From owner-freebsd-questions Thu Dec 19 12:29:40 1996 Return-Path: Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.8.4/8.8.4) id MAA09636 for questions-outgoing; Thu, 19 Dec 1996 12:29:40 -0800 (PST) Received: from xmission.xmission.com (softweyr@xmission.xmission.com [198.60.22.2]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.8.4/8.8.4) with ESMTP id MAA09631 for ; Thu, 19 Dec 1996 12:29:37 -0800 (PST) Received: (from softweyr@localhost) by xmission.xmission.com (8.8.4/8.7.5) id NAA09438 for questions@freebsd.org; Thu, 19 Dec 1996 13:29:25 -0700 (MST) From: Softweyr LLC Message-Id: <199612192029.NAA09438@xmission.xmission.com> Subject: Re: embed To: questions@freebsd.org Date: Thu, 19 Dec 1996 13:29:21 -0700 (MST) X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL25] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-questions@freebsd.org X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk > does anyone know of anything about "embedded" (romed) UNIXs ? > i saw Linux had a project - but nothing working (ELKS) ... > is FreeBSD ROMable ? anyone ever try it ? > or is the idea ridiculous? Ridiculous, no, overkill - probably. If you really need something small enough to run in a romable environment, UNIX is probably going to carry a lot of baggage you don't need. > or any other advice on a portable ROMable standard ? > 386 CPU ok - but NO drives (moving parts) ... Sure. As a good starting point, see http://www.pso.com/realtime.html I recommend looking at u/COS and RTEMS in particular. I'm just starting to investigate these systems now, using FreeBSD and GNU tools as a development environment, and 386ex and NS486 eval systems as targets. > no sales pitches please! Who, me? > i also hear that writing device drivers can be a real pain in the butt for > UNIX (A2D cards, etc) ? any comments ? Writing device drivers for UNIX is certainly no more painful than writing device drivers for any other OS. You at least have a kernel debugger in FreeBSD and *rarely* ;^) have to resort to logic analyzers, o-scopes, etc. Don't let the DOS-heads in the world frighten you about working inside UNIX; at least you have the source to the system, and to other drivers. -- "Where am I, and what am I doing in this handbasket?" Wes Peters Softweyr LLC http://www.xmission.com/~softweyr softweyr@xmission.com