Re: [ECOS] Historical question about eCos

[Hugo Tyson <hmt at redhat dot com>]

Cristiano Ligieri Pereira <cpereira@ics.uci.edu> writes:
> Was eCos designed to be a embedded operating systems since the beginning
> of its development or it was initially implemented to execute on PC based
> platforms and then after a while adapted to be exeute in any "embedded
> platforms" (which requires a bunch of specific characteristics such as
> small memory usage, small context switching and inter-task communication
> overheads, event-driven capabilities, etc).
> 
> I'm asking this cause I've just read "somewhere" that eCos was first
> designed towards PC platforms and later on adapted to become an embedded
> OS. Could someone give some historic info regarding this.

"Somewhere" is exactly wrong.

Embedded small controllers first; the PC native port came later, after the
"PC under LINUX" port.  Various HAL ChangeLog files verify this.

It could be they were thinking of the GUI config tool - *that* was
initially developed to be PC (as in M$ OS) only, during a period of
confusion within Cygnus as we were then.  It is now available for Linux
also, obviously and for obvious reasons; and the CLUI tools are now
fully supported under Linux also.

So it's fair to say that "the eCos *Development Environment* was first
designed towards PC platforms and later on widened in scope to Linux" I
suppose.  That was certainly the marketing strategy at the start of the
project, anyway.  Phew! ;-)

If "somewhere" was a magazine or market report, then that's exactly the
sort of misunderstanding they're prone to, IME ;-(

	- Huge