Part 2: Recent events, and a promising future

By late 2001, Lineo was spinning off their acquisitions and the former Rt-Control team began to wonder how they might recover uClinux. Moreton Bay was renamed to SnapGear, and spun out of Lineo in late 2001. (more…)

Building the Dreamcast boot CD

We're in the home stretch now! All that's left to do is to burn kernel-boot.bin onto a CD, move the CD to the Dreamcast, hit the POWER button, and watch your new kernel boot. (more…)

Building a Dreamcast Linux kernel

Now that we have a complete cross development toolchain, it's time to put the tools to work. As I mentioned before, I have pre-configured our Linux kernel sources so that they are already set up for the Dreamcast, so all that's needed now is to run the commands in Figure 6 to actually compile and link the kernel. (more…)

Building the tools

The first step in the process of getting Linux running on the Dreamcast is to construct the tools we need, including a cross assembler, linker, compiler, and a C runtime library. In the next section we will use these tools to build the operating system, and a basic shell application that Linux will run at the end of its boot process. (more…)

And then what happens?

Now that we know how to get an executable image into the Dreamcast, we need to know exactly how to use this capability to boot and run Linux. To answer this question, we need to cover a bit more background. (more…)

Here are Steve Furr's answers . . .

1. What is real-time? — Real-time is a property of systems that is often misunderstood. I will attempt to provide a summary of some of the critical elements of real-time computing, but for a formal treatment of the issue with rigorous definition of the terms, I would strongly encourage visiting (more…)

Here are Mitch Bunnell's answers:

• What is real-time? — The ability of a system to respond to external or clock events within a bounded period of time. (more…)

Here are Myron Zimmerman's answers:

• What is real-time? — A real-time system provides specified system services with known timing and latency characteristics, so that applications can be designed and developed that meet perscribed timing constraints. (more…)

Here are Jim Ready's answers:

• What is real-time? — The right results on time.
• What is hard real-time? — The right results late are wrong. (more…)

Here are David Beal's answers:

• What is real-time? — Real-time is the ability to issue a command or instruction and get a response in a relatively predictable amount of time to that task. It is also defined as the actual time during which a process takes place or an event occurs. (more…)

Here are Victor Yodaiken's answers:

• What is real-time? . . . and . . . What is hard real-time? — Real-time software can meet timing deadlines. Then there is “soft”, “firm”, “usually”, or “most of the time” or “kind of” real-time. These all seem to be ways of saying “not” real-time. (more…)

Here are Douglass Locke's answers:

• What is real-time? — A real-time system (defined by IEEE) is a system whose correctness includes its response time as well as its functional correctness. In other words, in a real-time system, it not only matters that the answers are correct, but it matters when the answers are produced. (more…)

Taking Embedix for a spin

To develop a sense of how practical it would be to configure systems using Embedix, I decided to build a system for each of the single-board computers in my Embedded Linux Toolkit Test Lab (described in the introduction to this series), and (at a minimum) get the system booted… (more…)

Lineo's real-time Linux option

About a year ago Lineo was on an acquisition spree, acquiring a number of small companies that provided Embedded Linux products. Among the companies they acquired were Zentropix, Moreton Bay, and RT-Control. In the process they became involved in a number of open-source projects, each with its own philosophy, programming model, and documentation. (more…)

Other Embedix components and features

Other components of Embedix are more in keeping with an open source philosophy. As one might expect, Embedix uses GCC as its compiler. Prebuilt binaries are provided for the supported target architectures. Also, GDB is used for debugging, and is used without significant modifications. (more…)