Re: STM32F4 Discovery, communication and libraries

[Dennis Lee Bieber <wlfraed@ix.netcom.com>]

On Wed, 27 Aug 2014 09:03:28 -0700 (PDT), Roy Emmerich
<roy.emmerich@gmail.com> declaimed the following:

>Hi again Dennis,
>
>I forgot to answer one of your questions:
>
>> 	I suspect a lot of those are being developed by companies for
>> proprietary products, possibly using some internal core "OS" for
>> interfacing between application code and the board support layer.
>
>
>Actually no. All of them are open source, community powered projects.
>
	I wasn't referring to the three you mentioned -- but rather to your
plaint that you wanted libraries for accessing various communications
devices, etc.

	THOSE libraries are probably being written for proprietary products in
support of a higher level (though still minimal) OS --
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_modular_avionics -- The OS is in C
or Ada, the processor board is provided with a board support package (BSP)
that handles extremely low hardware access (driving GPIO,
enabling/disabling memory management, other stuff), and libraries/drivers
are written to provide an interface between the OS and the BSP. The BSP
tends to come from the board manufacturer, the OS from somewhere else
(Windriver, for example, or home-grown). By writing a new driver layer it
is possible to rebuild the OS/applications on a new processor board without
making changes to the high layers.

	But those driver layers tend to only be useful in the environment (the
application/OS) above them.
-- 
	Wulfraed                 Dennis Lee Bieber         AF6VN
    wlfraed@ix.netcom.com    HTTP://wlfraed.home.netcom.com/