How to use RTEMS building tools

[Chris Caudle]

On Friday 18 November 2005 06:47 am, sam wrote:
> how to use these tools to build a RTEMS iso?

What exactly do you want to do?  I think this is the second or third time you 
have asked how to build an RTEMS iso, but that question as phrased doesn't 
provide enough context to make sense.
RTEMS is a real time embedded operating system, which supports many target 
processor architectures and many system configurations.  When you write iso, 
presumably you mean a CD-ROM image file which can be used to create a CD-ROM, 
but what do you want on the CD-ROM?  When you say RTEMS with no other 
context, that implies the real time executive, which has no application, 
minimal driver support, no user interface with the possible exception of a 
simple shell which is used for console output (printf statements and the 
like).

RTEMS is not a workstation operating system like a Unix style OS, such as 
Linux or any of the BSD family.  RTEMS consists of a kernel to provide memory 
allocation control, scheduling of threads, interrupt handling, and enough API 
support that you can build whatever you want on top of that.  The FreeBSD 
networking stack has been ported to run on top of the RTEMS kernel API's so 
that networking API's (sockets) can be made available in addition to the  
RTEMS's API's. 

If you want a CD-ROM which can boot on a personal computer style X86 processor 
platform, the best place to start is probably Till Straumann's bootable CD:
http://www.slac.stanford.edu/~strauman/rtems/cd/index.html
Till has provided a build of RTEMS along with his "Generic System Application" 
which features a shell accessible from the console.

Also of use may be these Wikipedia articles if you are not already familiar 
with the concepts of embedded systems and real time operating systems:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_time_operating_system
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embedded_system

-- 
Chris Caudle