[ECOS] Starting new eCos project

[James Graves]

Hello Folks,

We're about to start off a new project using eCos.  I'd like to list out 
(at a high level) what we're planning to do, and I'd appreciate your 
feedback if there are any major "gotchas" or some way to do things better.

As for the toolchain on the Linux host, I guess we'll use the one out of 
the Sourceware FTP directory.  Building my own toolchain is usually an 
adventure, even when using the crosstool script.

The target board is ARM9 based.  We'd previously done a partial port of 
eCos 2.0 to this platform, though that never reached production.  So 
I'll be digging through our existing code and cleaning that up.

Based on list traffic, it seems we should use the current CVS version of 
eCos, instead of the 2.0 release.

We're planning on using JFFS2 for a filesystem in NOR flash, using the 
version already in the eCos tree.  I don't know if it would be worth 
while to try to bring in the latest version of JFFS2.

For a follow-on project to this one which will also be using this 
platform, we'll need TCP/IP networking.  The network driver will be 
written by us (or maybe adapted from Linux).  Looks like we should be 
using the FreeBSD stack, based on a little digging in this mailing list.

We're going to be using this combo memory part (PSRAM and NOR flash) to 
save board space... and because you can't just buy the smaller SDRAMs at 
a reasonable price anymore.  :-)  I was thinking about just always 
running eCos out of RAM, to make things a little simpler when it comes 
to upgrades.  For the previous project, we'd needed to download a small 
bootloader that ran out of RAM and re-programmed the flash, and that was 
annoying and time-consuming.

Best regards,

James Graves

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