[ECOS] Making fragmented applications

[Andrew Lunn]

On Wed, Sep 28, 2005 at 09:21:58AM +0000, Guilly A wrote:
> Hi Andrew,
> Thank you for your prompt response...
> So, there is no way for the GNU linker to behave like armlink ? I used to 
> think it was just a linker option issue.
> I'm in trouble, because the application will be made by a third party. I 
> need to provide them with eCos API, and my custom API, and my objectives 
> was to provide the feature to update the application only, or the bios 
> (including ecos) only, while maintaining a backward compatibility. (any 
> version of the application should be runnable, without compilation, on top 
> of any version of the bios). Maybe the objloader could do the job. This is 
> my last hope. Is the objloader reliable ? Does somebody regularly use it ? 
> I need feedbacks.

It is worth remembering that eCos is (modified) GPL. You have to
supply eCos to the third party as source. So there is no need to have
binary compatibility with eCos. The 3rd party has the source, they can
recompile it.

If your custom API is open source then the simple solution is just to
teach the customer how to compile everything from source.

If your custom API is closed source then you can distrute it as an
object file which the customer links with the eCos sources and there
own sources. You could even make your object code an eCos package so
that it gets incorperated into the eCos library.

As for the objloader package, it is new, has not been used much, and
only works with MIPS and i386 at the moment.

        Andrew



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