Re: Bootable ... bindings?

[Ted Dennison <dennison@telepath.com>]

In article <8uavt1$kv$1@nnrp1.deja.com>,
  Sandro Binetti <sandrobinetti@my-deja.com> wrote:
> In article <8tujkg$bl9$1@nnrp1.deja.com>,
>   Ted Dennison <dennison@telepath.com> wrote:
> > Hmmm. It sounds like you are suggesting that you'd like to run on an
> > embedded platform w/o an OS at all, just Ada.
>
> OK! That's the case! I have to load in a PROM a boot sequence that

Well, in that case what you want is an embedded Ada compiler that
targets your CPU directly. There are several companies that make such
compilers. Searching through the list of validated compilers at
http://www.adaic.org/compilers/ada95.html would be a good place to start
looking.

Obviously you are likely to have better luck if you can be a bit
flexible about what processor you are going to use. But in a pinch,
there is also an Ada compiler from Aonix that targets C. I'm not sure it
supports the real-time annex though.


> > We have a rather
> > complex real-time scheduler we use here on our GreenHills vxWorks
> > systems which the developers commonly recompile using Gnat
> > (different compiler) for NT. Ada is probably the *only* language you
> > could realisticly write a source-code portable real-time scheduler
> > in.
> You mean that you can assemble a little, OS independent, task
> scheduler based on the ADA run-time libraries?

Whoa! I said it was "rather complex". I don't know if its "little" or
not, but as there is often an inverse relation between the two, my money
would be on "not". We are targetting a (non-windoze) PC, so size really
hasn't been much of a concern.

If you kept your needs simple (and within the easy capabilities of Ada's
real-time annex), then I don't see why one couldn't make a small
scheduler though. We had to do all sorts of fancy stuff like support
task snapshots and task recording and playback.

As for the rest though, yes. We made an OS independed real-time task
scheduler based on the Ada run-time libraries. It recompiled and ran
without a hitch on a different OS with a different vendor's compiler.

(Well, to be honest I did have to comment out a call to set the
real-time clock's iteration rate. Ada's real-time annex doesn't have
that one. But that could have been done in the kernel anyway.)

--
T.E.D.

http://www.telepath.com/~dennison/Ted/TED.html


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