Subject:
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RE: fast firmware downloader - and compilers
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.robotics.rcx.legos
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Date:
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Sun, 3 Oct 1999 01:03:57 GMT
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Viewed:
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1158 times
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I'll have to try fastdl at some point. My pbFORTH image
is assembled to live at 0x8000 and be loaded just like
"real" firmware. If I use fastdl, how do I have to
change my firmware assembly output to accomodate it?
On the subject of configurable binaries and source, the project
I'm working on right now has about 70,000 lines of source code.
I have a neat build system using GNU make that allows me to
easily configure versions of a "product" since we are trying
to use the same source code base for different embedded products
with possibly different peripheral sets and memory maps.
Sounds kinda like the same issues a configurable kernel might
have. Let's talk at Mindfest and see if we can't come up with a
source tree that makes it dead simple to configure a kernel
with the stuff you want.
The biggest configuration issue I run into is making sure that
the libraries are rebuilt every time a product specific change
is made. The "generic" libraries are only touched if we
need debugging aids built in. We support "in-house" releases
with ASSERTs built in and want to make sure that the stuff
that goes out only has a limited amount of overhead.
If all this sounds like babble, then it probably is...I have a
a lot of experience with fixing bad build procedures at companies.
One of the first things I do when I go into a company to audit
their software team is to grab a "shipping" product or ask them
what version was sent out a year ago to customer X. If they can
tell me the answer, they get points. Then I ask them to show me that
version as if the customer was reporting a bug. If they say, the
executable is still on file, they get points. When I ask them to
rebuild the executable from the sources so that they might be able
to debug it - I usually get blank stares - and they lose points...
That's when they get a crash course in CVS and make...
Cheers,
Ralph Hempel - P.Eng
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Check out pbFORTH for LEGO Mindstorms at:
<http://www.hempeldesigngroup.com/lego/pbFORTH>
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Reply to: rhempel at bmts dot com
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Message has 1 Reply:
 | | Re: fast firmware downloader - and compilers
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| (...) Not at all ;-) fast.srec works like this: - load new image, storing it immediately behind fast.srec - fix stack pointer, you'll start new firmware anyways - relocate a small routine immediately below SP - call that routine - relocate the (...) (25 years ago, 3-Oct-99, to lugnet.robotics.rcx.legos)
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Message is in Reply To:
| | Re: fast firmware downloader
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| (...) Erm, hrm, well... the reason I didn't ship it yet is that it won't compile with any released version of legOS. In order to gain full configurability, I had to set up a seperate directory structure, with its own include tree and stripped down (...) (25 years ago, 3-Oct-99, to lugnet.robotics.rcx.legos)
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