From: mea@sparta.com (Mike Anderson)
Newsgroups: comp.os.vxworks
Subject: re: general info needed
Date: Tue, 1 Sep 92 08:15:34 EDT
Organization: Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, Berkeley CA
NNTP-Posting-Host: 128.3.112.16
Originator: daemon@vxw.ee.lbl.gov

> 
> Submitted-by ramos@mtunm.att.com  Mon Aug 31 16:21:44 1992
> Submitted-by: ramos@mtunm.att.com
>  
> We're looking into using either VxWorks or pSOS+ on a intel i960-based 
> embedded system dedicated to communications processing.  I have experience 
> as an application builder on pSOS+ and have access to people who got pSOS+
> running on a custom hardware platform.  Unfortunately, 
> I don't know anyone with VxWorks experience.  My questions are these:
> 
> 1) How hard is it to get VxWorks running on a custom platform using the 
>    porting kit and how does it compare to pSOS+?

The folks to ask about this are Hughes Network Systems in Gaithersburg.
My company supplied them the Heurikon i960s and got their software
folks up and running on i960s under VxWorks while their hardware folks
got their custom boards fabbed.  They then did the port to their new 
platform and its been operational for several months.  They also
did a complete trade study on PSOS+ vs. VxWorks before starting on this
project and chose VxWorks hands down.  I think that one of the key factors
was Intel's support of VxWorks and the GNU environment.

> 2) How robust is the kernel? (performance, bugs, etc.)

We use the i960 almost exclusively for all of our synchronous protocol
jobs.  The on-chip DMA and the kernel support is excellent and the software
speed picks up with each new rev.  For example, we started in late 1990
with Heurikon i960s (33 MHz i960CAs) that did about 7K dhrystones.  Without
changeing the hardware at all we are now at 25K dhrystones.  All of that
through subsequent revs to VxWorks and the GNU compiler.  As far as robustness
and bugs are concerned, I frankly feel that the i960 version of VxWorks is
more bug-free (largely owing to HNS and Intel hammering the kernel to
death) than the 68K flavors of VxWorks.  With Heurikon's new Rev 3 boards
you can even avoid the big-endian/little-endian problems 'cause they have
hardware to do the byte swaps.

> 3) What are the limitations and quality of the communications software?

We do up to 8 channel serial I/O via Xycom XVME-400 boards and via the
4 on-board ports in both async and sync (HDLC, SDLC, BiSync and
Monosync) using the 8530 SCC chips on a single i960.  We had to write
all the protocols ourselves but the mechanisms to support framing and
all of the bit/byte level interrupts is already provided in VxWorks. 
A couple of quick ioctl hacks to the tyCo drivers supplied in source with
the boards and you've got sync comm.

> 4) What are your experiences with the VxWorks source debugging environment?

I don't have use the debuggers ;-).  Truthfully, I find that the GNU
environment for debugging is much more friendly than the XRAY+ and
just as easy to use.  I run the xVxGdb from my PC under PC-Xview and it works
like a charm.  The ability to interact with the shell directly is an
important tool in itself.  You can do things just like you were a 
program and then save it off to a file to be compiled.  Much more
friendly than dealing strictly through XRAY.



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Process Distribution/Control and Communications for Distributed Systems

Mike Anderson                       Voice: (703) 448-0210 ext. 235
Director, ADDEM(TM) Project Office  FAX:   (703) 734-3323
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