About the TCp/ip stack in RTEMS

[Ralf Corsepius]

On Wed, 2008-09-10 at 10:58 +0800, PowerMan wrote:
> I am doing a project which uses the NXP LPC2300.
> The NXP LPC2300 is based on arm7-tdmi & have a internal ethernet 
> controller. But the internal sdam is only 32KB.
> The FreeBSD tcp/ip stack in RTEMS seems too large for such kind of
> MCU ( with internal ethernet controller and small sram, another
> example is at91sam7x128) .
> Why not substitute lwip for it in the source tree?

First of all lwip would have to prove

a) functional equivalence to the BSD stack
Though the BSD stack in RTEMS is only a partial port of the original BSD
stack and gradually diverging from the BSD stack due to the fact it
receives too little attention, it should not be too difficult to add
further features, the original BSD-stack supports.

b) stability.
The BSD is widely used.

c) portability, standard conformance.
A non-portable "toy stack" not complying to any standard doesn't help
anybody.

That said, I don't see any reason to replace the BSD stack. If at all,
an alternative stack may be added in parallel to the BSD stack. Should
this stack once prove its viability, we could start discussing to
abandon the BSD stack.

Ralf