Re: hardware architectures to run Ada on in 2008

[Niklas Holsti <niklas.holsti@tidorum.invalid>]

Yochi Choresh wrote:
> How weird does it sound, to intend to run GNAT compiled code on
> a PowerPC on top of some Linux kernel as the embedded system
> steering e.g. a drone?
> 
> Or is this something, that the industry has been doing already for a
> couple of years?

Quite realistic, not weird at all. About six years ago I was 
involved with an ESA project that built a prototype Mars rover. We 
used GNAT on a PC104/Intel x86 computer on-board the rover. The 
computer ran Linux from a DiskOnChip device. For development work 
we connected an IDE hard disk to the PC104 stack. We wrote our own 
Linux device drivers for the analog and digital I/O cards. We used 
plain Linux, no RT variant. The rover was controlled through a wire 
tether using UDP over PPP. The other end of the tether connected to 
a PC with a Java GUI.

For a production rover we would surely have used some other 
processor and a small kernel or Ada RTS. But for a ground-based 
system Linux+GNAT was OK.

-- 
Niklas Holsti
Tidorum Ltd
niklas holsti tidorum fi
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