Custom eCos HAL - board support package

eCos ships with a vast array of eCos HALs and you can also buy eCos HALs for development/reference designs.

However, that will not be a HAL precisely to your specification for your hardware.

It is a misunderstanding that you need the eCos HAL to be written by the eCos maintainers and that it must go into the official eCos repository. A custom HAL will stay under your source control system, be closed source and you can make any changes you want to it while updating the rest of eCos independently.

Of course you can publish your custom eCos HAL to the eCos community if that is in your interest, but be aware that the community may have requirements that you need to meet with additional engineering effort and community interaction. Also if your eCos HAL has a very narrow audience, then chances are that community will show limited interest in your posted contribution.

Seasoned embedded engineers will not find writing an eCos HAL an impossible challenge, but Zylin offers to help you out if you want to save your internal resources for other tasks. Writing your first eCos HAL will take a lot longer than writing your subsequent HALs.

Creating a custom eCos HAL is mostly a matter of modifying an existing eCos HAL, gathering various files/documentation and testing everything. eCos comes with an excellent testing suite and Zylin has additional testing procedures we go through before we deliver a HAL.

A custom eCos HAL and documentation from Zylin is also a great way to get started with eCos. It filters away irrelevant information and gathers all the relevant information in a single document.

Zylin has experience with writing eCos HALs for both supported and unsupported processer architectures. You can of course also make the eCos HAL open source if that is what you require. You can host such open source eCos HALs on your own servers or a patch to the official eCos repository can be submitted. Zylin can be helpful in responding to any requirements the maintainers have before accepting a new HAL. There is of course no guarantee, nor is it necessary, to have an eCos HAL in the official repository.

Deliverables

A custom package from Zylin will typically contain the following:

1. The eCos HAL repository for the custom hardware. This is typically ~20-100 files that are stored under the customers source control system.
2. A manual for the custom HAL. This is a customer specific document that describes relevant procedures for the custom HAL. It normally contains some sections which are application specific.
3. Binary GCC toolchain. Oftentimes a new GCC toolchain have to be built and this can be anything from easy to black magic. Zylin has intimate knowledge of the GCC toolchain.
4. A known good snapshot of the official eCos repository. eCos does not really have releases as such, but rather a snapshot of the eCos repository is stored alongside the application. Sometimes modifications have to be made to the official eCos repository to support the custom HAL. These changes may be bugfixes that are fed back to the official eCos repository in time. The snapshot is taken in a way that makes it easy to update the snapshot to the latest official eCos repository.

Process

Zylin will be happy to provide you with a quote for a custom eCos HAL without obligation.

Phone us or send an email today with an outline of your needs and we will get back to you with a quote or questions if necessary.

info@zylin.com

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