RFC: Boot sequence callouts?

[Thomas Doerfler]

Hello,

in the past, I have brought up RTEMS on various boards, 
sometimes with almost no debugging tools. Today in a private 
email contact I once again got the question "My board does not 
boot. What's wrong?".

I just got an idea that might help a bit to find the reason 
for a hanging boot sequence. How about a standard callout 
function pointer (let's say "BSP_boot_checkpoint_reached") 
that is called, whenever a new part of the boot sequence has 
been reached. 

Normally this pointer would be NULL and therefore no call 
would be executed at all, but in the basic startup code, this 
pointer could be tweaked to a useful function (like blinking 
an LED, sending a character to the UART, beeping a beeper or 
so), just to monitor, which checkpoints have been reached (and 
which have not).

My recommendation is still very rough (and I hope no software 
patents already claim this fantastic idea as IP :-> ), but 
maybe this would be of some help...

Any comments appreciated,

	Thomas.
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IMD Ingenieurbuero fuer Microcomputertechnik
Thomas Doerfler           Herbststrasse 8
D-82178 Puchheim          Germany
email:    Thomas.Doerfler at imd-systems.de
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