What is the difference between eCos and redboot?

Hi,

I am monica from germany. I have a newbie query.

what is the difference between eCos and redboot?

The documentation means redboot as a bootstrap environment.

But how can ecos run without redboot bootstrap?

Can anybody throw some light on the issue and give me some pointers
like which documentation i should go through?

Thanks a lot,
Monica Dsouza,
Germany

Monica <monica_dsz@yahoo.com> wrote:

> what is the difference between eCos and redboot?

Total.  They're two tools serving almost completely different
purposes.

> But how can ecos run without redboot bootstrap?

Maybe it can't.  That depends on the hardware.  Some hardware may be
able to boot eCos images kept in just the right storage, without the
need for a boot utility.  Other hardware needs redboot or something
like to load the eCos from some place and run it.

To maybe put it into a more familiar context, think of redboot as your
BIOS, and eCos as something like MS-DOS, to be loaded off the disk or
floppy by the BIOS.

-- 
Hans-Bernhard Broeker (broeker@physik.rwth-aachen.de)
Even if all the snow were burnt, ashes would remain.

On 2006-02-27, Monica <monica_dsz@yahoo.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I am monica from germany. I have a newbie query.
>
> what is the difference between eCos and redboot?

eCos is a full-featured RTOS kernel with BSD network stacks and
all the usual RTOS features (mutexes, msg queues, semaphores,
several different schedulers, time-slicing, etc.).

RedBoot is a bootloader.  It's single-threaded and does all
it's I/O using polling.

> The documentation means redboot as a bootstrap environment.

Yup.  You can use RedBoot to boot any applications using any OS
or executable image.  It's currently used to boot Linux on a
lot of embedded systems.

> But how can ecos run without redboot bootstrap?

Use a different bootloader or just burn the eCos application
into flash and run it from there.

-- 
Grant Edwards                   grante             Yow!  World War Three can
                                  at               be averted by adherence
                               visi.com            to a strictly enforced
                                                   dress code!