helping picking the right RTOS

helping picking the right RTOS

[Patrick]

Hi Everyone

I would like to run Ada on bare metal but it doesn't look like this will be possible for me in the short term. 

There are many RTOS to choose from and it's hard to know which ones will play nice with Ada.

I have been repairing scientific instruments for 14 years now and I am just recently considering building one of my own to sell(a spectrofluorometer).  I would love to do this in Ada.

I don't think I will use a microcontroller for this but rather add my own memory and peripherals. It's not an absolute requirement but running on ARM sounds like a good place to start.

I would like the instrument to be able to participate on a LAN.

Simplicity is more import to me then power, I will need to get to know the OS well.

So all-in-all, an RTOS that brings me as close to what a bare metal environment would have been but supports networking and will support all of Ada's core language features like tasking, would be ideal.

If anyone could give me some pointers, I would really appreciate it, this will be quite a challenge for me and getting started with the right OS could make a huge difference.

Thanks for reading-Patrick

Re: helping picking the right RTOS

[Britt]

On Jun 8, 9:32 am, Patrick <patr...@spellingbeewinnars.org> wrote:
> Hi Everyone
>
> I would like to run Ada on bare metal but it doesn't look like this will be possible for me in the short term.
>
> There are many RTOS to choose from and it's hard to know which ones will play nice with Ada.
>
> I have been repairing scientific instruments for 14 years now and I am just recently considering building one of my own to sell(a spectrofluorometer).  I would love to do this in Ada.
>
> I don't think I will use a microcontroller for this but rather add my own memory and peripherals. It's not an absolute requirement but running on ARM sounds like a good place to start.
>
> I would like the instrument to be able to participate on a LAN.
>
> Simplicity is more import to me then power, I will need to get to know the OS well.
>
> So all-in-all, an RTOS that brings me as close to what a bare metal environment would have been but supports networking and will support all of Ada's core language features like tasking, would be ideal.
>
> If anyone could give me some pointers, I would really appreciate it, this will be quite a challenge for me and getting started with the right OS could make a huge difference.
>
> Thanks for reading-Patrick

For open-source OS that work with Ada and that you can try for free,
look at RTEMS and MaRTE:

http://www.rtems.org
http://marte.unican.es/

Re: helping picking the right RTOS

[Patrick]

Thanks Britt

I am just trying to learn a little more about OS systems with Minix3 right now, then I'll give RTEMS a serious try.

Thanks for your help-Patrick

Re: helping picking the right RTOS

[anon]

The problem with RTems is that its GNAT-2008.
and  MaRTE is GNAT-2010

In <3633e49d-d544-49a5-9f51-dc431b49c7b6@googlegroups.com>, Patrick <patrick@spellingbeewinnars.org> writes:
>Thanks Britt
>
>I am just trying to learn a little more about OS systems with Minix3 right now, then I'll give RTEMS a serious try.
>
>Thanks for your help-Patrick

Re: helping picking the right RTOS

[patrick]

Thanks for bringing this up. 

I am trying to work through the RTEMS docs but haven't made it very far.

Do both Martos and RTEMS have their own build systems?

Is there an RTOS that Ada would run on nicely and that is built using Makefiles and/or GPR? It would be nice to use a re-useable toolchain, rather then a custom one-off

-Patrick

Re: helping picking the right RTOS

[Mark Lorenzen]

On 11 Jun., 18:45, patr...@2h2inc.com wrote:
> Thanks for bringing this up.
>
> I am trying to work through the RTEMS docs but haven't made it very far.
>
> Do both Martos and RTEMS have their own build systems?
>
> Is there an RTOS that Ada would run on nicely and that is built using Makefiles and/or GPR? It would be nice to use a re-useable toolchain, rather then a custom one-off
>
> -Patrick

I think the RTEMS doc lack a lot of information regarding especially
configuration of RTEMS i.e. the C macros you need to define. I have
tried to use RTEMS a few times and have always had trouble with the
configuration. Sometimes it wasn't consistent, at other times it
simply failed due to wrocg stack sizes etc.

Regards,

Mark L

Re: helping picking the right RTOS

[Marco]

On Friday, June 8, 2012 6:32:10 AM UTC-7, Patrick wrote:
> Hi Everyone
> 
> I would like to run Ada on bare metal but it doesn't look like this will be possible for me in the short term. 
> 
> There are many RTOS to choose from and it's hard to know which ones will play nice with Ada.
> 
> I have been repairing scientific instruments for 14 years now and I am just recently considering building one of my own to sell(a spectrofluorometer).  I would love to do this in Ada.
> 
> I don't think I will use a microcontroller for this but rather add my own memory and peripherals. It's not an absolute requirement but running on ARM sounds like a good place to start.
> 
> I would like the instrument to be able to participate on a LAN.
> 
> Simplicity is more import to me then power, I will need to get to know the OS well.
> 
> So all-in-all, an RTOS that brings me as close to what a bare metal environment would have been but supports networking and will support all of Ada's core language features like tasking, would be ideal.
> 
> If anyone could give me some pointers, I would really appreciate it, this will be quite a challenge for me and getting started with the right OS could make a huge difference.
> 
> Thanks for reading-Patrick

Since Ada can interface with C nicely you may want to consider using Nuttx.
It is BSD licensed.
http://nuttx.sourceforge.net/

Typically one only uses a small subset of the RTOS features so not having an existing Ada binding is not that big of a deal especially if the Ada bindings can be lightweight.

Re: helping picking the right RTOS

[Patrick]

Hi Marco

Thanks for sharing this. I am going to give this a try. Looks like it was a lot of work.

Thanks for posting about it-Patrick