GNAT/RTEMS and ACATS Suite

[Joel Sherrill]

This is a SIGNIFICANT opportunity to contribute to the
GNU community in general and Ada community in particular.

Laurent Guerby <guerby at acm.org> has been working on a set of
scripts to run the ACATS (formerly ACVC) on GNAT.   This is
in anticipation of the merger of GNAT into the main
gcc.gnu.org CVS repository.  I think I am speaking for both
Laurent and myself when I say that we would love to see 
this suite run on GNAT/RTEMS.  I have made the scripts
available at:

ftp://ftp.oarcorp.com/pub/rtems/snapshots/contrib/acats

The full ACATS includes 1000's of tests.  I think Laurent
has focused on the executable portion of them.  This is
a VERY serious test of the Ada run-time and a very good
exercise of the POSIX tasking model.  I used the ACVC to
find problems in the RTEMS POSIX implementation and debug
it when it was first implemented.

Laurent wrote (the first?) ACVC scripts for ACT.  I used
his scripts to run the validation suite on the SPARC/ERC32
when we received the official validation certificate.

I would encourage others to play with this. :)  Eventually
GNAT will be merged into the main gcc source repository
and it will be then possible to build GNAT for any RTEMS 
target.  If there is a simulator, it will be easy to 
run the full suite automatically.

FYI .. simulators out there and RTEMS status in relation:

  + sparc, powerpc, c3x/c4x - suitable for ACATS
  + i960, h8, arm - missing timer source
  + m68000/cpu32 (BSCV) - suitable but BSP not complete
  + i386 (plex86) - suitable but needs attention
  + MIPS - suitable but no BSP
  + SH - suitable but no BSP

I would encourage the GNAT/RTEMS folks to rally around
and have an impact.  We can be THE GNAT-cross community.

-- 
Joel Sherrill, Ph.D.             Director of Research & Development
joel at OARcorp.com                 On-Line Applications Research
Ask me about RTEMS: a free RTOS  Huntsville AL 35805
   Support Available             (256) 722-9985