[ECOS] communications channel concepts

[Fabrice Gautier <Fabrice_Gautier at sdesigns dot com>]

Hi,

I'm still confused about the communication channel concept in eCos.
What I'm saying is based on what I've seen on the 1.3.1 release and
particulary in the i386 platform.

For example I think there is a confusion between the diag channel and the
gdb channel.
And for what I've seen in the code, the gdb debug channel is always com1 and
38400 bauds (except if you hack the stub).

But either the diag channel is com1 or com2, there is still an
initialization of the com port. When the diag channel is the same as the gdb
channel we shouldn't need this. And it don't understand very well how the
gdb stub and the diag channel send and receive chars. It would be logical to
have a read function for the stub and a read function for the diag channel,
and maybe when the channel is the same one would call the other but in the
current code i can't see a clear distinction between waht belong to the
stub, and what belong to the diagnostic stuff.

It seems that the last cvs update bring a lot of new stuff, Redboot and all,
Is there any stuff adressing this problems ?
I've seen that RedBoot only use ethernet for the moment. What shoudl be the
amount of work to have serial support for Redboot? What kind of driver does
redboot would use? the common eCos serial driver or a special serial driver
(like this is the case currently for the gdb stubs) 

Thanks

-- 
Fabrice Gautier
fabrice_gautier@sdesigns.com