RTEMS upgrade from 4.0

[Joel Sherrill]

Erwin Rol wrote:
> 
> Currently i am running RTEMS 4.0 on a MPC860T and am looking to
> upgrade to a newer version. My question is if I should go for
> the snapshot serie or for the 4.5 release ?
> 
> What are the known problems in 4.5 that are fixed in the latest
> snap shots.

>From your perspective, snapshots have a big advantage.  They support
remote debugging on the 860 over Ethernet thanks to Eric V. and friends.
Other biggies include that the ppp is newer, semaphores/mutexes are 
optimized (40+% faster when no contention), and the filesystem code 
has had some improvements.
 
There have been bugs reported in 4.5.0 and those are fixed in the 
last snapshot.  Those patches are also applied on the 4.5.1 branch
as well.

> And what are the know problems in thhe latest snapshots ?

There last snapshot was actually a fairly heavily tested one.  It had
all RTEMS tests run on it on 3 CPU families, all targets built, and
the Ada ACATS suite run on the PowerPC. The next snapshop will pick up
a couple of other fixes but is also intended to be very stable.
 
> Oh and when will the snapshots become a release version ?

There are plans for a 4.5.1 and it is approaching. Cygwin binutils
and gdb binaries appear to have finished building over the weekend.
We have been using the new RPMs for testing a few weeks now.  These
will update to gcc 2.95.3, binutils 2.10, etc. 

A date for freezing to get a 4.6 or 5.0 (depends on feature set) has
not been set.  The 5.0 version number is reserved for separating the
BSPs from the main tree. :)

> - Erwin

-- 
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
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