Re: [BLACKBOX] BB & Linux - was: Mobile-device development

From: [at]} <Wojtek>
Date: Fri, 22 Feb 2008 11:34:25 -0500

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All:

I refrained from commenting in this thread because I was too busy.
Seeing the phrase "BB & Linux" I want to comment from a slightly
different perspective. Till now in this thread I mostly saw
remarks from the software guys how the programming tools can be
improved (more readable code, fewer mistakes, and so forth).
It was repeatedly said that BB (or improved BB) would be ideal
to achieve this noble goal.

In the BB community we have been saying for years how great BB is,
how we all benefit from using it, and how others might benefit
as well. I fully support the idea. We have this great BB tool
running under the Windows GUI and we all should be forever grateful
to OuS for making BB available. I can and I will continue using
BB under Windows.

Considering embedded software, I consider the recent discussion
a bit off target. When I put my hardware hat on, I acquire a different
perspective. My hardware board has to run some kind of software. The
software has to use the processor which I chose because of its hardware
features (multiple ALUs, hardware video accelerator, multidimensional
DMA, and so forth). This CPU has nothing to do with 80386. I also put
some peripherals on the board, such as a concrete ethernet chip,
a concrete flash chip, a CPLD, a A/D converter, and so forth.
There might be a VME interface or a USB interface on board.
The most important issue is that the chips and interfaces need
to be serviced by "software drivers".

Someone has to develop those software drivers for the particular
CPUs, peripherals, and chips. It would be good and dandy if the SW
development system was decent. But it does not need to be ideal.
And here I can already see wasted bandwith in the discussion.
The SW guys seem to care about "IN" parameters and other such
optimizations in order to design an ideal software system.
>From my perspective, your optimizations would bring about
1% incremental benefit to the SW development tools. But you guys
are missing the 99% issue, which is the following: this SW system
does not exist yet. It is nowhere to be found for my particular
CPU (either Blackfin, or Microblaze, Nios, Coldfire, etc.)

The truth is that the SW which does not exist is 99% bad.
Discussing how to improve it by 1% to make it ideal is a waste
of time. We should first address the the 99% issue by making the
software exist at all, and then maybe optimize it with IN
or whatever.

In my opinion the only practical path to make the embedded software
materialize is to base it on some already existing base. The Embedded
Linux is the obvious choice. (Other bases may be considered as well.)
Those guys have already invested years into writing software drivers.
They worked around hardware bugs. (Yes, most every hardware has bugs.
For example, the HW revisions 0.1 and 0.2 of the BF-533 processor
had so many HW bugs that the uCLinux kernel could not be run
on those silicon revisions. It could only be run on silicon revision
0.3 and higher.)

If this discussion is to be relevant at all to embedded SW, it has
to come a little closer to the earth and acknowledge the fact that
there are various processors, not all of them being 80386-compatible.
In addition, there are hardware peripherals. In addition, there
are hardware bugs in the silicon chips, both in the CPUs and the
peripherals. All of this has to be taken into account. The embedded
development SW has to produce code running on a particular board
with a particular CPU (or multiple CPUs), connected to particular
interfaces and converters. If the SW cannot achieve this it is good
for nothing.

In short, the embedded processing is more defined by hardware than
by software. When software guys take over such discussions, they will
quickly focus onto 1% of the problem, which is "how to make
the SW ideal". SW guys seem to be missing the 99% of the problem,
which is "how to make the embedded SW to run on a particular
board with a particular CPU and particular set of peripherals".

How to make it exist, is the real question. How to make it ideal,
is not.

W.

On Fri, 22 Feb 2008, Treutwein Bernhard wrote:

> The ELF-Linker for BlackBox (a linker which produces
> a Linux executable) can be found here:
>
> http://mathstat.helsinki.fi/openbugs/LinBUGS.html
>
> Additionally the following stuff might be useful:
>
> Automagic generation of interfaces from C header files
> can be achieved with the help of H2O. It is part of
> the OOC project see: http://sourceforge.net/projects/ooc and
> http://ooc.cvs.sourceforge.net/ooc/ esepecially
> http://ooc.cvs.sourceforge.net/ooc/ooc2/src/H2O/)
>
> H2O optionally generates CP syntax for interfaces.
>

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Received on Fri Feb 22 2008 - 17:34:25 UTC