On Thu, Dec 18, 2008 at 10:12 AM, Andrew Lunn <[email protected]> wrote: > On Wed, Dec 17, 2008 at 08:13:44PM -0800, David Brennan wrote: >> I was wondering about the current state of SMP in eCos. Specifically, >> has any progress been made on running it on a dual core Intel chip >> yet? Or failing that, can it run on a SMP linux synthetic target? >> >> If either of those have not been done, I might consider tackling one >> or the other, if someone would give me some guidance as to what the >> process would be. > > An SMP synth would be interesting. It does not need a SMP host > underneath, just multiple threads. However such a system would be a > good test and development platform for SMP development. > > I think part of the problem with SMP is that so few people actually > have SMP hardware. The other problem is its a very specialized area. I > guess there are very few applications which need SMP and RTOS which > cannot use Linux. > > Andrew > I was actually recently playing with "another operating system's" simulator on an SMP linux box and thought exactly what you did. I think it would be great for testing SMP code without hardware. My current project is UP, but we use COTS VME boards and they are mostly going to Core Duo chips (for Intel architecture). So we would like to consider how difficult it would be to make our code SMP aware. We don't currently need the horsepower. But who knows what the future requirements are going to be. And the hardware vendors are "throwing it in for free" (if you neglect the extra power, and heat).
But if it is possible to get the SMP eCos running on a Core Duo laptop, they are also getting cheap enough to testing/development. But I don't understand what the actual steps are for identifying processors, and initializing them. I'd be willing to try and learn to try and get it working under eCos. For running it on linux synth with mulitple threads, would that just require starting a second thread somewhere in the synthetic startup code? Will the threads be able to share memory? I've never done multi-threaded programming on anything other than a flat memory model RTOS. Thanks for your input David -- Before posting, please read the FAQ: http://ecos.sourceware.org/fom/ecos and search the list archive: http://ecos.sourceware.org/ml/ecos-discuss
