[Milkymist-devel] RTEMS

[Sébastien Bourdeauducq]

Hi,

Lately I played a bit with RTEMS [1], a free real-time embedded OS that has a 
port for Mico32, and I was pleasantly surprised. The test program for LM32 
compiled out-of-the box, and so did zlib and libpng (unpatched) that I tried 
afterward. This is very unusual in the softcore CPU world, where tools 
routinely come with gazillions of bugs and seldom compile without modification 
of their source code by the user.

The only major problem I ran into was the usual GDB bug with the non-zero load 
address of binaries [2], which prevented the simulation of the test programs 
from running.

RTEMS would bring good filesystem support, TCP/IP networking (useful for 
bringing support for OpenSound Control [3]) and some compatibility with 
existing software and libraries. STL (C++) also seems supported.

uClinux would also bring those, but it's heavier, probably slower, more 
complex, and the Unix "philosophy" is irrelevant on a small MMU-less processor 
such as LM32.

Does anyone have any experience or advice with RTEMS?

Sébastien

[1] http://www.rtems.com
[2] http://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=10362
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenSound_Control