The following is an announcement from the ecos-discuss mailing list. eCos is an open source real-time operating system originally developed by Cygnus Solutions, later taken over by Red Hat (via its acquisition of Cygnus), and subsequently turned over by Red Hat to a worldwide independent developer community.

eCos 2.0 Beta announcement

From: Jonathan Larmour
To: eCos discussion
Date: Mon, 17 Mar 2003 15:08:01 +0000
Subject: [ECOS] eCos 2.0 Beta announcement

We are pleased to announce that the eCos 2.0 Beta release is now available. This is a substantial release incorporating many new features and support for more than 80 publicly available evaluation and development platforms.

Architectural support now covers ARM (including StrongARM and XScale), SuperH, Intel x86 (IA32), PowerPC, MIPS, Matsushita AM3x, Motorola 68K/Coldfire, SPARC, Hitachi H8/300H and NEC V850.

System enhancements (relative to the previous eCos 1.3.1 release) include:

• RedBoot, the open source bootstrap and debug firmware based on eCos
  
• A choice of TCP/IP stacks including options for BOOTP/DHCP, DNS, TFTP/FTP, SNMP, IPv6 and HTTPD
  
• RAM, ROM and flash file systems
  
• Power management support
  
• USB slave support
  
• A POSIX-compatible API
  
• Symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) support

Further enhancements are listed in the NEWS file included in the release.

eCos 2.0 Beta is also the first release under a new license which provides compatibility with the well-known GNU General Public License (GPL) while also allowing application source code to remain proprietary.

Alongside many public contributions to the eCos sources, a set of pre-built GNU toolchains for all the major architectures supported by eCos and RedBoot has been contributed. These toolchains, together with a new download and installation script, make it much easier to get started with eCos.

For download details, please visit the eCos project home page.

The complete release, including the pre-built GNU toolchains is also available on CD-ROM from eCosCentric, here.

We need the help of the eCos net community in evaluating this beta release on a wide variety of hardware platforms. The eCos maintainers have prepared a set of testing guidelines to assist you in providing the feedback we need, here.

Please consider supporting the eCos community in this way.

Thank you!

Jonathan Larmour
Chief eCos Maintainer
on behalf of the eCos maintainers

 
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