GigE NIC (Was: Who is RobertF?)

Tue Nov 25 11:35:12 UTC 2008

Robert Fu wrote:
> Hi Joel,
>  
> > Which GigE NIC is it?
>  
> Realtek RTL8111C is on the kit I'm interested most, and Intel 82574L 
> is on
> other kits I'm also interested. I really wish they were supported in 
> RTEMS.
I have a port of intel's 'em-6.5.3' covering many intel GigE chips but the
82574L is not among them. Shouldn't be very hard to port their latest
FreeBSD driver. em-6.9.5 seems to support the 82574L.

FWIW
-- Till
> As I mentioned before, for new hardware kits with this kind of gigabit 
> ethernet cards
> and without GPIO, it seems that serial port becomes the only supported 
> bi-directional
> link that can be used to interact with external systems. I think 
> that for most cases,
> a RTOS must be able to retrieve information from external systems, and 
> present
> processing result back to external systems, otherwise there is no need 
> for such
> RTOS+Hardware. Due to limited capability of serial ports, coping with 
> only serial
> communication is not a good situation.
>  
> Thanks a lot,
> Robert Fu
>
>
> > Date: Mon, 24 Nov 2008 09:52:30 -0600
> > From: joel.sherrill at oarcorp.com
> > To: wendell.silva at compsisnet.com.br
> > CC: robert.fu at live.com; rtems-users at rtems.org
> > Subject: Re: RES: RES: Who is RobertF?
> >
> > Wendell Pereira da Silva wrote:
> > >
> > > *De:* Robert Fu [mailto:robert.fu at live.com]
> > > *Enviada em:* sábado, 22 de novembro de 2008 17:19
> > > *Para:* Wendell Pereira da Silva
> > > *Cc:* rtems-users at rtems.org
> > > *Assunto:* RE: RES: Who is RobertF?
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > > Hi Wendell,
> > >
> > > Thanks a lot for your information about VMWare. It increases my
> > > confidence about VMWare.
> > >
> > >
> > Although they haven't spoke up, I know of another project that is 
> doing all
> > development inside VMWare. This lets all team members have exactly
> > the same host environment. When there are tool upgrades, a new OS
> > image is released and everyone switches to it.
> > >
> > > In your short message, you actually mentioned something interested to
> > > me. Using Google translator, I briefly browsed COMPSIS website. With
> > > 19 years of history, I guess COMPSIS is a big company with a lot of
> > > resource and is involved in activities important to your country. I'm
> > > new to RTEMS, and have very limited resource: just some spare time
> > > outside working hours and limited personal funding, so I'll need a 
> lot
> > > of help from RTEMS community on various RTEMS issues down the road.
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > > Not at all. J
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > > Limited available resource is one of the reasons I'm using VMWare 
> now.
> > > In the past I abandoned some hardware (a waste to already limited
> > > funding), either after finding out it's unsuitable or outdated due to
> > > the limited time I can work on it. This time I hope using VMWare 
> first
> > > can help me avoid some of such costs. For example, like you mentioned
> > > about 2 UARTs, since I already use one UART for remote debugging, I
> > > better select hardware kit with more than 2 UARTs (for sensor
> > > interface). Now with Eclipse plug-in and GDB working in my
> > > environment, I plan to shift focus to hardware part.
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > > Although RTEMS currently does not support the gigabit ethernet on the
> > > hardware kit that I have in mind, I'm still interested in how you 
> made
> > > GDB server interface via TCP/IP work in RTEMS. To my understanding,
> > > RTEMS is a system with single process, and GDB server is another
> > > process, so how do you launch GDB server in RTEMS?
> > >
> > It runs as a thread. There is another way of doing things using CEXP
> > and dynamic loading
> > of your application. This ends up working a lot like people are used to
> > with VxWorks.
> >
> > Network drivers are often ported over from NetBSD or FreeBSD since the
> > RTEMS TCP/IP
> > stack is an old FreeBSD one. Till Straumann has mentioned having a
> > kit/procedure for
> > making this moderately painless.
> >
> > Which GigE NIC is it?
> > >
> > > Robert, what we did was a custom implementation of a GDB Server
> > > interface inside SIS (SPARC Instruction Simulator) through a TCP/IP
> > > socket. So the RTEMS program (running on the SIS) is not aware about
> > > this interface. RTEMS already has a glue code to implement the GDB
> > > interface for some targets, including i386, but not for SPARC 
> processors.
> > >
> > >
> > > You also mentioned GPIO simulation with PC's parallel port. For the
> > > hardware kits I have in mind, some have 4-bit In/4-bit OUT GPIO, some
> > > don't. I checked Discrete Driver chapter in RTEMS BSP and Device
> > > Driver Development Guide. There are descriptions about the driver, 
> but
> > > no concrete example code is given. Do you know where I can find 
> such a
> > > concrete example? Also in 
> c\src\lib\libbsp\i386\shared\comm\i386_io.h,
> > > there some macros like outp(port, val) and inp(port) calling assembly
> > > code directly. May such macros be used to access GPIO pins directly
> > > without using the discrete driver?
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > The RTEMS powerpc gdb has psim which can map UNIX shared memory into
> > simulated PowerPC
> > processor address space. When using this, you can do all IO into shared
> > memory and let a UNIX
> > process mirror IO in and out.
> >
> > --joel
> > >
> > > In the same way, we implemented the GPIO code inside SIS. That is,
> > > when the RTEMS program access the address of the GPIO registers it
> > > redirects such access to the PC’s parallel port mapped through VMWare.
> > >
> > > Thanks a lot for your help, and have a nice weekend!
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > > No problem.
> > >
> > >
> > > Robert Fu
> > >
> > > Wendell.
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > > 
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> > >
> > >
> > > Subject: RES: Who is RobertF?
> > > Date: Fri, 21 Nov 2008 11:01:15 -0300
> > > From: wendell.silva at compsisnet.com.br
> > > To: robert.fu at live.com
> > > CC: rtems-users at rtems.org
> > >
> > > Hi Robert Fu,
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > > This is just to complement your information.
> > >
> > > Here, at COMPSIS (Brazil), our development environment includes 
> VMWare
> > > 6.0 playing Fedora 7, RTEMS 4.8.0, Eclipse 3.3 CDT and a customized
> > > (home made) version of SIS (with GPIO emulation with the PC’s 
> parallel
> > > port and a GDB Server interface via TCP/IP – which allow us to use
> > > both UARTs to run our protocols). Everything has worked very well
> > > since its implementation (6 month ago). VMWare have worked very well
> > > in Windows Vista 32 in our case. None of our problems (in the
> > > beginning) wasn’t regarding to the VMWare.
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > > Att.
> > >
> > > Wendell P. Silva.
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > > 
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> > >
> > > *De:* rtems-users-bounces at rtems.org
> > > [mailto:rtems-users-bounces at rtems.org] *Em nome de *Robert Fu
> > > *Enviada em:* sexta-feira, 21 de novembro de 2008 04:33
> > > *Para:* daronchabot at gmail.com
> > > *Cc:* rtems-users at rtems.org
> > > *Assunto:* RE: Who is RobertF?
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > > Hi Daron,
> > >
> > > Thanks for clarify Option --enable-rdbg and --enable-rtems-debug.
> > > The RTEMS version I used is 4.9.0. I'm not sure if the problem has
> > > anything to do with VMWare, or some of my heap configurations
> > > were not right. I'll keep eye on it in the future.
> > >
> > > Thanks,
> > > Robert Fu
> > >
> > > > From: daronchabot at gmail.com
> > > > Subject: Re: Who is RobertF?
> > > > Date: Thu, 20 Nov 2008 07:10:53 -0600
> > > > To: robert.fu at live.com
> > > > CC: rtems-users at rtems.org
> > > >
> > > >
> > > > On 20-Nov-08, at 4:24 AM, Robert Fu wrote:
> > > >
> > > > > Hi Jeol,
> > > > >
> > > > > It's me. Last night I uploaded screen shots while 
> writing/previewing
> > > > > "RTEMS Eclipse Plug-In" wiki page. Although some files were 
> uploaded,
> > > > > error page (HTTP 500 Internal Server Error or Could not create
> > > > > directory)
> > > > > came up for almost every uploading, and later I could not access
> > > > > the wiki site.
> > > > >
> > > > > I developed an Eclipse plug-in for RTEMS 
> (http://www.rtems.com/wiki/
> > > > > index.php/RTEMS_Eclipse_Plug-in).
> > > > > Please take a look. I'm new to RTEMS, and also new to Eclipse 
> plug-in
> > > > > development. This is the 1st plug-in that I ever developed. So 
> please
> > > > > be patient if you encounter problems while using it.
> > > >
> > > > Well done! Thanks for your contribution.
> > > >
> > > > However, as Sebastian pointed out the plugin is not accessible 
> on the
> > > > FTP site. I'd really like to check out your work.
> > > >
> > > > >
> > > > >
> > > > > While working on the GDB part of the plug-in, I initially used --
> > > > > enable-rdbg in
> > > > > configure. Later I found --enable-rtems-debug was mentioned in a
> > > > > wiki page.
> > > > > When I used both --enable-rdbg and --enable-rtems-debug in
> > > > > configure, during startup
> > > > > my application hang at "_HAssert(_Heap_Is_prev_used
> > > > > ( next_block ));" in
> > > > > cpukit\score\src\heapsizeofuserarea.c. I went back to use 
> --enable-
> > > > > rdbg. So my
> > > > > question is: which configure option should be used to enable 
> remote
> > > > > debugging?
> > > >
> > > > Option --enable-rdbg is the one to use to enable remote debugging.
> > > >
> > > > Option --enable-rtems-debug activates some instrumentation within
> > > > RTEMS itself (malloc statistics at least...).
> > > >
> > > > I use both switches simultaneously and have not seen the problem you
> > > > reported. What version of RTEMS are you using ??
> > > >
> > > >
> > > > -- dc
> > > > _______________________________________________
> > > > rtems-users mailing list
> > > > rtems-users at rtems.com
> > > > http://rtems.rtems.org/mailman/listinfo/rtems-users
> > >
> > > 
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> > >
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> >
> > --
> > Joel Sherrill, Ph.D. Director of Research & Development
> > joel.sherrill at OARcorp.com On-Line Applications Research
> > Ask me about RTEMS: a free RTOS Huntsville AL 35805
> > Support Available (256) 722-9985
> >
> >
>
>
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