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New CPM/DPRAM allocator
Hello eCos maintainers
I'm concerned to read of the incompatibility between newer eCos builds and
older RedBoot builds due to the new CPM/DPRAM allocator. If I understand
correctly:
a) The incompatibility which has arisen was not intentional.
b) The new allocator is highly desirable.
c) There does not appear to be any way to avoid the incompatibility
robustly.
A few of questions:
1) Does this incompatibilty affect _all_ targets which run both RedBoot and
eCos?
2) Could the new allocator implementation be modified in any way to preserve
compatibility?
3) To what extent might the new allocator perturb eCos functionality other
than by a stepwise "it will work or it will be completely broken".
4) Is a further break in compatibility possible as potential issues with the
new allocator are ironed out?
We need to determine how to manage the switch over to the new CPM/DPRAM
allocator smoothly for everyone. From my perspective, it is certainly
unfortunate that this innovation has arrived between 2.0 beta and 2.0
final. Were it not for the break in compatibility, I would vote against
incorporating this change for 2.0 final since the change will (to a certain
extent) invalidate beta testing by the net community. However, it would
also be undesirable for 2.0 final RedBoot to be incompatible with anonCVS
eCos from day 1. Users are likely to want to stick with a release version
of the firmware while experimenting with eCos from anonCVS.
John Dallaway