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eCos 2.0 Breaks Out of Red Hat Red Tape


POSIX layer offers lightweight alternative to embedded Linux

By Edward J. Correia
April 15, 2003 — 
Free of the shackles imposed by Red Hat Inc., maintainers of the open-source eCos real-time operating system said in mid-March that version 2.0, now in beta, could be generally available around April 15. The new version will add an all-new bootloader with remote debugging and full POSIX compliance, giving it the ability to run many Linux and Unix applications with just a recompile.

"This was the best possible move for the future of eCos: to get out from under Red Hat and become truly open and not controlled by a commercial company with commercial interests," said former Red Hat employee Alex Schuilenburg, now CEO of eCosCentric Ltd., the company he formed with three other of the six original eCos developers.

Schuilenburg credited significant increases in target support of eCos 2.0 to that freedom. "[Under Red Hat,] any kind of public release had to be customer-driven. Now that we're no longer part of Red Hat, we have a lot more freedom to do things." One of those things, he said, is to port eCos to many new development platforms and boards. "We plan to conquer the world by making eCos as pervasive as possible." General release should come within the month, he said.

The new version will support nearly a dozen processor architectures, including ARM, MIPS, Motorola 68K/ColdFire, PowerPC and x86. Schuilenburg cited survey data published by CMP Media LLC that showed eCos with a 5 percent estimated market share for 2003, up from 3 percent in 2002, and that it is being considered by about 1 in 5 embedded developers.

Peter Vandenabeele, CEO of Mind NV (www.mind.be), which develops and markets tools and services surrounding eCos and embedded Linux, said that being dropped by Red Hat also means freedom from its restrictive license. "The Red Hat license forced anyone using a modified version of eCos, even in private circles, to send modifications back to Red Hat."

Since last year, eCos, like Linux, has been licensed under the GPL, but with one important exception, according to Vandenabeele. "Unlike regular GPL, in eCos you are not forced to release other programs that you distribute with eCos if they are linked with eCos. In GPL, if you link a proprietary program to a GPL library and want to release it, you can only do that if you also release the program." On the other hand, Vandenabeele added that programs that include parts of eCos or changes to eCos itself are required also to be released under GPL.

According to Gary Thomas, one of the original eCos developers and still a key figure in its evolution, the POSIX layer in version 2 extends compliance with the portable operating system interface far beyond what Red Hat had done. "This is a significant update to Red Hat's last release, which was 1.3.1. The greatest benefit is that you can take an average program designed to run in a POSIX environment, compile it, and it runs [on eCos]. There are a wealth of programs comfortable running on Linux that with very little effort will now run on eCos."

Jonathan Larmour, chief eCos maintainer and chief engineer at eCosCentric, tempered Thomas' claim of Linux compatibility. "We're using a subset of APIs, and we don't emulate every Linux octet. But most things should run as long as they're not too 'Linuxy.'"

Thomas said its fine-grained configurability makes eCos a superior choice to Linux and its derivatives as an embedded operating system for resource-constrained devices. "You might not be able to or want to put Linux on a particular embedded device because of size or because of the capabilities of the processor. And running uClinux is an ordeal, and it can't fit in such a small space with limited resources," he said, referring to the version of Linux for microprocessors lacking a memory management unit.

Larmour echoed Thomas' claims. "What's great about eCos is the level of control you get. Not only is it designed to be small and fast, but it's highly configurable and you get the source code and can do anything you want with it. Plus it's modular, so it can be extended."

Thomas counts among his accomplishments the first Linux port to the PowerPC processor in 1996. Laid off from Red Hat, Thomas now operates MLB Associates (www.mlbassoc.com), a software development consulancy, and is under contract with Mind to continue eCos development. He admitted that although the new version increases developer choices, including four new TCP/IP stacks with varying capabilities, Linux still has one big advantage over eCos: "thousands of eyes. That's one of the big claims of Linux; there are lots of people working on it at every level, and there are tons of drivers always being updated. People using eCos are pretty much on their own. We have lots of drivers, but may not have the one you want."

Another significant improvement, according to Thomas, is RedBoot, an embedded bootstrap and debugging environment that he said contains the GNU debugger remote stub. "That lets you do remote debugging on the device using gdb. The benefit is that you can telnet in from anywhere on the planet and debug code on the board, or update RedBoot or other software images. Even after it's deployed, you can get in and test and fix it." Thomas was the principal designer of RedBoot.

A CD-ROM containing eCos 2.0 and RedBoot sources, configuration tool binaries and the GNU toolchain is available now for US$50 atwww.ecoscentric.com/ecos/cdrom.html. The same also can be downloaded for free athttp://sources.redhat.com/ecos.


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