GPL, but with an exception to make it more suitable for embedded use. It's also now an independent free software project from the original developers Red Hat (which bought Cygnus Solutions) after the development team was canned. Most of the team still work on eCos but for different companies. It also has a wide range of ports but has managed to keep a low profile, which should now change with the new stable release. More at http://ecos.sourceware.org/ "

Comments

More TRON!

[ObviousGuy]

iTRON is a big deal here in Japan with it being one of the leading embedded operating systems here. eCos seems to support a flavor of it.

It would be interesting to see what American companies could do with the TRON system.

C++ and Kernel Coding

[Markus Registrada]

eCos serves as elegant proof that, even in the Free Software world, C++ is a practical language to use for even the lowest-level kernel coding.

Re:RTOS

[Markus Registrada]

Nowadays (what with Wince out there) we have to say "hard real time". It delivers to-the-nanosecond latency maxima, making it suitable for controlling million-dollar machines that would break, and maybe kill somebody, if it missed. It might be annoying enough if it kept dropping your cellphone connection -- those have hard-real-time constraints, so when Wince runs a cell phone, there's a separate CPU running a real-time kernel.

There are hard-real-time kernels that will run underneath Linux (or NetBSD) so you don't have to choose, you can have both. Sometimes, though, you need networking but can't afford the extra RAM and whatnot to run a whole Unixy environment. Anyway the minimalism can be heady, too, like the thin cold air on a mountain you've just climbed.