Porting to Cortex-R4F - Thesis and GSoC project proposal

[Pavel Pisa]

Hello everybody,

we have a student (Premysl Houdek) who has interrest
in ARM based embedded systems. He has long term experience
with Cotex-M LPC based boards.

He has not used RTEMS yet but he likes idea to test it,
work on it and eventually use it in applications.

We have discussed possible summer and thesis projects
and his preference is to try port RTEMS to Cortex-R4F /
Ti's TMS570LS3137 . Advantage is that we have some boards
based on this chip left at our university office from
previous projects, we have already implemented support
for CAN, FlexRay and other peripherals with use of
Ti CCS and included rudimentary OS and we would be happy
to test RTEMS as more complete operating system running
on the HW.

Other, more important reason for Cortex-R4 is that
it is one of not so many safety enhanced CPUs.
TMS570LS3137 includes two cores in lockstep mode with
hardware differences comparison, full ECC SRAM and Flash
and all peripherals registers and memories equipped
by parity bits.

There is not much MCUs which provide such setup.
There are more such PowerPC based systems and there
are much more expensive special chips for aerospace
and space applications. But Ti's TMS570 and Hercules
families are relatively new and some of these chips
are quite affordable. RTEMS targets same/similar range
of applications as these chips so I think there is
good match.

My question:

What is opinion of RTEMS development coordinators,
do you suggest to open that task for GSoC application
and student proposal evaluation?

If yes, then who is willing to be menthor/reviewer?
I expect to be co-menthor or consultant. There are
more other people at our department who already
finished thesis or project related to given HW, so there
is knowledge base for work. There is high chance that
student would continue on project because he consider
to choose it as diploma thesis and so final state should
be very well documented and integrated at the end.

As for the GSoC period, I expect next goals

 - basic test and toolchain configuration
     non-multilib version for Cortex-R4 big-endian should
     not be problem for GCC

 - documented patch for addition of the variant into multilib

 - checking which conditional blocks in RTEMS ARM SCORE
   sources best match architecture and providing patch
   to select appropriate SCORE support.

 - extensions of SCORE (task switch and interrupts) to support
   the architecture

 - implementation of serial port driver - ideally interrupt driven

Then other peripheral support can be implemented during diploma
thesis period, including basic CAN and FlexRay support. Porting
of our Matlab/Simuling Embedded Coder target base environment
to RTEMS POSIX or RTEMS specific API should be reachable as well.

More about related project for actual used OS there

  http://rtime.felk.cvut.cz/rpp-tms570/

More about MCU there

  http://rtime.felk.cvut.cz/hw/index.php/TMS570LS3137
  
The concrete board design is owned by carmaker which
contracted us to do the design for new potential MCU platform
suitability test. But we have some code originally running
on Ti's evaluation kit. It was broken during other diploma
thesis but I expect that we can get another one from Ti
so we should provide even BSP variant for HW which has
full public documentation and is available from Ti.

Thanks for reply or ideas even for different project
in advance.

Best wishes,

                Pavel Pisa
    e-mail:     pisa at cmp.felk.cvut.cz
    www:        http://cmp.felk.cvut.cz/~pisa
    university: http://dce.fel.cvut.cz/

PS: I am on yet another exhibition (Amper in Brno) next week
    so my response can lag some days