Notes from eVLA software meeting of April 23.

B. Sahr reported on current information about choice of RTOS.  Choice
is now down to two - Nucleus Plus and ThreadX.  Emertec is not 
interested in porting to the TC11IB chip.  vxWorks has a port to TriCore
architecture underway, but timescale is not known and probably not
soon enough.

ATI says they will provide a completely integrated system for our 
setup, with RTOS, network stack, ethernet driver, and complete toolset
for about $30k - $50k, budgetary estimate (in addition to the usual 
license fee).  They are talking with Infineon about collaborating with 
them on a port to the TC11IB, and if this transpires the above price will 
go down.  Having things integrated is an attractive feature that is 
likely to save us a good many man hours during the early days.

It is not totally clear whether ThreadX would deliver an ethernet 
driver as part of the port.  He will get back to them on that.

The port from either vendor would be delivered with booting and 
debugging via the JTAG port (IEEE standard 1149).  Their toolsets support
a connection from a window's machine parallel port to the JTAG.
Sophisticated debugging is likely to require this, likely necessitating
a JTAG connector on the MIB.  We will probably have to do the code to
boot from on-MIB flash, and to write a system image to flash transfered
by ether.  (Less sophisticated debugging can be done by this route,
but the sort of breakpoint/display debugging that is very often 
necessary will almost certainly have to be done via the JTAG.)

Both toolset vendors have ports to Windows, ports to Unix may be 
problematical.

W. Koski has a document about interfacing with the MIB which is intended
to be a starting point about negociating with the device designers.

W. Koski and G. Peck not only have not received the developement board,
they are in possession of little information about it.  It is not clear
whether it comes with an ethernet transducer, for instance.  Last date
mentioned for delivery was April 30, but remarks from the vendor sound
like somebody still trying to finish the design.