[ECOS] Ecos on an i386 PC target

["Paolo Marini" <paolom at prisma-eng dot it>]

Hi all,

 

I recently spent some time evaluating Ecos, beginning with a PC platform.

 

I downloaded the GNU tools, the Ecos tarball, followed the instructions and built a cross development environment for a Linux RH62 creating executables for an i386-elf PC. I built the ecos pc stubs tree, created the floppy and fired up an old abandoned PC. The GDB (Insight) debugger seems to connect to the target (If I disconnect the serial cable, the debugger stops for some times).

 

When downloading an executable to the PC target, it suddenly resets and reboots as soon as the first packets of code arrive.

 

The Linux hosted synthetic i386 target works pretty fine (the Insight debugger is quite impressive).

 

Thereafter, I tried with CygWin.

 

I was only able to compile the binutils executables; I followed the instructions, unzipped the gcc and gdb (Insight) tarballs, applied the specified patches, but the compilation aborted after some time. In the case of insight, it seems that it misses some symbols while linking the insight executable. The GCC compiles for some time, then stops tossing out a lot of errors.

 

Then, I tried the Windows configuration tool for ecos. I noticed, for the PC STUBS template, that the COM1 (serial line 1) is used for both the debugger and the diagnostic output. I returned to linux, regenerated the configuration file, edited it manually by forcing the diagnostics to go on the PC screen. This time the target booted up and the (still impressive !) insight debugger took control of the target, downloaded the executable and run smoothly.

 

Does anyone have some instruction for building the CygWin executables for the gcc and gdb ? Is there any new version or patche to be applied to the tarball ?

 

Thank you

 

Ciao

 

Paolo Marini