RE: [ECOS] RedBoot without serial

[Jeremy Craner <jcraner at sorensontech dot com>]

> Gary Thomas wrote:
> > We've definitely done this (a number of times).  I'm pretty 
> sure that the
> > platforms involved had a serial port which was either 
> present or not.  The
> > drivers were left in and the bits just drop on the floor :-)
> > 
> > If this is something you could do, it would probably be 
> best.  Alternatively,
> > you could have a dummy serial driver for your platform 
> which does not have
> > a real serial port.  Having 
> CYGNUM_HAL_VIRTUAL_VECTOR_COMM_CHANNELS might
> > actually be confusing things, so having a dummy port might 
> do the trick.
> 
> Or we could find and fix the code that fails to allow for 
> this scenario
> :-). Certainly the code in mon_read_char_with_timeout() in
> redboot/current/src/io.c has a loop:
>             for (i = 0;  i < 
> CYGNUM_HAL_VIRTUAL_VECTOR_COMM_CHANNELS;  i++,
> tot++) {
> which should just mean it spins doing nothing until the 
> timeout, at which
> the idle function should allow the net stuff to intervene.
> 
> So the most likely thing would be that something somewhere is 
> dereferencing
> the console stuff anyway. It would require debugging, and the 
> best place to
> start is in hal_if_init in hal/common/current/src/hal_if.c. 
> The calls to
> set_debug_comm and set_console_comm shouldn't happen if
> CYGNUM_HAL_VIRTUAL_VECTOR_DEBUG_CHANNEL isn't valid. 
> redboot's main.c as
> well as io.c may also need tweaking.
> 
> So Jeremy if you want to fix this properly in eCos that's 
> where to start
> :-).
> 
> Jifl

Being a newcomer to eCos, that's more than I am willing to take on at this
point. The dummy driver did work, however, so thanks for the suggestion.

Jer

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