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><H1
><A
NAME="SYNTH">Overview</H1
><DIV
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><A
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><H2
>Name</H2
>The eCos synthetic target -- Overview</DIV
><DIV
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><A
NAME="SYNTH-DESCRIPTION"
></A
><H2
>Description</H2
><P
>Usually eCos runs on either a custom piece of hardware, specially
designed to meet the needs of a specific application, or on a
development board of some sort that is available before the final
hardware. Such boards have a number of things in common:
</P
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><P
>Obviously there has to be at least one processor to do the work. Often
this will be a 32-bit processor, but it can be smaller or larger.
Processor speed will vary widely, depending on the expected needs of
the application. However the exact processor being used tends not to
matter very much for most of the development process: the use of
languages such as C or C++ means that the compiler will handle those
details.
</P
></LI
><LI
><P
>There needs to be memory for code and for data. A typical system will
have two different types of memory. There will be some non-volatile
memory such as flash, EPROM or masked ROM. There will also be some
volatile memory such as DRAM or SRAM. Often the code for the final
application will reside in the non-volatile memory and all of the RAM
will be available for data. However updating non-volatile memory
requires a non-trivial amount of effort, so for much of the
development process it is more convenient to burn suitable firmware,
for example RedBoot, into the non-volatile memory and then use that to
load the application being debugged into RAM, alongside the
application data and a small area reserved for use by the firmware.
</P
></LI
><LI
><P
>The platform must provide certain mimimal I/O facilities. Most eCos
configurations require a clock signal of some sort. There must also be
some way of outputting diagnostics to the user, often but not always
via a serial port. Unless special debug hardware is being used, source
level debugging will require bidirectional communication between a
host machine and the target hardware, usually via a serial port or an
ethernet device.
</P
></LI
><LI
><P
>All the above is not actually very useful yet because there is no way
for the embedded device to interact with the rest of the world, except
by generating diagnostics. Therefore an embedded device will have
additional I/O hardware. This may be fairly standard hardware such as
an ethernet or USB interface, or special hardware designed
specifically for the intended application, or quite often some
combination. Standard hardware such as ethernet or USB may be
supported by eCos device drivers and protocol stacks, whereas the
special hardware will be driven directly by application code.
</P
></LI
></OL
><P
>Much of the above can be emulated on a typical PC running Linux.
Instead of running the embedded application being developed on a
target board of some sort, it can be run as a Linux process. The
processor will be the PC's own processor, for example an x86, and the
memory will be the process' address space. Some I/O facilities can be
emulated directly through system calls. For example clock hardware can
be emulated by setting up a <TT
CLASS="LITERAL"
>SIGALRM</TT
> signal, which
will cause the process to be interrupted at regular intervals. This
emulation of real hardware will not be particularly accurate, the
number of cpu cycles available to the eCos application between clock
ticks will vary widely depending on what else is running on the PC,
but for much development work it will be good enough.
</P
><P
>Other I/O facilities are provided through an I/O auxiliary process,
ecosynth, that gets spawned by the eCos application during startup.
When an eCos device driver wants to perform some I/O operation, for
example send out an ethernet packet, it sends a request to the I/O
auxiliary. That is an ordinary Linux application so it has ready
access to all normal Linux I/O facilities. To emulate a device
interrupt the I/O auxiliary can raise a <TT
CLASS="LITERAL"
>SIGIO</TT
>
signal within the eCos application. The HAL's interrupt subsystem
installs a signal handler for this, which will then invoke the
standard eCos ISR/DSR mechanisms. The I/O auxiliary is based around
Tcl scripting, making it easy to extend and customize. It should be
possible to configure the synthetic target so that its I/O
functionality is similar to what will be available on the final target
hardware for the application being developed.
</P
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ALIGN="CENTER"></P
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><P
>A key requirement for synthetic target code is that the embedded
application must not be linked with any of the standard Linux
libraries such as the GNU C library: that would lead to a confusing
situation where both eCos and the Linux libraries attempted to provide
functions such as <TT
CLASS="FUNCTION"
>printf</TT
>. Instead the synthetic
target support must be implemented directly on top of the Linux
kernels' system call interface. For example, the kernel provides a
system call for write operations. The actual function
<TT
CLASS="FUNCTION"
>write</TT
> is implemented in the system's C library,
but all it does is move its arguments on to the stack or into certain
registers and then execute a special trap instruction such as
<TT
CLASS="LITERAL"
>int 0x80</TT
>. When this instruction is executed
control transfers into the kernel, which will validate the arguments
and perform the appropriate operation. Now, a synthetic target
application cannot be linked with the system's C library. Instead it
contains a function <TT
CLASS="FUNCTION"
>cyg_hal_sys_write</TT
> which, like
the C library's <TT
CLASS="FUNCTION"
>write</TT
> function, pushes its
arguments on to the stack and executes the trap instruction. The Linux
kernel cannot tell the difference, so it will perform the I/O
operation requested by the synthetic target. With appropriate
knowledge of what system calls are available, this makes it possible
to emulate the required I/O facilities. For example, spawning the
ecosynth I/O auxiliary involves system calls
<TT
CLASS="FUNCTION"
>cyg_hal_sys_fork</TT
> and
<TT
CLASS="FUNCTION"
>cyg_hal_sys_execve</TT
>, and sending a request to the
auxiliary uses <TT
CLASS="FUNCTION"
>cyg_hal_sys_write</TT
>.
</P
><P
>In many ways developing for the synthetic target is no different from
developing for real embedded targets. eCos must be configured
appropriately: selecting a suitable target such as
<TT
CLASS="USERINPUT"
><B
>i386linux</B
></TT
> will cause the configuration system
to load the appropriate packages for this hardware; this includes an
architectural HAL package and a platform-specific package; the
architectural package contains generic code applicable to all Linux
platforms, whereas the platform package is for specific Linux
implementations such as the x86 version and contains any
processor-specific code. Selecting this target will also bring in some
device driver packages. Other aspects of the configuration such as
which API's are supported are determined by the template, by adding
and removing packages, and by fine-grained configuration.
</P
><P
>In other ways developing for the synthetic target can be much easier
than developing for a real embedded target. For example there is no
need to worry about building and installing suitable firmware on the
target hardware, and then downloading and debugging the actual
application over a serial line or a similar connection. Instead an
eCos application built for the synthetic target is mostly
indistinguishable from an ordinary Linux program. It can be run simply
by typing the name of the executable file at a shell prompt.
Alternatively you can debug the application using whichever version of
gdb is provided by your Linux distribution. There is no need to build
or install special toolchains. Essentially using the synthetic target
means that the various problems associated with real embedded hardware
can be bypassed for much of the development process.
</P
><P
>The eCos synthetic target provides emulation, not simulation. It is
possible to run eCos in suitable architectural simulators but that
involves a rather different approach to software development. For
example, when running eCos on the psim PowerPC simulator you need
appropriate cross-compilation tools that allow you to build PowerPC
executables. These are then loaded into the simulator which interprets
every instruction and attempts to simulate what would happen if the
application were running on real hardware. This involves a lot of
processing overhead, but depending on the functionality provided by
the simulator it can give very accurate results. When developing for
the synthetic target the executable is compiled for the PC's own
processor and will be executed at full speed, with no need for a
simulator or special tools. This will be much faster and somewhat
simpler than using an architectural simulator, but no attempt is made
to accurately match the behaviour of a real embedded target.
</P
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