Embedded Software Development with eCos (Bruce Perens' Open Source Series) (Paperback)

by Anthony J. Massa (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description
Embedded Software Development with eCos shows developers and managers the advantages of using eCos -- the Embedded Configurable Operating System from Red Hat - over proprietary or commercial embedded operating systems. As an Open Source solution, eCos provides a low-cost, royalty free option for embedded software development. Anthony Massa shows how eCos, and the eCos development environment, has all of the features and functionality to meet the needs of almost all commercial embedded system requirements. Massa provides an understanding of how to use the open-source licensing and royalty free nature of eCos in order to eliminate high startup and per unit costs associated with many of the proprietary real-time operating systems on the market today. Embedded systems are operating systems that must operate with a very small footprint (usually less than 100KB of space) and must be self-contained. Most companies use either proprietary solutions or expensive commercial solutions. eCos is the first powerful, royalty-free Open Source solution, from Red Hat.

From the Back Cover

• How to build low-cost, royalty-free embedded solutions with eCos
• Covers eCos architecture, installation, configuration, coding, debugging, bootstrapping, porting, and more
• Incorporates additional open source software components to extend the features and functionality of eCos, meeting the requirements of a wide range of embedded systems
• Includes open source tools for a complete embedded software development environment with eCos as the core
• Contains extensive code examples and complete application case study

Foreword by Michael Tiemann, CTO, Red Hat Software and Co-founder of Cygnus Solutions

"Anthony's book is easily the most complete treatment of eCos system development. I believe it is destined to become part of every eCos developer's library."

—Michael Tiemann, CTO, Red Hat Software and Co-founder of Cygnus Solutions

Build low-cost, royalty-free embedded solutions with eCos—step by step.

The Embedded Configurable Operating System (eCos) gives professionals a low-cost, royalty-free embedded software development solution that works in highly constrained hardware environments, while scaling smoothly to larger products. In this start-to-finish guide to eCos solution building, Anthony Massa covers eCos architecture, installation, configuration, coding, deployment, and the entire eCos open source development system. Additional open source tools are included to configure a complete embedded software development environment. Massa's code examples and application case study illuminate techniques for building virtually any embedded system, from the simplest device to complex Internet-enabled wireless systems. Coverage includes:

• Understanding eCos architecture: kernel, hardware abstraction layer, and other components
• Preparing your eCos embedded development environment
• Incorporating additional open source tools for a complete embedded software development environment
• Working with exceptions, interrupts, and virtual vectors
• Managing threads and synchronization
• Utilizing the eCos networking stack, I/O system, and file system
• Covering additional eCos functionality, including third-party open source contributions
• Using RedBoot, the standardized embedded debug and bootstrap solution
• Porting eCos to new hardware platforms

CD-ROM INCLUDED

The accompanying CD-ROM contains the complete eCos development environment, along with all the code presented in this book.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 399 pages
• Publisher: Prentice Hall PTR (December 5, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0130354732
• ISBN-13: 978-0130354730
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.8 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #717,651 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Index is worthless, January 22, 2003

By	Ralph E. Richardson (Wayzata, MN United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This is an OK book, bringing together a lot of the eCos documentation and some sage experience.

However, the author did not spend very much time on the index, and this limits the usefullness of the book compared to the online documentation.

For example, all of the eCos functions start with "cyg_", yet none of them appear in the index.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars eCos Explained - All in One Place, December 9, 2002

By	William M. Knight Jr. "BillK" (Plano, TX United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Just got the book yesterday and have been reading through it ever since. This book will be an immense help for both first time eCos users as well as those of us who don't have it quite figured out yet. While much of the information presented in the book might be found by wandering about the eCos web site, reading documents, FAQs, and previous postings to the mailing lists, Anthony has presented it all in one place in a consise, logical order. It will be a great help.

11 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Organization is not its strong point, August 4, 2003

By	C. McManis "Chuck McManis" (Sunnyvale, CA USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Currently (as of ECOS 2.0) you need this book in order to get up to speed and programming ECOS. Unfortunately it isn't very well organized and it is very well written.

Like many "open source" books, there is a lot of zeal that isn't necessary to communicate the point :-) Lots of discussion about how the source directory is layed out, and then how not everything follows the layout (this is classic open source, here is the standard, but many people don't follow it.)

For me I read this book out of order, how to install first, then the examples, then started reading the chapters on internals. The book re-hashes reference documentation on the redhat site, but organizes it a bit better.

The book comes with a CD that has cygwin and basically the Gnu Pro kit on it for Windows users. That's great, but I'm a FreeBSD user. There is very little information about using ecos from a shell using ecosconfig & and gdb. That is the books worst failing, there should be a couple of chapters devoted to non-Windows users. (or maybe split the book into an ECOS reference and then a platform users guide).

Once you're finally up an running and have gotten your first target "application" to boot, the book is a handy printed reference and it does explain the internals better than the web pages do. All in all, I wanted "ECOS in a Nutshell" and got "Learn ECOS in 21 days"