Samiksha Jaiswal (Editor)

ECos

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Written in
  
C, C++, assembly

Source model
  
Working state
  
Current

Developer
  
eCos community, Free Software Foundation

OS family
  
Real-time operating systems

Initial release
  
September 1998; 18 years ago (1998-09)

The Embedded Configurable Operating System (eCos) is a free and open source real-time operating system intended for embedded systems and applications which need only one process with multiple threads. It is designed to be customizable to precise application requirements of run-time performance and hardware needs. It is implemented in C/C++ and has compatibility layers and application programming interfaces for POSIX and µITRON.

Contents

Design

eCos was designed for devices with memory sizes in the range of a few tens or several hundred kilobytes, or for applications with real-time requirements.

eCos runs on a wide variety of hardware platforms, including ARM, CalmRISC, FR-V, Hitachi H8, IA-32, Motorola 68000, Matsushita AM3x, MIPS, NEC V8xx, Nios II, PowerPC, SPARC, and SuperH.

The eCos distribution includes RedBoot, an open source application that uses the eCos hardware abstraction layer to provide bootstrap firmware for embedded systems.

History

eCos was initially developed in 1997 by Cygnus Solutions which was later bought by Red Hat. In early 2002, Red Hat ceased development of eCos and laid off the staff of the project. Many of the laid-off staff continued to work on eCos and some formed their own companies providing services for the software. In January 2004, at the request of the eCos developers, Red Hat agreed to transfer the eCos copyrights to the Free Software Foundation in October 2005, a process finally completed in May 2008.

Non-free versions

The eCosPro real-time operating system is a commercial fork of eCos created by eCosCentric which incorporates proprietary software components. It is claimed as a "stable, fully tested, certified and supported version", with additional features that are not released as free software.

Criticisms

The FreeBSD TCP/IP network stack included with eCos is out of date (circa 2001) and exposes systems to numerous security and stability vulnerabilities (FreeBSD RELENG 4 4 0 RELEASE for IPv4 and FreeBSD's origin KAME for IPv6). Official eCos maintainers do not appear to monitor FreeBSD or KAME for security or stability updates, but rather rely on minimal and insufficient bug reports from users of eCos.

The SNMP package is rudimentary at best, once again, apparently due to its age.

References

ECos Wikipedia


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