University project - recommendations?

[Chris Johns]

On 29/11/2014 11:14 pm, Dominik Taborsky wrote:
> On Sat, 29 Nov 2014 04:44:53 +0100, Gedare Bloom <gedare at rtems.org> wrote:
>
>> On Fri, Nov 28, 2014 at 4:17 PM, Dominik Taborsky <bremby at seznam.cz>
>> wrote:
>>> I have browsed through the wiki/trac and I found these 3:
>>> 1) CFI-standard flash device interface,
>>> 2) CEXP integration,
>>> 3) TCP stack rewrite.
>>>
>> I don't know that CEXP integration is that interesting anymore. One of
>> the key features of CEXP is dynamic loading, which is not supported
>> through the RTEMS linker and loader projects (RTL). You might ask
>> Chris Johns if there are projects available for RTL.
>
> Chris is subscribed to this ML so he can reply now. Or should I address
> him directly?
>

Here is fine and welcome to RTEMS.

The RTL is in the main tree now under libld. There are some extra tasks 
to complete, one relate to ARM veneers and adding veneer support in 
general that is outstanding but I am not sure there is enough work left 
in them for you. The veneer is an interesting task and has some challengers.

One area that has plenty of work that needs doing plus ways to innovate 
is trace. Jennifer is adding trace support to the capture engine [1] for 
SMP and I have written a trace linker [2] that has support to trace 
calls using printk. We need to hook all this together to make a workable 
solution for users and we are currently looking at the Common Trace 
Format (CTF) [3] to do this. Generating CTF lets us integrate with 
Babletrace and the Linux Trace Toolkit Viewer (LTTV).

The trace support we are adding attempts to solve some tough user 
requirements from the space community such as instrumenting and tracing 
software at the object level rather than instrumenting at the source 
level. This means you take software that is compiled and production 
ready and link in trace support. The support needs to be efficient 
because it is a target side software only trace. Transporting data off 
target needs to be generic and flexible because we have so many 
different target types with differing hardware.

The work involves adding suitable support to the capture engine to 
extract the trace data and convert it to the CTF format. This may be on 
target or off target depending on the load it places on the target. We 
have lots of pieces of code in place but the code is new and green so 
you would need to work across all parts. We need support for generating 
trigger and trace control maps and this may be linked to the CTF format 
and Babeltrace. There will be work at real-time capture level, the trace 
linking parts on the host, and CTF integrations.

Joel and I met three of the EfficiOS people at GSoC this year and 
discussed this work so we would work with them.

Chris

[1] https://devel.rtems.org/browser/rtems/cpukit/libmisc/capture
[2] https://devel.rtems.org/browser/rtems-tools/linkers/rtems-tld.cpp
[3] http://www.efficios.com/ctf